If you ever find yourself in Dresden there's a fantastic tour based on Slaughterhouse Five, run by a local man who loves the book and is quite a character. A unique lens to learn about the city through.
I read it and thought it a remarkable book. I lent it to a mate who thought the same. Said mate lent it to his dad who had fought in the 2nd WW. His dad apparently said it was the best book on the war he'd ever read. If true, that's really saying something.
I read this book from a Summer Reading List as a Stephen King fan in the 1990s. I assumed from the name, that it was a horror novel like Cujo.
It was not a horror novel like Cujo but it sort of was in its own way. It had a huge impact on me, though. I'm fairly sure it was the first book that ever made me cry.
I generally respect Salman Rushdie (the author of the article), But I really feel he's missed the point. I am far less qualified to criticize literature than he, but I'm going to do it anyways.
SL5 is about one thing. PTSD. PTSD was not a diagnosis when the book was written, but it is at least clear to me, that the book is about a fractured man trying to repair itself by creating a world view that is comforting to it. His becoming unstuck in time is, in my mind, simply a sci-fi flashback, or perhaps, flash-forward in this case?
"Billy Pilgrim ... “comes unstuck in time” and begins to experience chronology the way Tralfamadorians do, he understands why his captors find comical the notion of free will."
The belief that time is linear is not universal. Another fictional take on 'eternal recurrence' is explored in Ouspensky's 1915 Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.
It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.
The related quote is the one part I remember and thought about most from the book:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. [...] When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
I remember this idea brought to the logical extreme (though I don't remember author's name).
A character gets born, lives, dies, repeatedly, in different circumstances. At one.moment he manages to remember something that a being from outside time tells him between incarnations, in "limbo" / "bardo" type of setting.
All the people in the world is that same character, only transpoted in time. All the worst villains he faces are himself, all the best saints he meets are his (future) selves. This world is entirely by him.
The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.
Abbreviated weeb version: Re:Zero. Also, All you need is Kill. (Aweebrviated?)
It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.
Let's say I implement a huge, immersive, highly emergent video game, where all of the entity states are recorded, but all of the random number generation is constantly seeded by a feed from CloudFlare's lava lamps. I could present the entire history of my toy universe as a single, static 4 dimensional data object. I could even save that data on a 2D surface, then set the archive as a physical object on my mantelpiece. Yet the timeline of every entity in that toy universe wasn't scripted.
In early high school computer programming class (which officially was about programming in a particular language), our teacher didn't just teach that. The class put substantial time into things like history of programming (e.g., Ada Lovelace), and the thing I remember most was that we read and discussed Vonnegut's "Player Piano". In hindsight, that class was formative.
In his seminal book on advanced industrial society, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse makes the case that even many ostensibly democratic nations are, at heart, totalitarian. Totalitarianism, he argues, need not manifest as dystopian wastelands with labor camps, dictatorship, secret police, and all those other Orwellian characteristics: “For ‘totalitarian’ is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”
Player Piano, which purports to be “not a book about what is, but a book about what could be,” is such a totalitarian society – not one organized by terrorism but by economic-technical coordination of vested interests. Its society is one that appears, as its main character Paul Proteus notes, as a “clean, straight rafter,” that, once the surface is scraped away, is rotten to the core.
If going against society results in you losing your job (because your employer doesn't want to deal with bad publicity), losing your home (because you can't make rent/mortgage payments), losing your friends (because anyone who hangs out with a [racist/rapist/fetus-murderer/scammer/person who refuses to sign things they can't read/etc] suffers guilt by association), and possibly starving to death in the street (if you can't convince anyone to charity you some food), then that society is totalitarian, no matter how subtle they are about it.
Current western society isn't nearly that bad[citation needed], but that's neither because it's impossible nor for lack of anyone trying.
It saddens me that this was downvoted, because it's entirely true. It doesn't just apply to LGBT people, though. There are all kinds of minority groups that are treated as second-class citizens in modern Western (and Eastern) cultures.
"You are required to be totally compliant with what (leaders of) society demand, on pain of really bad stuff."
Or: a system where [people, as distinct from bureaucracy, hostile memeplexes, corporations, etc] have virtually no authority and [bureaucracy et/vel al] wields absolute control of every aspect of the country, socially, financially and politically.
What is the power of a person, separate from a group? When there are three hundred million people, how much individual power can there be? Or should there be? The accumulation of power in structures is inevitable.
Moreover, the fact that this is even an open debate suggests that calling the current state of affairs totalitarianism is a bit exaggerated. There are multiple groups currently vying for control of every aspect of life, with no single group having complete control, and people throw in with the one they feel closest to. I don't know what that is, but it doesn't match totalitarianism.
