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Vonnegut dead; and good riddance
Topic Started: Apr 13 2007, 03:57 PM (119 Views)
Dominic Guglieme
the human MICROscope!!

I will say it now. If there is anything resembling a just afterlife, Vonnegut is getting now what he missed in Dresden.


The man was a traitor. I have read "Slaughter House 5."

Besides the fact that SH 5 is one of the most over-rated books I have ever read, the ethics behind it are sickening.

In terms of style, SH5 is deliberately incoherent, and critics rave about this. Even if one thinks well of such a shabby gimmick, it should not be enough to carry a book to whatever dubious heights SH5 sits at. Wow! Time-travelling aliens and a polemic complaining about bombing Nazis. Brilliant! Not since "Satanic Verses" have I been so astounded by the badness of a book. (Man, the Ayatollah was not wholly out of line in putting a hit on Rushdie. Anything to keep him from writing again.)

Lets look at Vonnegut shall we?

The man argues, not without justification, that war is a waste of resources and lives. However, his most vocal and highest profile complaint is about an attack on a people who had a direct hand in 2 world wars. (They outright started the second one mind you.) Those poor Nazis. Those poor Nazis who enthusiastically supported Hitler et al. Those poor Nazis getting a comeuppance after the Blitz.

They should not have been killed. (Never mind possible military and political considerations, like denying/detering the Soviets. Or the fact that somebody had to show the Nazis they were beaten, and taking out a city over the course of 2 months is a good way to do it.)

Vonnegut was more concerned with humanizing an enemy and making them sympathetic with the fact that the Nazis would have happily plunged Europe into a bizarre pagan dark-age.

Yes, there is a practical need ot understand one's enemie, and reducing them to cartoonish stereotypes is as dangerous then as it is now. If the Nazis were as cure as Col. Klink and Sgt. Shultz, WWII would have been a much different affair. If they were as stupid as some stereotypes implied, they would have been obliterated much more easily. But, the purpose of understanding your enemy is not to sympathize with them, but to make yourself more able to kill them.

Vonnegut was an intellectual fraud who did his best to blur that distinction.


So it goes.






Keep it local.


The healthiest leper in the colony is still very very sick.

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