Human Smoke

[David Morris]

Wow.  Thanks for this morality history.  Ghandi might have been pure in his
ideal, but to ask an entire minority group to all be martyrs is beyond
unrealistic.  Pynchon loves his version of this same power imbalance in GR
w the Herroroe faction committed to collective suicide.  He also has the
slave Austra in MD become so submissive as to become menacing in her
extreme submission.  Pynchon does play on that turf.

On Monday, March 25, 2013, Thomas Eckhardt wrote:

>  Orwell on Gandhi may be of interest here:
>
> 'Even after he had completely abjured violence he was
> honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides.
> He did not--indeed, since his whole political life centred round a
> struggle for national independence, he could not--take the sterile and
> dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the
> same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western
> pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the
> late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to
> answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them
> exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting
> to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist,
> an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of
> evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that
> Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer
> is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's GANDHI AND STALIN. According to Mr.
> Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit
> collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of
> Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the
> Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly.
> One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an
> admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are
> not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be
> lost in some other way. '
>
> See: http://www.george-orwell.org/Reflections_of_Ghandi/0.html
>
> Orwell obviously disagrees with Gandhi, even though he respects his
> forthrightness, but certainly would not subscribe to what Heiner Geißler,
> secretary general of the Christian Democratic Party notoriously stated in a
> 1983 debate in the German Bundestag, namely that it was the pacifism of the
> 30s which first made Ausschwitz possible.
>
> My two euro cents.
>
> Thomas
>
>
> Am 25.03.2013 20:45, schrieb rich:
>
> far be for me to question those who seek to understand and critique the
> doings of those in power, including the powers that be in one's own country
> but striving to say that Hitler could have been stopped without violence
> well I think that's just horribly naive.
>
> On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'against.the.dave at gmail.com');>
> > wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 6:51 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
>> 'lorentzen at hotmail.de');>> wrote:
>> >
>> > "--- Hitler, Roosevelt" (Vineland, p. 372)
>> >
>> > Halfway through with Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke (the German edition
>> from
>> > the library), I want to ask whether you people here have read it and
>> what
>> > you think about it. Could imagine that Michael Bailey loves it, could
>> > imagine that Rich Romeo hates it. Anyone? Offlist is ok with me, too
>>
>>  Well worth reading.
>>
>
>
>
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