In Memoriam: Kurt Vonnegut
It's been a week since Vonnegut died, but none of his obituaries seem to have noted that he changed history.
After the Axis were forced to unconditional surrender, they were required to take full responsibility for the wars of the first half of the 20th century.
After the war, the Allies wrote the history books and distributed endless documentaries about how the wars had been between good and evil. While the Axis were bent on world domination for lebensraum, i.e., exterminating their enemies so that members of the Axis would have plenty of space, the Allies fought a war strictly in accord with international law. The Allies only bombed military targets. They didn't claim 'smart bombs,' but they did claim precision bomb-sights that enabled them to avoid civilian targets. The Allies only bombed factories making tanks and aircraft, they did not wantonly take lives as the Axis did.
And then Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five. He had been a prisoner of war in Dresden, and had witnessed what the Allies had done to Dresden
The bombing was to test a new, anti-personnel strategy. For the test, the Allies had selected Dresden, because it was a target with no military value, hence it was undefended, so the planes could bomb without worrying about anti-aircraft defences. The new bombing strategy rendered bomb shelters useless. Almost everyone in Dresden-- mostly elderly men, women, and children--was killed. And Vonnegut was an eyewitness, and later wrote a novel about it.
History, by which I mean what is in the history books, was forever changed by that novel.
It was not so simple any more. The Axis were still just as evil as they had been depicted, but the Allies had managed to kill almost as many innocents as the Axis, and with very little more justification.
After Vonnegut's novel, history was no longer about the glorious triumph of unadulterated good over unmitigated evil: such triumphs were relegated to fiction by authors other than Vonnegut.
After the Axis were forced to unconditional surrender, they were required to take full responsibility for the wars of the first half of the 20th century.
After the war, the Allies wrote the history books and distributed endless documentaries about how the wars had been between good and evil. While the Axis were bent on world domination for lebensraum, i.e., exterminating their enemies so that members of the Axis would have plenty of space, the Allies fought a war strictly in accord with international law. The Allies only bombed military targets. They didn't claim 'smart bombs,' but they did claim precision bomb-sights that enabled them to avoid civilian targets. The Allies only bombed factories making tanks and aircraft, they did not wantonly take lives as the Axis did.
And then Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five. He had been a prisoner of war in Dresden, and had witnessed what the Allies had done to Dresden
The bombing was to test a new, anti-personnel strategy. For the test, the Allies had selected Dresden, because it was a target with no military value, hence it was undefended, so the planes could bomb without worrying about anti-aircraft defences. The new bombing strategy rendered bomb shelters useless. Almost everyone in Dresden-- mostly elderly men, women, and children--was killed. And Vonnegut was an eyewitness, and later wrote a novel about it.
History, by which I mean what is in the history books, was forever changed by that novel.
It was not so simple any more. The Axis were still just as evil as they had been depicted, but the Allies had managed to kill almost as many innocents as the Axis, and with very little more justification.
After Vonnegut's novel, history was no longer about the glorious triumph of unadulterated good over unmitigated evil: such triumphs were relegated to fiction by authors other than Vonnegut.
posted by Dubai@Random at 8:21 pm
1 Comments:
By coincidence I'm in the middle of a heated e-mail debate with a friend about dresden. It wasn't a war crime because it was 'us' doing it isn't an argument I can agree with.
I'm an avid reader of Vonnegut, my books are all dog-eared from repeated reading. A great man.
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