Book review: Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse 5 is really good but five thousand people have reviewed it already and what more is there to say? A discussion then. There’s always more to say.
This is a pacifist piece, written by someone who has grown up being conditioned that pacifism is something to be ashamed of (phrases of opposition include: lily-liver, conscientious objectors, conchies, chicken, draft-dodgers, fifth columnists, cowards, white feather, traitors) and therefore the writer’s feelings are not spelled out in unambiguous ink, instead the author provides just enough observation to let the reader come to their own conclusion. That’s literature. Each time someone expires, sadly and pointlessly, their epithet is “and so it goes”. When you’ve read enough if the book, you become aware of the great count of times this line has been used and that gives a woeful sense of the cumulative procession to the unthinking grave, the complete lack of alternatives to donating more and more lives to the pit until the other side eventually runs out of people first and, if this is only one soldier’s experience, we sense how many millions of lives are being pinched out as he writes, across the broad theatre of this conflict. If you take the politics of this particular case out, wars at this scale are a disaster.
The character based on the author has gone off to fight because this is what a proper man of the time was expected to do (phrases of reinforcement include: Red blooded, hero, true, duty, onward Christian soldiers) and he’s performed a role even though his objective critical faculties whisper to him there’s something not quite right about encouraging all of this. Top Gun, for example, says war is brilliant, join up! This book says think twice.
The thing is, war is necessary in certain extreme circumstances (e.g. your own group’s survival). It is totally absurd and often makes the problem bigger and last longer rather than concluding it, but even so it’s hard to find a principled alternative process to settle a dispute when then only thing the ideological lunatic on the other side of the table will settle for is your death. Using the logic of proportionate reaction to an opponent you cannot survive in parallel with, engineering death to people you have never met sounds reasonable. ABSURD, but reasonable. Alternatives to fighting might include vacating your country and living on the Moon (unpractical) or simply waiting for the opposition leader or ideology to collapse and normalise (and sit idly by while they do their worst to innocent civilians?).
From the perspective of the allied forces (anti-fascist), from which this is composed, humanity was drawn into WWII sensibly, reasonably, no choice, with all its intellect in full working order because that’s what you had to do against this level of evil aggression. Was everyone unified in this opinion though? A footnote of absurdity floats up when you realise this author (a member of the US Army) had Germanic heritage and, in 1939–41, there were congressmen petitioning for America to come into the war on Germany’s side. Luckily, the president didn’t entertain this lobbying but, specifically, this book is by a soldier being asked to fight his own distant relations and accepting being put in that position without complaint. Would you feel conflicted? In any country’s forces you will find a complexity of allegiances based on things like ‘the old country’ your parents were from, which side your employer supports, favouritism, distrust from a previous injury, love & marriage or religious alignment (God’s law above Man’s law). What you don’t see in the movies is there’s a full range of commitment in any group, including reluctance. There was a fascinating example from an American Civil War battlefield, where archaeologists recovered a musket that had been muzzle-loaded 24 times and not fired. Picture that soldier thinking ‘thou shalt not kill’, ahead of him seeing brothers, countrymen, his ethics telling him not to shoot but all the time someone behind him yelling “Re-load. Ready. Aim.” and then he mimed firing. Connected research in the same article suggested that in any platoon of 30, there are perhaps two doing the majority of the killing and the rest are ‘also there’, similar to the committee decision system where group responsibility protects the individual’s personal decision.
How wide do you cast your own feeling of group identity? In any movement, e.g. an army, a health service or a religion, individual people will have a different diameter of circle they’d draw around the concept of ‘us’. It might be small, e.g. genetic family or close colleagues, or is might be their professional designation, brigade, nation or even encompass an ideological expanse (republicans, monarchists). In the south-west of the UK, some people see themselves as Cornish and that’s where it ends, not identifying with the English or British. To bring this interesting dilemma up to date with an hypothetical situation, I wonder what would happen today if the institution of the EU (different from the population) called up British people en-masse to go to war under their flag. Come and work for the success of your abductor. What proportion would refuse? What share would actively identify their own force as hostile to themselves, antagonistic to their ‘us’? If you think I’m kidding, the Eurofighter aeroplane was re-named Typhoon in the UK because focus groups consistently interpreted the nomenclature to mean it was an enemy aircraft. If a circle is drawn too wide it becomes artificial and will be wrong most of the time, so people will desert it. In the UK’s case, members of Parliament draw their circle of ‘us’ so amazingly wide that it includes the enemy. The resilience of small circles is the reason why the soldier is encouraged to fight for his mates and doesn’t want to let the people he knows personally down — not for concepts or figureheads. I know it’s hard to talk to a squaddie for long without getting bored (try big drinks and loud places) but you might learn something.
