meta [part the second]

[Joseph Tracy]

On Dec 15, 2009, at 12:44 PM, rich wrote:

> 'here are many striking things about Gravity's Rainbow. For me the
> sense of the innate corruption at the center of the Second World War
> was particularly intense.'
> ________
> at the center of the Second World War was Adolf Hitler--please xplain.
> you can tease out all that bad shit that went down--corporate
> collusion and the like but you can't lose the sense of a fight worth
> fighting, either.
The question GR asks is who and what won?Hitler was a manifestation  
of a powerful mindset that went far beyond his particular delusion of  
everlasting empire of the superior peoples. It didn't start or end  
with him and the war was more a question of what form a state/ 
corporate/ military empire would take than a negation of that  
arrangement. The Euro/ American empire has every historic quality  
that makes the Fascist empire abhorrent: genocide, wars of aggression  
to control resources, ideological cleansing, enslavement of the  
weak.  Its worst habits persist to the present day.
  Hitler gassed millions of Jews, along with many  Gypsies,  
homosexuals, communists, and resistors; look at what is happening in  
Copenhagen- who will stop the gassing of a planet and the billions  
who will die at the hands of the winners of WW2?
It is good that people stopped the axis powers, but sad that they  
were not stopped earlier and sadder yet that we have learned so  
little about stopping the abuse of power that continues with little  
abatement of violence. Many millions have died since WW2 as victims  
of the same kind of racism, scapegoating and ideological warfare.  
Tyrants of every kind and place  still abound. The Gis Tommys and  
Ivans have been more complicit than heroic.

>
> those GIs, Tommys, and Ivans did die for something. that was
> apparently the last time, alas.
>
> rich