Herero latest

Tue May 23 09:30:13 CDT 2017

That's the locus classicus. As Weisenburger & Herman document in many ways,
GR richly expresses and extends the critique of American exceptionalism and
triumphalism -- especially their post-WWII flavor -- that was spreading in
the years of its composition. The U.S. phase of the war in Viet Nam, the
civil rights and free speech movements, the ongoing nuclear arms race and
the sterile culmination of the moon race (thanks, Wernher!) convinced a lot
of people, not just Pynchon's readers, that We hadn't been the unambiguous
good guys in WWII... that both European and American imperialism had
brought at least as much Bad Shit as Christianity and progress to the
"lesser breeds without the law"... that the Atomic Age and Space Age (don't
those sound quaint now?) might not be as brightly benign as Disney's TV
programs and subtropical Zwolfkinders had suggested. Slothrop is (among
many other things) Candide on sodium amytal, stumbling on uncomfortable
questions about this "best of all possible worlds.".      .

Those were my late teens and early twenties. I embraced (and inhaled) that
critique, and much of it remains part of my world view. But even when GR
was new, I also thought that its uses of mythology (including original sin,
a doctrine far from unique to Christianity), sexuality, and depth
psychology pushed the critique to older times and wider regions than the
500 years of European expansion.

It's in the later books, too: in Mason & Dixon, those aren't just French
and Spanish tendrils out there beyond the frontier. The Chinese presence
and advanced communications technology sketch an alternate history in which
Asian empire reached across the Pacific. Whatever Captain Zhang may be,
he's not your basic innocent Confucian or Taoist victim of British opium
wars, Shanghai concessions, and multinational reprisals for the Boxer
rebellion.

Pynchon, like most writers, "writes what he knows" -- which is a hell of a
lot more than me or thee, but still expanded outward from the experience of
an American born in 1937, maturing with the late Beats and then the
California 1960s. He gets an amazing amount of the world and world history
into his books, but he's not a disembodied _weltgeist_ or a xenobiologist
from Mars.

It's safe to say that when he wrote "the savages of other continents,
corrupted but still resisting
in the name of life
," he wasn't thinking about Thutmose III or Mansa Musa or Shaka Zulu,
Ch'ing Shi Huang or Genghis Khan or Asoka or Timur Leng, the bloody-handed
empire builders of El Mirador or Teotihuacan or Cuzco. But I doubt very
much that means he would (or would expect us to) classify them as
exceptions or aberrations. The world is big, history is long, and

"
the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death
," did not enter them with Calvin and calculus and conquistadors.