This line of reasoning dilutes the term “totalitarian” too much.
Any given group being intolerant of contrarians is not “totalitarian”, it’s just a group following group instincts. Otherwise you might as well argue that most animals are totalitarian, which is 1) patently absurd and 2) dangerous (since you are effectively arguing that totalitarianism is the natural state of any society).
Totalitarianism is not just about reaction to dissent; it requires a proactive side with structured ideology and a conscious effort to fashion all elements of life (public and private) after such ideology. Whether you really have something like this in Western society, is very debatable. Consumerism might get close, but you can still live and thrive without being a consumer, if you really want, and you won’t be jailed for it.
When you say “subtle totalitarianism”, you are highlighting some elements of Western life that could fit a totalitarian environment, but you are also ignoring all the rest that points in the opposite direction: organised dissent, freedom of expression, tolerance and survival of alternative lifestyles, and so on. This is normal: a lot of sociological constructs are not binary. But you cannot say that a society is totalitarian if it fits only a few of the characteristics of observed totalitarian systems.
I might concede that, after 1990, Western societies have somewhat sleepwalked into something closer to a “totalitarian capitalism” than they were before; but I think we are still far from the excesses of actual totalitarian societies.
These words don’t need to be attached to a state. most private services, even ostensibly serving as public forums, are de facto authoritarian—the authorities just want us to like them. States with monopoly of violence have no such constraints, but we still must live by the dictates of powerful people (often with interests deeply contrary to our own) we have no access to.
The USSR. East Germany. Syria. The Sudan. Pretty sure you haven't lived in any of them. If you've ever been in real oppression, you wouldn't say that western society is legitimate oppression.
If you look around and see poverty and oppression in your own culture/country and your answer is "you should be grateful you're not in [worse country]", then you are part of the problem.
Right-wing seem to like playing this card -- "If you haven't lived in [whatever country we feel to be fundamentally opposed to 'Western' values at the moment] then you have nothing to say on the matter" -- yet I have many, many close contacts from those countries (including quite a few who have had serious run-ins with the authorities in those places), and I can't imagine of them saying that Western societies do not have "legitimate oppression".
If anything what keeps coming up is that it seems strange to them that we think we're all that different from those countries (as if we're on a higher plane, basically).
> Pretty ballsy to proclaim western society and economic coercion as not "legitimate oppression".
Those are 2 claims, in which neither makes sense to me, probably due to a lack of detail. Did they make sense to you when you wrote it?
If it's 'legitimate', are you referencing the oppression of the majority as a proxy for western society?
Economic coercion - The threat or act by a sender government or governments to disrupt economic exchange with the target state, unless the target acquiesces to an articulated demand.
It's possible that 'economic coercion' is now a misnomer, having been used to mean something else specific, initially. I have referenced a definition, for simplicity. Feel free to audit. As it stands, it is not oppression, unless any given demand is supposed to equate to the status of oppression?
You can survive without participating in the economics, it just benefits you more to participate, where lifespan and pleasure is concerned. That isn't coercion any more than checking the material you put in your mouth is biological oppression, it's a linear optimization you're free not to make.
I don't struggle with that concept much; literature and popular usage conditions us to certain meanings and associations of words - when I read Marcuse's book I was actually almost as surprised as you seem to be, though Marcuse goes to pains not to trivialize the situation in those places we would describe as "totalitarian" by the kind of standard outlined in 1984 or by the example of Nazi Germany. Marcuse's point stems from the concept of totality, it's like looking at totalitarianism from the other way round - to me that was extremely refreshing.
Similarly, I think we've made strides in thinking about what oppression means - what allows us to say that those non-"1st-world" places are oppressive but ours are not? Is it a matter of quantity or quality? The language here is not merely hyperbolic (though this feature does remarkably well in being provocative, which is the point of activism - Marcuse was a lifelong activist), it's substantive.
When you appeal to the the "basis of Western society" in your comment, it reads more like normalization - how could such a thing be totalitarian, after all, it's the basis of Western society. That's actually the point I'm making, this basis conditions us to see only the worst examples as totalitarian/oppressive/"bad". The unspoken point seems to be that because it is the basis then we can't describe it as totalitarian. To me, that's not a logical conclusion.
