#193

“War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted... secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war” (id, 529-530).

#192

“We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was only open aplin and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide to that openness: it is terror to us” (id, 268).

#191

“What did Caesar really whisper to his protégé as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you'd expect to get from them – it says exactly nothing. The moment of of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator” (id, 167).

#190

“The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fürher – it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity... Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness – not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life” (id, 133).

#189

“It was widely believed in those days that behind the War – all the death, savagery, and destruction – lay the Fürher-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma... that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources” (Pynchon, 2006: 82).

PYNCHON, Thomas (2006). Gravity's Rainbow. London: Penguin.