On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 6:31 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> "In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its
> order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or
> altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away.
> But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the
> structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death
> has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old
> metropolis. But now we have only the structure left us, none of the
> great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali
> seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting
> in the name of life, have gone on despite everything...while Death and
> Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death
> only rules here. [...]'" 722-23
>
> "hopeless as the one-way flow of European time" 724
>
>
> http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.
> php?title=Europe_in_Gravity%27s_Rainbow
>
> On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 3:04 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > The systems of colonial exploitation, including the efficiencies of
> slave classes and the technologies of militarism seem to know little ethnic
> favoritism. In the words of the Marx brothers “All god’s children got guns”
> . In this I agree with Monte. But cultures can root themseves in mythos,
> values and practices that are ruthlessly competitive or they can grow out
> of and retain humane, inclusive values .  I see examples of this, too,
> throughout human history and where nasty habits like caste get established
> there is usually a resistance ( Buddhism, Gandhi, abolitionism). Humane
> values are actually very resilient  locally but are often overthrown by
> militarized imperial ambition or people with too much power. Still, abuses
> of power breed resistance.  Many revolutions are fueled by an attempt to
> restore or start over with better, more fair, laws and values.  Still we
> can all see that the cycle of mass violence and exploitaion is too much
> with us and combned with abused and reckless technology threatens
> catastrophe.
> >
> > My main argument in this discussion is the danger of the mindset and
> ingrained abuses that accompanies economic, cultural and military
> colonialism. Here I tend to have feelings similar to jody boy that
> westerners too easily make exceptions for themselves to ignore the savagery
> of western history and current hegemony. The main problem being the
> presumption that answers and positive changes lie with the powerful.( this
> presumption is basic to colonialism) .  One of the best things that is
> happening globally is the awareness of an interdependence that can only
> work if everyone is treated respectfully and has a stake in where we direct
> our wealth, intelligence and work.  We are also returning to a more humble
> reationship the biosphere. Environmentalism was not invented in western
> academia and is an increasingly global value. Nonviolent conflict
> resolution, introduced on a global scale as a foundational principle of
> sane community by people like Buddha, Jesus, Martin L King, Gandhi
> feminism, and many others may be disorganized and still weak in dealing
> with the major purveyors of violence but most protestors and fighters for
> justice follow those precepts.
> >          Caste?
> > I just saw a really inspiring French made movie called ‘Tomorrow’ which
> shows existing projects from non-chemical agriculture, to alternative
> banking, to active ground-up democracy, and renewable energy- existing
> models of new ways of living..  One segment was a look at a small
> agricultural village in India. The newly elected mayor turned out to really
> believe in democracy and got the whole village involed in making decisions
> and setting priorities. They started businesses, fixed the water system,
> started regular cleanup days  and then they took on the serious issue of
> untouchables, first they  funded a new sewer and water system for the
> untouchable area mostly with labor by the untouchables. Then they decided
> that there would be no more separation of castes. Many started living in
> shared houses( imagine a plaster duplex), even Brahmins and former
> untouchables lived in the same building and quickly came to see that they
> were all much the same.  Couldn't race in America have a similar solution?
> The big question for those of good will is whether humans are doomed by bad
> habits or whether the dynamics that created the peaceful heroes of
> history,from Buddha to kind wise mothers, can lead us from a colonizing,
> controlling, dominating mindset to a a friendlier shared community of life.
> >
> > Enough words, I’m going out to plant asparagus, strawberries and
> potatoes.
> >
> >> On May 21, 2017, at 12:52 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Agreed. There *are* deep connections between the European rise(s) of
> capitalism, of imperial expansion, of technology, and of organizational
> complexity. That's the brilliance of GR's use of the Hereros (onstage) and
> the Holocaust (offstage): it's "bringing the colonial war home," not
> chasing victims across the Kalahari but using the the careful parsing of
> ancestry and tIfe efficient train system and the triplicate Zyklon B
> procurement contracts to feed the ovens at Belsen. It's making us smell in
> in Dresden and Weimar and Gottingen the death-stink of what were supposed
> to be far-away outhouses.
> >> Of *course* the West, because it had an edge in wealth and geographic
> reach and technology for 500 years, was able to "modernize" and
> industrialize domination and exploitation both abroad and at home. We
> should understand that; we should feel the shame of that; we should be wary
> of its continuation in new guises.
> >>
> >> But we should also be wary of "virtue Othering," aka the flip side of
> Said's Orientalism. For example: I'm no scholar of South Asian religion and
> history, but I do know enough about the 2000- to 3000-year-old caste
> systems, from reading and from many conversations with South Asians over
> the years, to believe they have been a titanic human tragedy. They have
> constrained literally billions of lives -- marriage, occupation, status,
> social interaction -- and crushed countless "untouchables" (a Hindu
> innovation, AFAIK) and shudras from birth to death.
> >> It's fine with me if my Western peers want to idealize Eastern
> spirituality; I've long had some Buddhist leanings and practices myself.