>Marcuse’s engagement with the issue of totalitarianism relies on the understanding of the transformation of reason and for him this transformation is exemplified by the emergence of positivism as the dominant means of making sense of the world. He argues that the totalitarian character of advanced industrial society and its concomitant ‘totalitarian rationality’ (Marcuse 2001 [1961]: 52, 55) have specific, potentially devastating, consequences for the members of that society. Most important here are what Marcuse conceptualizes as ‘matter-of-factness’, ‘psycho-logical neutrality’, and ‘repressive desublimation’.[0]
>In advanced industrial societies, Marcuse says that the unit of production is totalitarian in without it determines the activities, attitudes and skills involved in social life. It defines and regulates also the aspirations and individual needs. Thus, the creation of false needs and control of these needs have corollary the disappearance of the border private / public life: only the consumer remains. It is this unique ontological condition that Marcuse called “undimensionnelle.”
So he's redefining a word with a well-established meaning based on its etymology to say... what, exactly?
These kinds of word games are what turns me off of philosophy. Like the argument that there isn't a multiverse, since "universe" includes everything and would include alternate realities. Congratulations, you know Latin roots. That is all I have learned.
Marcuse's aim wasn't merely to redefine, one of the purposes of his book was to find out how these words came to be defined in industrial society as they are, and how these words (words considered also as what they signify) influence our thought. Marcuse would actually agree with your point here - how is it that these word games came to be defining of the concepts which they signify in modern society?
>I have already referred to the self-validating hypothesis as propositional form in the universe of political discourse. Such nouns as "freedom," "equality," "democracy," and "peace" imply, analytically, a specific set of attributes which occur invariably when the noun is spoken or written. In the West, the analytic predication is in such terms as free enterprise, initiative, elections, individual; in the East in terms of workers and peas-ants, building communism or socialism, abolition of hostile classes. On either side, transgression of the discourse beyond the closed analytical structure is incorrect or propaganda, although the means of enforcing the truth and the degree of punishment are very different. In this universe of public discourse, speech moves in synonyms and tautologies; actually, it never moves toward the qualitative difference.
> "In advanced industrial societies, Marcuse says that the unit of production is totalitarian in without it determines the activities, attitudes and skills involved in social life."
Interesting thread, and worthwhile commentary, mostly improved by your post -- but this one sentence is kind of a trainwreck. By "without" did you mean "that"?
We don't describe it as totalitarian or oppression because, by looking around the world, we've seen real oppression and totalitarianism, and they weren't just an economic system. I mean, look at the Uighurs in China. That's oppression.
Note well: I am not saying that the economic system does not have its oppressive aspects. I am not saying that those aspects should not be improved. But I am saying that calling it totalitarian is cheapening the word "totalitarian". There's real things that the word applies to, and stretching it to apply to the economic system may help make your point, but it also hides the difference between the economic system and real totalitarianism. And there is a real, massive difference, which needs to not be swept under the rug of rhetoric.
(Also, positivism is dead as the dominant means of making sense of the world.)
>by looking around the world, we've seen real oppression and totalitarianism, and they weren't just an economic system
This just dances around the core question, though: you say we've seen "real" totalitarianism, but by what do you judge that standard other than the uncritical ideological framework that's most common? Of course the treatment of the Uighurs is totalitarian, but that says little about what is and isn't totalitarian. Marcuse's claim isn't that "economic system" totalitarianism is the only kind, he's saying that the limiting of the concept in today's world is a result of technological and instrumental rationality, just as is the limiting of various other concepts - we conceive of totality, freedom, peace etc. within our rationalities, but Marcuse is saying that our very conception of what is rational changes in the advanced industrial age just as it changed in past ages more obviously (e.g the early Rennaisance moral opposition to a tradesman collecting profit other than by remuneration for his work of doing the transport).
>But I am saying that calling it totalitarian is cheapening the word "totalitarian".
Why couldn't it be the opposite - that the limited construction of the folk (generally uncritical) concept of totalitarianism is a restriction which works well to serve the interests of advanced industrial society?
>And there is a real, massive difference, which needs to not be swept under the rug of rhetoric.
Marcuse (nor any of his followers) argue that the forms of totalitarianism are qualitatively the same - in fact to do so would be self-defeating, because they want to draw a distinction between folk concepts of totalitarianism and critical concepts - and that is only possibly by accepting there is a difference between, for instance, the treatment of the Uighurs and economic totalitarianism.
>Also, positivism is dead as the dominant means of making sense of the world
Marcuse is not strictly referring to philosophical logical positivism, since even by the time he was writing this application of the concept was waning - he is reacting against the "positivist" sociology which was dominant at the time (and some scholars would argue still is). The dispute (the "Positivism Dispute") refers to the debate over the notion of "historicism" and in particular revolves around Karl Popper's criticisms of critical theory methodology.
I loved the book when I read it as youngster. Now .. it's faded a bit.
