Kurt Vonnegut on absurdity of war

As I am writing this post on December 24, 2024, there are around 110 conflicts going on around the world as per Geneva Academy. This is not new; humans have always used violence to settle their disputes and disagreement but the kind of world we live in can be lethal for humanity. We have two major wars going on right now, the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict and then are many civil wars like one in Sudan which has claimed countless lives and inflicted endless suffering. Now we have our politician’s glorification of war from the politicians of all sides, I do not know if they are lying, or they truly believe that. I think it is time to pause for a second and think what are we doing.

People before us has warned countless time but we seemed to be living in an age of ignorance. One of such great authors was Kurt Vonnegut, who himself served in World War 2, was taken as POW and held in an underground slaughterhouse when the city of Dresden was bombed to ground. He has written a lot of novels, short-stories, plays and non-fiction. In the last two weeks I happen to read one of his famous book which has quite an interesting name.

“Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death”

This is a fictional book where the main character “Billy Pilgrim” has been kidnapped by aliens to be shown into their museum. These aliens are the being of fifth dimension, which means they can look into the future and also in past, they can basically look at the whole time in a single moment. Their philosophy was whatever happened happened and whatever will happen will happen, we should not worry about it and cherish the moment. Because he was being taken by these aliens, now he can also look into the future and the past. Over the course of story, he keeps travelling to one time or the other and always knowing what is going to happen next.

This novel is written in a satirical tone with a dark humour where Kurt describes the Allied bombing of the Dresden city and his experiences after that but combining it with fiction. This is surely a fictional novel, but I think it much more than reality. Kurt used a lot of satire to describe the horrors of the war and how decent people gets turned into murderers. This novel explains the greater tragedy of war which is the human suffering.

One thing he emphasised in the book that the wars are childish, and the soldiers are like children who do not know what they are doing. In the story when character went to his friend’s home and he was writing a book on war, his friend’s wife got upset. He realized that it is because she does not want her children or any of his children to die in wars. He then promised that this will not be a book that glorify war and hence book got the name “The Children’s Crusade” meaning wars are childish.

I believe that although its a fictional book, but it holds a lot of lessons for us and our leaders on what is the human cost of wars. This book really captures a human experience of war and still as relevant as was when he wrote it.

So, the bird says “Poo-tee-weet?”