Herero latest

[Joseph Tracy]

I disagree  that *all* humans are liable to eat the apple (drink the Kool-aid?) of power and domination when they can. History offers a fair number of resistors to this pattern ( many whose unrewarded resistance cost their lives) ). Pynchon offers his own flawed resistors and the history of Literature .  The commonality of imperial cruelty accross cultures is a commonallity that ovelaps most and most cruelly in the colonial behaviors of those empires. It is habits of mind that allow violent subjugation of others that Pynchon wishes to expose and understand without simply blaming a single race, religion or political ideology,  as he also wishes to explore the source of individual and collective oppostion to that history of abuse of power.  I agree that Pynchon zooms out in time and perspective to give these questions a fundamental and cosmic universality.
> 
> On May 20, 2017, at 11:52 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "False equivalence"? I don't question for one second -- and venture that I could cite a lot more evidence than you could for -- the overwhelming edge in power and organized aggression of the European expansion over nearly all the indigenous people it encountered in Africa, Asia, and the New World.
> 
> But I don't agree that it "rubs salt in the wounds of the victims" to acknowledge that there *were* many indigenous, warlike, expansionist, slave-taking empires -- Chinese, Indian, Mongol, Central and West African, Mexica (Aztec), Inca, Five Nations -- before the Europeans arrived. Or that their interactions with Europeans got complicated:
> 
> - the Huron and Mohicans playing English and French for guns in their own immemorial war, while the English and French were playing them
> - Indian rajahs and sultans doing the same against each other with -- and typically marching with -- troops of the British East India Company, French, and Portuguese 
> - Cortes taking Tenochtitlan with 750 Spaniards -- and 80,000 or more Tlaxcalan and other allies he'd recruited, who cheerfully slaughtered their erstwhile Mexica overlords
> 
> You call these "unique"; I call them ubiquitous. It's the Herero "war," the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, that are more nearly unique precisely because they were so one-sided; the victims had *no* state, allies or organized military power of their own. That doesn't mean everything that happened from 1450 to 1950 was the same story writ large. 
> 
> Nor does it mean that other, less helplessly "pure" victims, deserved or asked for what imperialism/colonialism did to them. It doesn't exculpate Europeans from any of their bloody 500-year spree. It just means that *all* humans are liable to eat the apple (drink the Kool-aid?) of power and domination when they can. 
> 
> Pynchon spends a lot of time exploring the specifically European and USAn expressions of that, and it leaves a mark -- as it should. But he also dips via Calvinism to Adam's fall and other mythologies, visits ancient ruins and legends, zooms out to millennia rather than centuries -- and those are reminders (I think deliberate) that it's not *all* about us.      
> 
>        
> 
> On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 9:55 AM, jody boy <jodys.gone2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I think it is pretty clear, and that bringing up the divisions,
> infighting and betrayal among the Herero amounts to a false
> equivalence.
> 
> I'm not insinuating that you endorse or excuse the genocide in any
> way, but each of those examples you listed are unique. Lumping them
> together rubs salt in the wounds of the victims.
> 
> On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 7:29 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Gotcha. All clear now.
> >
> > On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 8:42 PM, jody boy <jodys.gone2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> This is an example of white European Christians travelling thousands
> >> of miles to the homeland of native Africans, colonizing it, and then
> >> rounding up the natives and systematically exterminating them. The
> >> only complexity about this is the twisted, convoluted arguments about
> >> why they did it, and why they should not be held accountable.
> >>
> >> "Oh, but it's more complicated than that..."  I'm reminded of
> >> Archduke Ferdinand playing the dozens. Oh, and his trophy's- if he
> >> even bothered to have the carcasses stuffed- littering the plains. Or,
> >> those brave "souls" riding along
> >> on the first transcontinental railroad shooting the buffalo until
> >> their fingers got tired.
> >>
> >> Let's get real here, and not obfuscate like the ink of a white octopus.
> >>
> >> On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 9:55 AM, e tb <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > Salt in old wounds: What Germany owes Namibia | The Economist
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21721918-saying-sorry-atrocities-century-ago-has-so-far-made-matters-worse-what
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
> >
> 

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l