A little factoid I found interesting -- Vonnegut was inspired in part to write it by the holocaust denier David Irving's book "The Destruction of Dresden"
> "Vonnegut helped perpetuate that myth and spread this form of denial. He probably did so initially unwittingly. But since the publication of that book enough has been written to show this is not true and he could have corrected it has he been so inclined"
What historians try to do that? Are they respected in their field? And are you sure about their intentions? Are they trying to minimize casualties, or just trying to find an accurate number(which may be smaller than reported casualties).
Curtis Lemay, who was the man in charge of the firebombing of Japan had no questions in his mind on the morality of the operation.
> Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.
- On the morality of the firebombing campaign
And also:
> There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders. [0]
I would imagine that this is the same logic that modern terrorists(not only Islamic) use to justify their killing of civilians. Aka, collective responsibility.[1]
Putting aside our disagreements on the moral equivalency of the Axis and the Allies; it is simply factual incorrect to claim that Dresden was done before any bombings on allied cities. The Blitz happened in 1940.
>it is simply factual incorrect to claim that Dresden was done before any bombings on allied cities. The Blitz happened in 1940.
I did not claim that. I stated the objective and indisputable fact that England began deliberately burning women and children alive before Germany started bombing British civilians. The British terror campaign against German civilians began on 11 May 1940. The first German retaliation in kind was 4 September 1940.
This is a bad comment on multiple levels. It's factually incorrect: a LOT of bombs were dropped on the UK, and knowing that seems like a pretty low bar to having any opinion on the topic.
But beyond that, it's obviously ludicrous to reductively say "between bad guys and bad guys" and simultaneously complain that people don't want nuance.
>It's factually incorrect: a LOT of bombs were dropped on the UK
Yes. After we started firebombing German civilians. I didn't say Germany did not bomb civilians, I said England (the supposed "good guys") did it first.
How amazingly reductive. Citizens are not governments.
I wonder how you'd feel if you or a family member endured a horrible death by firestorm due to the machinations of a government which happens to rule the nation in which you currently reside?
If the Nazis did not want to be bombed, they should not have picked a fight with the 2 superpowers (UK, US) who had heavy bombers when they had none.
I know someone who survived Dresden, and what those people went through was terrible. However, it was an inevitable consequence of stopping an ideological movement that did not value humanity in the least. When you hear people touting their ideology and how they can't respect people's rights because they're trying to achieve a greater good - watch out.
Please now explain why exploding nuclear bombs to mass murder civilians were really necessary and also why it was necessary as a demonstration of power instead of doing something like exploding Mount Fuji.
A fanciful idea indeed. It's exactly this kind of thinking that got us into war by convincing Yamamoto that we'd be a push over because we did not have the stomach for war. War is terrible. We didn't want it. We were staying out of it despite the mass atrocities of Japan and Germany. But when it was forced on us we fought it and used the weapons at our disposal. No regrets here.
Sure - it was necessary to insure the unconditional surrender of Japan, as opposed to the conditional surrender they were trying to negotiate. Sources:
I think it is generally agreed that the Dresden bombing had little strategic impact, so I would do a little more reading on the subject before you go claim that it was a necessity to stop the Nazis. Unless you think vindictively bombing a civilian population as revenge is justifiable.
I understand that it was always going to be immoral to fire bomb Dresden but the wind on that day whipped up the fires considerably and the extremity of the outcome was due to chance rather than vindictiveness. Of course I think if they’d have known the outcome of course they would have done it anyway.
Or maybe some of them considered the wind fortuitous. I wouldn't be surprised. But then, I'm not a huge fan of war. In fiction, sure. The bloodier, the better. But not in reality, where so many die to make points.
Given the brutal efficiency of the Nazis in their conquest, occupation and genocide, I have little problem justifying means of inflicting damage on any significant source of support until the threat is completely neutralized. They were desperate times, and destroying the enemy's will to continue fighting is an integral part of warfare.
The Battle for Britain had just shown that "destroying the enemy's will" was not an effective strategy, something that has been verified several more times since. The acts were absolutely abhorrent, and the nicest way to describe them is "not quite as bad as the Nazis."
Or the Germans' failure showed they were incapable of carrying out the strategy. I find it easy to criticize the acts as abhorrent without the threat of Nazi rule over your head.
There was quite a bit if data showing that the strategy was not effective, the decision to attack the "will of the people" over military targets was made for callous reasons like revenge. There are no circumstances that make the act less abhorrent, we should have realized it then and not committed similar acts.
[Harrison Starr] raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were
as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
Well good news for humanity. We're well on our way to stopping glaciers, so maybe we can stop war after all.
Soon after stopping glaciers will come stopping technological human civilization. Maybe that won't stop war, but it'll reduce scale considerably. So it goes.
http://kurtvonnegut-tour.com/