Herero latest

Sun May 21 09:10:31 CDT 2017

Much agreement here. I'd add that one legitimate (IMO) reason for
concentration on the European expansion is our awareness, as insiders, of
its hypocrisies: the cognitive and moral dissonance between its actions and
---at various times -- its Catholic (universal) church, humanism, organized
science, Enlightenment, civil liberties, inclusive democracy, etc. Those
were/are very real and very important: the "something special- especially
good- about "us"... something unique to offer the rest of the planet" that
jody boy mentioned.

That's what puts the special edge on, e.g., William McKinley praying for
divine guidance before seizing the Philippines and presiding over a
particularly nasty "anti-insurgency" war against Filipinos... or "racial
science" ginned up to justify slavery and eugenics as well as genocide...
or indignation over Germany's V-1 and V-2 "vengeance weapons" while RAF and
USAAF bombers were killing tens of thousands overnight in Germany and Japan.

One more note on genocide the word: I understand historically when and why
it was defined and coined just after WWII, entered international law,
became part of public consciousness. And I'm not surprised that once it
did, people looked back and applied it to the Herero campaign, the
Armenians during WWI, and so forth. But the term also opens up all kinds of
special pleading and definitional nit-picking between "real" genocide...
mass killing inside and outside formal war... and mass death that could
have been prevented. E.g., the Nazis *did* do their best to systematically
eradicate European Jews, notoriously tallying 5-6 million... but was their
killing of 9 to 11 million non-Jewish Soviet civilians, and their intent
(had they won) to starve and work to death another 20-30 million, any less
awful because they didn't plan to kill *every* Slav? Were the deaths in the
Irish potato famine genocidal because English contempt for the Irish
combined with doctrines of "political economy" to prevent relief? Was Mao
Tse Tung's famine not genocidal because it killed Chinese, because it was
caused by provincial Party bureaucrats afraid to report to Beijing that its
lunatic agricultural policies were failing?

Or in the New World: modern estimates are that at least 30%, in some
regions 90% of pre-Columbian populations died of epidemic disease over the
250 years after contact -- most without ever seeing a European explorer or
settler. Were all the "Indian wars," from Cortes and Pizarro to King
Philip's War to Wounded Knee and Rosas in Argentina, more or less genocidal
because they were often against demographically and culturally shattered
survivors of what pathogenic microbes had already done?

I've watched stars of "post-colonial" studies wax eloquent about how
imperialist/racist ideologies denied all agency and autonomy to Africans --
then turn around and ascribe *all* the intra-African wars and massacres of
recent decades to badly drawn colonial borders, the legacy of exploitation,
and global markets for blood diamonds and coltan.

I'm not trying to dissolve all distinctions and judgments in a bath of
"everybody does it." I'm explaining my own suspicion of arguments about
history or current affairs -- or readings of Pynchon! -- that seem too
carefully "tailored" to put oppressors A, B, and C in one moral column,
victims X, Y., and Z in another. Pynchon did a lot to show me the
intertwined roots of Tchitcherine in Kirghizstan and Crouchfield the
Westwardman, vulgar Major Marvy and cultured Colonel Blicero, precise Roger
Mexico and precise Franz Pokler. I think he writes about the cultures he
knows best...

...NOT that he wants us to draw a neat line around the Crimes of Western
Modernity and stop there.

On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 11:46 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> 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/?listpynchon-l
>
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