> But I'm damned if I'll see the evil of caste handwaved away -- 'hey, it's
> all OK because knowing your place in life is so much better  than
> materialistic status-seeking, and because reincarnation anyway.' Fuck that:
> I thank the Trimurti that brahmins and kshatriyas in the 1400s didn't take
> the lead with banking and joint-stock companies, galleons and cannons, and
> plant *their* banners around the shores of the world ocean. Because as
> badly as we've fucked up, things could have been a lot worse.
> >>
> >> On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 11:35 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> This is a fascinating discussion, with interesting viewpoints
> contributed by all. I'm listening to the GR audio, and just heard, "the
> real business of the war is buying and selling". What struck me, Monte, is
> the distinction between colonialism and the tribalism (?) displayed by the
> native North Americans after their acquisition (re-acquisition?) of horses.
> >> It seems to me that, though the impulses may be traced to the same
> source, what is different is the degree of complexity, and the distance
> traveled from one to the other. The level of technology involved in
> colonialism, the self-justification, the duplicity...
> >>
> >> Www.innergroovemusic.com
> >>
> >> On May 21, 2017, at 10:40 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>>> And, of course, why should we confine ourselves to genocide
> perpetrated against humans?
> >>>
> >>> Why, indeed? Do you know why the Europeans' horses were so startling
> to Native Americans in the early 1500s? Because their fucking ancestors --
> not a Protestant among them -- had spent millennia hunting and eating and
> driving to extinction the horses that had EVOLVED in North America (some of
> whom had earlier migrated across the land bridge to Eurasia).
> >>>
> >>> Once the Spaniards' horses had spread northward tribe by tribe, they
> transformed the Southwest and Great Plains. The sedentary tribes of the
> 17th to 19th century, from pueblo-dwellers to the Chippewa near the Great
> Lakes, saw and suffered what the Comanche and Kiowa and Lakota Sioux
> became: not just mounted buffalo hunters but mounted raiders (very much
> like Aryans and Dorians, Scythians and Mongols had been in Eurasia),
> descending bloodily on their villages, departing with food stores and
> scalps, captive women and children.
> >>>
> >>> I'm sure it must have been that malign European influence. As you've
> just provided a fine example of the "all Africa's problems trace to
> colonialism" view I cited, no doubt you can connect the dots.
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 9:02 AM, jody boy <jodys.gone2 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> Your sarcasm aside, an argument can be made, and I think with some
> >>> merit, that Western colonialism set the stages for those tragic
> >>> examples you've listed, especially their magnitude, by directly or
> >>> indirectly disrupting those cultures.
> >>>
> >>> Let's not forget the role of slavery and capitalism, symbolized by the
> >>> "twin gallows" in M&D, silhouetted in the clear freshening breeze of
> >>> St. Helena, as it wafted over from the African coast.
> >>>
> >>> Nor the role of Western science and technology, among which I- perhaps
> >>> uniquely- include Protestantism, as a form of social engineering, all
> >>> of which dovetailed with slavery and capitalism to engender a new and
> >>> exponentially more efficient means of chronic genocide, at
> >>> controllable rates and with predictable rates of return.
> >>>
> >>> And, of course, why should we confine ourselves to genocide
> >>> perpetrated against humans? The extinction of the Dodo as portrayed in
> >>> GR, seems to me more than just a metaphor for man's inhumanity to man,
> >>> but against the totality of nature and the environment we all depend
> >>> on.
> >>>
> >>> How does it go, the opening of GR?   "It's happened before, but
> >>> nothing like this..."  something to that effect.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 9:40 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>> I think the uniqueness of the European (Western) example is unique
> >>>>
> >>>> Can't argue with that
> >>>>
> >>>>> Scale matters, and so does the belief system that undergirds and
> justifies
> >>>>> the implementation of
> >>>> systematic genocide.
> >>>>
> >>>> I
> >>>> t was doubtless a great comfort to 2 million Hindus, Muslims and
> Sikhs in
> >>>> 1947, 30 million Chinese in 1959-61, 1 million Indonesian Chinese in
> >>>> 1965-66, 2 million Cambodians in 1975-1979, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi in
> 1994,
> >>>> and 5 million Congolese in 2003-2008 that their deaths were
> small-scale,
> >>>> unsystematic, non-genocidal, and not in the service of the Western
> belief
> >>>> system.
> >>>>
> >>>> On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 6:17 PM, jody boy <jodys.gone2 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Couple, three points:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I am not in competition with you to cite evidence of "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." I don't claim to be an historian.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Secondly, I am not convinced that all human cultures are equivalently
> >>>>> predisposed to "eat the apple," etc. I think the uniqueness of the
> >>>>> European (Western) example is unique and it is precisely that
> >>>>> uniqueness that Pynchon is concerned with. Scale matters, and so does
> >>>>> the belief system that undergirds and justifies the implementation of
> >>>>> systematic genocide.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Lastly, it seems obvious to point out, that all human societies are
> >>>>> capable, push to shove, of atrocity, but that gives short shrift to
> >>>>> the uniqueness of the Western version. There are hints in the texts
> of
> >>>>> another type of uniqueness- perhaps the flip side of the same coin,
> >>>>> that there is something special- especially good- about "us," that we
> >>>>> have something unique to offer the rest of the planet that may yet
> >>>>> turn out to be decisive. In order for that to happen, "we" need to be
> >>>>> especially honest.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On Sat, 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
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>>
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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