Kurt Vonnegut is gone.
My epitaph for him follows.
As will we all, eventually.
(So it goes…)
Mistah Kurt wrote:
“…the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
Imagine.
Try to picture the size of that greed, that vanity and cruelty.
Now blow it up hundreds of times larger and give it propaganda capabilities of which Goebbels could only dream and weapons of which NO ONE could conceive at the time.
That’s us, brother.
That’s us.
A successful Nazi Germany.
A Reich that has lasted for 60+ years.
Off and on.
Mostly on.
How many people on the face of this earth have had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed, vanity and cruelty of the AMERICAN Reich? (“Reich”. A word that translates from German to English as “richly”. Yup. The Half Century Of Living Richly. At the expense of 90% of the rest of the world’s population. Now about to come to an end.)
A Reich that used economic blitzkriegs backed up by a spy system that made the Gestapo look like amateurs and the eternal threat of a nuclear Armageddon…or at the very least a glass parking lot constructed by nuclear contractors… parked on a sea bottom somewhere right off of whatever coast dared to oppose it.
If every action has an equal and opposite reaction and we have outstripped Hitler’s wildest paranoid fantasies with a cold-blooded Anglo-Saxon Protestant efficiency…what Dresden does the universe have in store for us?
Learn to pray, my friends.
Learn to pray.
Because we are all in this foxhole together.
There WAS a universal draft.
And we all serve in the army of America.
One way or another.
Bet on it.
Mr. Vonnegut…
Rest in peace, good hearted man.
Rest in peace, brother.
So it goes.
Say hello to Sam Clemens for me, if you get the chance.
Ambrose Bierce too, if you run into him.
And Mistah Conrad, too.
See ya soon enough.
See ya somewhere.
Later…
AG
He is one of them.
R.I.P., good hearted man.
R.I.P.
AG
take it easy, AG. If you lived in Nazi Germany they would have killed you long ago. If you must make these Nazi comparisons, at least make decent comparisons. Hone your argument some.
What we did in Chile and Central America, for example, was deplorable, but not comparable to what the Germans did to Poland and the Ukraine.
Can we get serious?
Plus, all this greed isn’t a totally one-way street.
From vaccinations to irrigation projects to introducing steel construction, people’s lives have been improved by American interaction in the world.
What was improved by the Nazis interaction with the world? I can’t think of anything.
Nope, sorry. Not a correct analogy.
Yes, we have done bad things.
But, no, we have not achieved the depths of disgusting depravity in Nazi Germany. Your ignorant diary merely exposes your lack of understanding of Nazi Germany.
I suggest that you pick up the new 2-vol biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw. The level of detail is very great. The attention to minutia is at times maddening, but you feel in the moment. Understanding the nationalistic and anti-semitic drives which drove Hitler illustrate the period very clearly.
I am concerned about Bush as well, but we are not the Fourth Reich.
we have not achieved the depths of disgusting depravity in Nazi Germany. Your ignorant diary merely exposes your lack of understanding
Perhaps AG is just letting the 21st century cloud his perspective. Or perhaps not: What we did to Cambodia in the 1970s matches anything the German Nazis dreamed up.
As for depravity, well, we are–as the say–workin’ on it! The Nazis did a good deal of torturing, but they did not make it a point of publicity. They were not PROUD of it, the way Americans are proud of it.
My perspective is not clouded on this point, gaianne.
Had we walked up to any of the millions of good Germans and their equivalents in the occupied countries of Europe and accused them of war crimes during W.W. II they would have reacted with the same kind of blindness that you are seeing here.
Hell…less than three years ago we had a Presidential election that essentially hinged on the issue of exactly how effective a war criminal one of the contestants had been in Vietnam.
“No Viet Cong ever called ME nigger” said Muhammad Ali while simultaneously Lieutenant “Small K” kerry was volunteering to go over there and kill gooks for God and Country.
“Lieutenant Kerry reporting for duty!!!”
I was on the road, in a restaurant all by myself just 20 miles outside of Boston when I saw this fool run that number, and I swear, I almost puked into my plate. I knew the game was up right there, that another few hundred thousand would lose their lives in the pursuit of bloody oil.
And the same game continues to this day.