In Let the People Think, Bertrand Russell wrote that he believed the most pro-war section of society were elderly women as (during WWI) they were the ones who felt the most bitter, walking down trains, pinning white feathers on males not in uniform. He also recounted a conversation between three of them as their carriage passed Plymouth docks, when the elderly women were saddened that they could see three naval destroyers idle in dock, much preferring the idea that their sailors should be killing and being killed without stopping. I think that’s more about cossetted individuals who have never experienced horror believing a romanticism that has somehow become attached to the act, to make to more palatable for recruitment. The first war did its best to dispel that illusion but does endure, through each new generation.
Yes, it was a catastrophic time “and so it goes.” There were difficult decisions taken, ones people had to live with for the rest of their lives. The elephantine one in this book, the culmination of the story, is the bombing of Dresden which killed more people than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic blasts. The exact number (80,000?) is unclear but, wow, imagine a teeming city that’s gone in the morning. It was a city made of wood, so Bomber Command logically selected incendiaries, firebombs. There were a lot of civilians but Germany had destroyed civilian Coventry, so this wasn’t a defence. It also seems the allies had dropped on all the military sites so were searching around for somewhere new to try — not an immediate threat. Then again, Dresden had supplied people to the German forces.
Almost everyone who took part of either side of this famous conflict is now dead. A lot of resentment continues but mainly these events are recounted as object lessons of what right and wrong look like, hopefully making it less likely this sort of wasteful mess will happen again. People are predators, it’s in our evolutionary design, but large population groups don’t have to be. Collective reason can over-rule primeval instinct, those grannies on a train. Dresden, or a catastrophic event like it, was the almost inevitable result of the decision to start a war between industrialised nations. You shouldn’t complain you have to pay a ransom to escape your prison — the error was at the beginning when you began a course of action that put you in a situation which you have to pay a ransom to undo.
The self-propelled field gun fires at a tank in the winter and misses, a long mark of burned powder scoring a dark line across the snow. The tank’s turret turns and fires much more effectively back; and so it goes. Stupid at one level, tragic at another, inevitable in the grand design. The message is to find a different answer. No one can afford to go through all of this again, economically or psychologically, so we all finish the book agreeing with the author. Black and white, doves and hawks, absolute right and wrong are all badly fitting generalisations but it’s easy for the winner to adjust the emphasis of history to fit their moral lesson.
We are all used to rationalising through perspective changes. For example, it is true to say that humans are the only species on planet Earth which subsists on the baby food of another species, comprising a hormonal soup tailored specifically for their species, not ours (suggesting we should not eat cheese, butter, milk and egg yolk). Change the context and you can say there are a million species on the planet who subsist on the meat and blood of other species, so using another species as a food source is normal. You choose a side to be on and then conveniently only remember one of the two justifications. Context becomes important.
I can see that death can be memorable but this book teaches me to conclude the romantic attribute is added later, by someone who wasn’t there. Dilating something horrible with the charms of fancy isn’t a matter for law but the embellisher is guilty of poor taste.
Like everyone else, I can make a convincing case for global peace forever at the conceptual level and believe it can work, on paper. To live in peace should be a human right. I’m on the side of the doves and the ethics committees, the defenceless righteous who stand up against self-interest in the individual and the nation. However, this is an ignus fatuus because when faced with the brutal reality of in-your-face evil (in this book, the most unpleasant opponent in the history of our species; Cassandra prophesied evils that would come to greet you at your hearth and board) and a side that absolutely must not be allowed to continue, it’s amazing how fast reasonable people elbow their ethics into storage and carry out the previously unthinkable. Dresden, Hiroshima. Everyone should read this once, reflect on it and ask themselves the pertinent questions because Slaughterhouse 5 is a great anti-war novel showing us the reality of how bad it gets, the pointlessness too, and we agree with its powerful peaceful sentiment in theory but, even with hindsight, in the context of what we could expect to happen to ‘us’ if Hitler and his supporters had won, I doubt we would really do anything different… “and so it goes.”
