Vonnegut on War, Christianity, and Socialism.
- The first casualty of war is truth.1
- The truth continues to die after the war. There are plenty of truths to kill.2
- Any president is going to feel he needs to compete for time on TV and so what he’s [Bush] going to entertain us with is what I call Republican superbowl played by the lower classes with live ammunition.2
- Religion is the opiate of the masses.3
- He [Marx] said it at a time when opium was the only pain killer. You took it for a tootache. … He might have said religion was the aspirin of the people.2
- There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, now I can’t.2
Kurt Vonnegut [1922-2007] was an infantryman in World War II. Captured at the Battle of the Bulge, he was sent to a P.O.W. camp in Dresden in time to witness the city’s firebombing from the relative safety of an underground meat locker [Schlachthof 5 : Slaughterhouse 5]. The devastation was greater than Nagasaki. Vonnegut thinks the there were 135,000 dead, but only 35,000 are reported now.
He voted socialist and found no conflict with his Christianity.
A personal reminiscence by Berkoblogger j.
1Senator Hiram Johnson 1918a
2Kurt Vonnegut In Conversation an interview with David Barsamian of Alternative Radio.Currently [for the next two weeks] available for free from KEXP in Seattle from their streaming archive page. Use the “Listen by Time” Dropdowns for Sun, April 15, 2007, 7:00 am. [You can buy it anytime from the Alternative Radio website.]
3Karl Marx
aAccording to Joy from Doha Qatar, et.al.,precursors may have gone back as far as Αἰσχύλος [a.k.a Aeschylus].
