aw. RE: aw. RE: aw. RE: Why did Elser plant the bomb?

[Robin Landseadel]

On Feb 14, 2009, at 9:35 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
> Robin wrote:
>
>>> Ok, we're talking about Hitler, and the year is 1939.
>>>
>>> Michael says:
>>>
>>>> History also tells us that successful assassinations bring on
>>>> horrible retribution and do little to change policy.
>>>>
>>> This makes me speechless ... Would be interested what other P- 
>>> listers
>>> have to say to that ... Especially Jewish, Gypsie, Slavic, gay and
>>> epileptic people ... Come on, don't leave it like that ...
>
>> Not to mention what happened to America's civil rights movement in  
>> the
>> wake of the assassinations of MLK and RFK.
>
> Sorry, I don't get your point. Please explain!

Michael says that assassinations do little to change policy, I say  
they do a lot in changing policy.
Horrible retribution does a lot to change a neighborhood. I was in  
Watts in the aftermath of the insurrection of 1965. Basically, the  
police assassinated a child crossing the street. The fury that ensued  
spread into widespread violence and looting followed by a massive  
infusion of federal funds in the wake of all that rioting.  
Assassinations  & Horrible Retribution significantly change public  
policy.

>> Our Beloved Author has a change of tune in Vineland, one that does  
>> not
>> change key or meter in his subsequent novels. What was once a burning
>> need for a justice that the author knows will never come shifts mode
>> into an awareness of the presence of karma, a law of nature & spirit
>> akin to Newton's laws of motion and rest that eventually restores the
>> level.
>
> But you don't want to convince me that the Holocaust was karmic  
> business,
> do you? I mean, I've heard this before from some, well, western  
> buddhists
> who were telling me that the Jews (and the Gypsies and the Slavic  
> people,
> not to forget psychotics, gays and epileptic people) must have all  
> done really
> bad things in, as the folks believed in, former lifetimes to get  
> exterminated
> like this.

No* I don't, though it appears to me that the modern state of Israel  
is fueled by the bad karma of the Holocaust turned inward and then  
projected back onto the Palestinians. Seeing as you cited the views of  
young Jesse it struck me as very on point to cite the opinions of the  
older Jesse, showing how it was the perfect expression of the older  
Pynchon's concept of karma.

My point is that assassinations have already done a lot to change  
policy. Martin Luther King's state-approved assassination completely  
changed the nature of the civil rights movement and the anti-war  
movement, much as Manson's slaughter instantly changed everyone's  
concept of Hippies and long-hairs.

At the same time, while Nazism requires a figurehead/leader in their  
Führer many [not all] Nazis would drift in the same general direction  
without Hitler. I.G. Farben would probably would have continued to  
spit out Zyklon B and Bayer Aspirin. I suppose that would be Michael's  
point. However, since out own homegrown Führer has left office it  
appears that things have changed significantly. Any change in  
figurehead would produce a significant change in policy.

	Kai: 7) I've never heard a word here on Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

Some of that I.G. Farben backwash infecting far-right policy in the  
good ol' USA, I'd say. I.G. Farben begat the CIA, which begat  
Blackwater . . .

	" 'Secret retributions are always restoring the
	level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt
	the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the
	world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles
	forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and
	mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the
	recoil.' "
	Vineland, page 369

*But there is a negative karma attached to Capital, see Against the  
Day for more detail.