Al Qaeda and Slaughterhouse Five

I have long had Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" on my reading list. I borrowed it from the library recently and finished it yesterday afternoon.

I did know that Vonnegut was a survivor of the Dresden fire bombing. I had thought that Slaughterhouse Five was about five survivors who were in a meat locker. Actually it was the address of where they were bunked as prisoners of war assigned to work in Dresden: Schlacthof fünf. There were about 100 prisoners guarded by four old or teen-age German conscripts.

They were about the only survivors of the firebombing. When they emerged from their shelter, they saw no standing buildings. Even then, they were strafed by planes attacking anything moving.

One character, a retired Air Force officer justifies the bombing because of what "the Germans" did. He also states that more people died in Dresden than in either the firebombing of Tokyo or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He also justifies the latter two because of all the things "the Japanese" did to other people.

Amazing the different attitudes of people in the air or far away and of the people actually on the ground.

The imposition of collective guilt is always wrong. Jewish children of the twentieth century had nothing to do with the crucifixion of Jesus. German children of the 1940s had nothing to do with the Holocaust or the bombing of England. Japanese children of the 1940s had nothing to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Rape of Nanking. Yet all these children are worth killing because of the actions of some of their elders. The god Maloch still lives and we still sacrifice children to his fires.

Is it any wonder that Al Qaeda thinks it appropriate to kill Americans anywhere anytime because they don't like the actions of a few Americans?

Obama's reaching out to people around the world is not going to quench the fires of Maloch soon, but let's hope it is a start.

A day of infamy

Today is the anniversary of the first internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry in 1942. The later Supreme Court ruling justifying the internment as a national security measure still stands. This same thinking has led to abuse of power by several succeeding presidents.

On the other hand, my German-born grandmother was never interned. If some movies are to be believed, Germans in America were more dangerous than Japanese. After all, they "looked like" everybody else.

The military needs to be green, too

Many have mentioned that a sound energy policy is also a national defense issue. Thomas Friedman, "Who Will Succeed Al Gore?", New York Times, Oct. 14, 2007, gives an interesting twist on this. He wrote that U.S. Army officers are desperate for distributed solar power so they don't have to depend on diesel generators. The diesel fuel has to be trucked in, and the trucks are regular targets for insurgents. Isn't one of the jobs of the Commander-in-Chief keeping the supply lines open to the military?

One of the strategic moves of the Allies in World War II was to bomb the oil fields in Ploesti, Romania, thus depriving the German Army of much needed fuel. Not using solar power in a sunny land like Iraq seems to be another case of not learning from history.