Anybody interested in Project Paperclip should probably stay away from the Jacobson book

Wed Mar 5 19:38:42 CST 2014

No, by "our own vast moral failure" I mean building nuclear weapons and
delivery systems far beyond any rational need. During WWII we and the UK
had already taken "terror bombing" of cities to a scale far beyond what
we'd called horrible when enemies did it to Guernica, Chinese cities,
Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London. In the decades that followed, we spent
several trillion dollars systematically equipping ourselves to do a
thousand times worse.

That the equipment has not yet been used (and that it has been modestly
scaled back since the 1980s) does not make it less of an abomination. The
decisions that led to that were made by Americans, not by German emigres.
Millions of Americans (including young Tom Pynchon, cranking out Boeing
technical documentation and company magazine articles) took part in the
process. Details of bombs and rockets were secret; that we were gearing up
for mass murder -- only if forced to it, of course! -- was not a secret,
not a conspiracy.

One of the central concerns of GR (and the reason for its arc from a
missile in 1944 to a missile in 1972) is to ask: "Given all the destruction
and horror of the Zone, and 1945's opportunities for a fresh start... was
Mutual Assured Destruction really the best we could do by 1972? Why did we
fuck up all over again, only bigger and shinier?"

Wernher von Braun and his team brought the experience and technical _virtu_
to make one part of the process somewhat faster for the US. They brought
their own guilt -- which as far as I'm concerned, is lost in the enormity
of the larger enterprise. The process as a whole would have been very
little different if Paperclip had never happened and they'd all been
hanged. They weren't; neither were thousands of other Germans whose war
efforts depended on -- and who spent years managing -- horrific slave labor
operations.

Listen,  Joseph: against the enormity of what we (and the USSR, and the UK,
and France, and China, and Israel, and India, and Pakistan, and...) have
chosen to live with quite openly, I DON'T FUCKING CARE about Paperclip as a
conspiracy, about Sekrit Nazis REVEALED!!! (for the 12th time since that
Sekrit Gallup Poll in 1946). Or that (gasp) senior officers and statesmen
LIED about it!!!

Paperclip is an acid-etched little bit of historical irony, rich in
symbolism... and that's all. To the extent that we keep rediscovering it,
and keep emphasizing (against abundant evidence) how Very Very Hush-Hush
Top Secret it was, and that Now It Can Be Told, we're reassured that we've
found the hidden root of evil.

Does everybody remember Pynchon's earlier title for GR? "Mindless
Pleasures"? I don't believe he intends us to understand that historical
conspiracies go on while we're distracted by mindless pleasures.

I believe he intends us to understand that a focus on conspiracies *is*
another mindless pleasure, one that distracts us from what's staring us in
the face.

In the mirror.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 5:43 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I don't really see the logic of what you are saying. 1st point) "our own
> vast moral failure". 'Our own' meaning the majority of citizens who did not
> want to import Nazi scientists? Or some other us who have the power to
> ignore public opinion and the stated policy of the President and do as they
> wish?
> I agree that most of our national problems are plainly visible, but isn't
> the fact that powerful policy makers in defense and intelligence wanted  to
> skirt legal accountability for war crimes and bring in Nazi science and
> policy people and wanted to do so against popular will and against
> important opposition voices indicative of  something other than a united
> expression of national will? Doesn't the fact that they went ahead secretly
> also indicate how policy is made in the US regardless of democratic process?
>    We talk about the cold war as a battle with Soviet Russia and China but
> big enemies are always a psychological part of totalitarian systems and can
> be convenient cover stories.   Meanwhile all the actual fighting we engaged
> in apart maybe from Korea was to continue colonial projects.
>  Part of what GR is about is the tendencies within the culture of the
> western allies toward the generation of systems of totalitarian control
> which are parallel to the axis madness . It also points out the tendency to
> override moral restraint and ignore human rights in the interests of a
> paranoid strategic priority. This is what a conspiracy is  and there are
> thousands of examples from Abu Graibh to the gulf of Tonkin to the
> Tuskeegee syphilis  experiments to cointelpro to operation paperclip. The
> idea that all have been exposed is naive.
>   A modern parallel to operation paper clip is Total Information
> Awareness, proposed by Dick Cheney publicly, roundly rejected, and made
> operational secretly, and in contradiction to public statements, by Barak
> Obama.
>  So Mr Le Carre is all wrong. There is no deep state, there is no deep
> state, there is.....
>
> On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:59 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> > I liked some of Blowback, but also found in it some of the tacit "Nazi
> magic" attitude I object to in l'affaire von Braun: in Simpson's book, that
> our stance toward the postwar USSR was corrupted by a relative handful of
> Germans with their own _parti pris_ and axes to grind; in von Braun's case,
> that we don't have to think about our own vast moral failure in
> missile/nuclear strategy, or the Cold War origins of the space race --
> because hey, there were NAZIS providing a technical leg up at White Sands
> and Huntsville.
> >
> > In both cases, there were so many other, broader causes at work that
> when I ask myself: "Would US choices and policies have been materially
> different if Paperclip had never existed?" the answer is "no."
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
> thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> > I enjoyed, if that is the right word, Christopher Simpson's "Blowback."
> >
> > Thomas
> >
> > Am 04.03.2014 10:11, schrieb Mark Thibodeau:
> >
> > Here is what some "serious" conspiracy minded people think of Ms
> > Jacobson and her work...
> >
> > http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37827
> >
> > YOPJerky
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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