The whole thing has been warped and woof ticketed into near incomprehensibility if you consider the reality of the situation.
The only differences between what Hiitler did and what the US has done in S.E. Asia, South/Central/Caribbean America, Africa and the Islamic world?
1-Hitler commiitted the unforgivable sin.
He killed identifiably white people.
Of course…he disagreed.
But that was only a matter of definition.
In his mind, if they were not pure Aryan they were NOT white.
We are simply more liberal in our definitions.
and
2-He used more military and less economic force in his quest for dominance than have we.
We are simply kinder, gentler thieves.
We don’t bring in the enforcers unless you REALLY refuse to play ball.
Unbelievable.
It is simply UNBELIEVABLE that so many of the so-called “left” do not…and apparently cannot see this, even when it is thoroughly pointed out to them.
“No Viet Cong ever called ME nigger.” A relatively uneducated man who was not smart enough to not allow himself to be punched into ill health in the pursuit of fame and fortune saw through this shit about fifty years ago!!!
I guess it’s all about how much you physically resemble those who are being shat upon.
Unbelievable.
You want to know why the “left’ in America has been so unsuccessful?
You want to complain at what is going on within the so-callled party of opposition today?
Look no further.
Ask not for whom the blindness obscures.
It shades for us all.
And “Eyes Wide Shut” was not just a movie title.
Bet on it.
AG
my point being I do not believe we are inviting a good fate.
Both of you.
Go visit Attica.
Tell it to the hundreds of thousands who have lost their lives in Third World Countries to starvation, war and despair amidst the plenitude.
Go tell it to the black kids growing up hopeless in our ghettoes.
Tell it to the MILLIONS who have nothing so that we can walllow in overconsumption.
And to the millions who die each year because of a poisoned earth. A poisoning in whiich we were the vanguard. The model. “Do it our way or face the consequences.”
We are WORSE than Nazi Germany.
.
Because we are
A-A thousand times bigger.
B-A thousand times more subtle.
and
C-A thousand times more successful.
Read books written 50 years after Germany was successfully defeated in W. W. II?
Why?
It’s a dead monster, and thus a safe target.
I’ll tell you what. If any of us live long enough…and if indeed the earth itself survives our depredations…read the books that will be written after THIS Reich meets its end. (A peaceful end, I pray, although my money would be on the contrary if I were so crude as to be willing to bet on human misery.)
They will tell a different story.
A story of massive evil.
The U.S, PermaGov is a LIVE monster, and just as life evolves, so does evil. The U.S. is the Tyrannosaurus Rex of live monsters at present, and those of us who really go after it with our puny spears and broadsides most often pay the price. One way or another, whether it is in disbelief, mockery or more serious retributions, one way or another real resistance exacts its price.
I am telling you now.
If there were a way to add up the human suffering caused by Hitler and all his minions and then somehow compare it to that which has been caused by the U.S. since W.W. II…let ALONE the damage done by its genocidal, slave owning forebears…if human misery could be weighed and totted up in plus and minus columns, the U.S. would be WAY ahead.
Trust me.
And trust me on this as well.
Karma is real.
Or to put it in a more down home manner, as Malcolm X so aptly noticed before he himself was offed by one or another claw of the monster, “The chickens always come home to roost.”
I know y’all get mad at me when I say this, but you have not walked in my shoes or seen what I have seen.
Worldwide.
Wake the fuck up.
Hitler was a monster and Naziism was his vehicle.
But what has been done in our name since Allen Dulles? By several GENERATIONS of monsters? In Africa, in Asia, in South/Central/ Caribbean America and in our own ghettoes?
Worse.
MUCH worse.
No smoking ovens.
No Eastern Front slaughter.
Just steady, numbing, criminally perpetrated dominance.
Over BILLIONS.
And the chickens are headed back our way if we do not repent.
Soon.
In fact…it may be too late.
We shall see.
We shall soon see.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
Arthur, I was thinking of you when I recently saw an interview with Norman Mailer on CSPAN. I can’t find a transcript and CSPAN wants $30 for the video, but here is a slice of it. I thought you’d enjoy it.
If there is a tragedy implicit in human life it is this.
That genius such as Mailer’s has to begin to die just as it begins to really live.
Makes me want to cry.
He is and remains one of my real heroes.
AG