Von Braun

[Henry]

Ummm...  

Pleasant, facile thought: War is Bad.  (Who knew?)
Bumper sticker that I like to see: "War should not usually be the answer,"
but it wouldn't fit. So...

1. All fictional conflation and hysterical pacifist bleating aside, This is
now and that was then.

2. Nothing about the Nazi policies towards their internal and world-wide
(thank-god) enemies, including their war effort, can be construed as for a
good cause.  I've always been against the nuclear bombings of Japan, and the
fire-bombing of Dresden, etc., but extremely few of the WW2 soldiers with
whom I have spoken feel the same way.  Many of the Vietnam vets that I have
known were either against that war, or at least against the way in which it
was fought, e.g. napalm.  Extremism in the defense of justice, as opposed to
in the advancement of hegemony and genocide. 

3. That said, I don't believe that I've implied that the Allies did no
wrong, but that the Allies did at least some right, as opposed to the
Germans and those who supported them.

4. Yes, the correctness of the Allies is more than muddied in GR,
particularly when their business-states cooperated with the Nazis.  Even so,
the guilt of those who support the efforts of evil regimes is unavoidable in
TRP, and a pivotal example in GR is Von Braun.  I see no suggestion of
parity in TRP's work between the enemies in any of the wars that he uses in
his novels.  His is not the attractive lunacy of Slaughterhouse Five.  

HENRY MUSIKAR
Information, Media, and Technology Consultant

http://www.urdomain.us/scuffling.htm  

-----Original Message-----
From: Monte Davis [mailto:monte.davis at verizon.net] 
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 10:41 AM
To: 'Henry'; 'Pynchon Liste'
Subject: RE: Von Braun

Sorry, don't know what came over me.

Germans who designed weapons were bad, bad men.

Our WWII was a good, good war, because ends cannot be corrupted by means. 

Being asphyxiated and/or incinerated at home in an Axis city is incomparable
to being asphyxiated and/or incinerated at the end of a train ride. As would
be being promptly incinerated by the thermonuclear warheads of which we and
the Russians currently have 36,400. Many of ours are on missiles that we
were hornswoggled into building by a bad, bad man, but that's OK because we
only built them so we'll never have to use them.

Most of all, Our Beloved Author would never be so inconsiderate of our
righteous comfort as to muddy these certainties.

-Card-Carrying Deconstructionalist