Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

[Joseph Tracy]

The point of the Orwell essay  which you are referring to is to take 1984  and Animal Farm away from those who would reduce it to Anti Communist Or Anti Nazi propaganda. Orwell is talking about the centralization of power and bureaucratization of a totalitarian mindset, and specifically the role of language to disguise and facilitate that process of enslavement.  But Pynchon actively notes the Orwellian uses of language taking place in the US to disguise the abuse of power. The point as I read it is not to deny the relevance of 1984 to historical realities, but to prevent it from being limited to the status of  either dystopian fantasy or  political allegory/propaganda.

 Regardless of whether the reader sees connection or entropic delusion Gravity's Rainbow points toward the uncomfortable similarities that Kai mentions.  He also makes distinctions  but the mirroring is pretty intense.  If the Orwell essay offers insight into P's political leanings Pynchon is offering a similar critique of authoritarian power structures,  but with a much more active examination of the role of markets and  shared  individual/corporate/military/political interest in cybernetic structures of control, and a much more active examination of the forms of dissidence, personal freedom/transformation/ connection to other patterns of human expression. 
On Jan 8, 2012, at 10:40 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

>> Since we're talking on P-list: Didn't Pynchon - by putting the
>> real-world-events of Operation Paperclip and MK Ultra into his novels -
>> himself make a certain connection between Nazi Germany and the US?
> 
> A certain connection? In a novel where everything is connected or not?
> I suggest that the best approach to this question is Pynchon's
> Foreword to Orwell's 1984. We might extrapolate and thus give our
> conjectures connection to the author's non-fiction where we are more
> likely than not (Pynchon's fiction are quite ironic and nake extensive
> use of ambiguity so discovering his ideas there is more difficult) to
> discover his ideas. In that famous Foreword the author discredits the
> kind of one-to-one alegorical reading of Orwell that camps on the Left
> and Right have eployed to advance their own propaganda. There is, of
> course, irony in this fact and Pynchon, a keen observer of the ironic,
> directs his reader to the irony.
> 
>> 
>> Isn't GR's Weissmann/Blicero in fact designed to represent the real Wernher
>> von Braun?
>> 
>> Of course it is "absurd" to equate the US and Nazi Germany; nobody did.
>> 
>> According to my impression, however, it was Pynchon's intention to criticize
>> his very own US society of the 1960s and early 1970s by intermingling
>> patterns of domination common to both systems.
>> 
>> Not that he's a Germany lover or something ...
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 08.01.2012 02:25, Michael Bailey wrote:
>> 
>> said alice -
>> 
>> Well, it is absurd to equate Nazi Germany and the US.
>> 
>> JT brought up some points of comparison.
>> to which one might add, the proportion of the national enterprise
>> dedicated to murderous endeavor was -- I'm pretty sure -- much higher
>> in the 3rd Reich
>> but US adventures in the old ultra-violence have been taking place
>> over a much longer time so that cumulatively...
>> Even so, there are important philosophical and procedural differences
>> that I, for one, cherish.
>> 
>>