Politics vs Art

[rich]

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 2:57 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hyper-technically, the Auschwitz complex --  almost 50 camps in all and
> hybrid,as you say -- was originally  a concentration camp (Auschwitz I) for
> Polish political prisoners, added the Auschwitz II-Birkenau cluster as
> prison then extermination camp for Jews and Gypsies, then added Auschwitz
> III-Monowitz as slave labor camp for IG Farben's synthtic-rubber factory..
> which is why Primo Levi, an Italian Jew and a skilled chemist, survived at
> Monowitz rather than dying at Birkenau. Mixed priorities...
>
__________
thanks, Monte. I realize we are speaking of such unspeakable things in
terms of word usage and definitions but to follow your point I agree that
the approach to genocide was never consistent, very much contradictory, yet
for all that still operating at the pinnacle of soul-crushing brutality.


> Why not follow up on your sense that P's "systems...markets" message
> "can't really digest the insanity of Nazi racial policy and ideology"?
> Why not question yout implicit premise that systems and markets are by
> their nature sane and rational? Recall my earlier point on Blackett's "you
> can't run a war on gusts of emotion": that  the German V-weapon campaign
> and the US-UK city-bombing campaign *were not rational uses of economic and
> military resources,* no matter how much technology and organization went
> into them. They were supposed to be answers to "how do we win the war?",
> but in fact were answers to "how do we HURT THE ENEMY?" They were highly
> organized, rationally implemented gusts of emotion. Likewise, all those
> trains taking Jews to the death camps could have more profitably been
> supplying the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front -- except that the felt
> threat from the Jews was beyond or beneath rationality, deeper and darker
> than that from the Red Army.
>

I'm not trying to be coy or flippant but markets and systems do have their
own sense of logic. at the time no economic system made sense by the
dispatch of useful resources, even for evil purposes. how would that
benefit Them? Of course, today with short-selling and essentially making
money off things going to shit, yes now folks can make a bundle as things
of concern go down the shitter.
I'm still of two minds when it comes to Allied bombing--how do we win the
war and hurting the enemy do sort've go hand in hand. and as we know, its
flesh and blood folks doing the planning so i'm not sure how anyone can
avoid such gusts of emotion. Like my feeling about Hersh and the killing of
Bin Laden, considering where the bombs were being dropped--on Nazi Germany,
well its hard for me not to say they had it coming. but its not for me to
say
------------
'Rather than saying Pynchon *couldn't* deal with the Holocaust directly
because he'd chosen an approach based on the primacy of rational systems,
markets, cost/benefit calculations, etc... consider the possibility that
he's questioning how rational they really are. The peculiar horror of the
Holocaust, after all, was not mass murder -- Rwanda or Cambodia or the
partition of India will do for that -- but the *juxtaposition* of mass
murder with an "advanced" European nation's highly organized, systematic
implementation. You propose that people using technology and rationality to
do insane things poses a problem for Pynchon in GR; I think it's at the
heart of the book.'

me: working people to death, exploiting them for all their worth makes
rational sense economically--in that sense its not insane. of course, its
immoral wrong inhumane, etc etc. To those benefiting from such a system,
'Them', it's cool. What doesnt make sense for Them is hauling thousands of
people across Europe to be immediately put to death. The War is a
continuation of markets, nothing more. Many made bundles working for or
being a Nazi but the core of the movement, and for a good portion of
people, to the endgame in 1945, it was an ideological state of mind that
went beyond the continuation of markets. That is what I think Pynchon,
purposefully or not, sidesteps.

>
>
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