herero today

[Paul Taylor]

scary how apropos this seems in modern day society, unfortunately...
'cheap labour and overseas markets'?  20th century blues...

--PT

On 1/19/06, David Casseres <david.casseres at gmail.com> wrote:
> om Pynchon:
>
> "A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a
> topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked
> on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among
> the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling
> like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives?
> Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of
> desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction
> or the mining -- wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that
> sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows
> up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas
> Markets.... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the
> outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down
> and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his
> slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood
> with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go
> in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the
> hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis
> and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death,
> as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe.
> Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and
> down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all
> its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those
> cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts.... No word ever gets
> back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no
> matter how dirty, how animal it gets...." (GR 317)
>
> On 1/19/06, kelber at mindspring.com <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> > The article says it wasn't a one-sided conflict.  50,000 Herero dead to 50 German dead?  Yeah, I'd call that one-sided.
> >
> > ----Original Message-----
> > >From: Paul Taylor <neon.taylor at gmail.com>
> > >Sent: Jan 19, 2006 4:36 PM
> > >To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > >Subject: herero today
> > >
> > >http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4623516.stm
> > >
> > >--PT
> > >
> >
> >
>
>