Sheep graze in front of the ruins of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) on Sept. 13, 1957, in Dresden. Richard Peter

Slaughterhouse-Five [...] contained the phrase that became most closely associated with him and that could most fittingly serve as his epitaph: 'So it goes.' The words recur throughout the book each time a death is recorded and what they imply lies at the centre of any understanding of Vonnegut's work: fatalism, stoicism and the acceptance that no use will come of shrinking away when the worst has happened. Questioned repeatedly over the decades about whether he thought Dresden should have been bombed, Vonnegut's most significant response was that it had been bombed; the question for him was how one behaved after that.

  —  Kurt Vonnegut: So it goes

The destruction in Dresden in WW2 bombings.

a lot of my free time is spent listening to a podcast run and researched by a professor of genocide studies who went into those studies specifically bc in an attempt to escape the violence of his angry, alcoholic father he signed up to go off to war in afghanistan only to realize that the whole war and war in general is a) stupid & boring and b) a series of horrific war crimes that had made the civilian population deeply suspicious of him even tho His Morals Were In The Right Place (tm). when he got home and threw himself into being anti violence, joining anarchist orgs & studying theory & trying to understand why he was sent to the other side of the world to be traumatized for no good reason while traumatizing the local population with his very presence, his shithead father died & he found out that his father was Like That bc their family was chased out of armenia because of genocide and it kicked off a cycle of violence & anger in the men of his family. he absolutely lost his shit, got his degree in genocide studies, and moved to armenia (do not ask me how he convinced his wife to do this with him. he’s really open about every other aspect of his life except his wife and kids which is imo very valid).

all that to say, he has this interesting perspective of war in that he has this cultural trauma of being the victim of a horrific crime while also himself being the perpetrator of imperialism & serving in an area that had recently been the site of several horrific war crimes (really similar to tim o’brien, who served in my lai several months after the massacre but didn’t know the massacre had happened & pieced together what happened from the horrified whispers of the civilians & brags from soldiers). it makes him both hyper critical of soldiers who do terrible things & empathetic to soldiers who are forced from home to do terrible things & angry on behalf of civilians who are victims of war crimes. i have ragged on him for being Very Midwestern about certain things but his research is interesting & sad & well done, & it’s really made me think about my own place in The Greater World & every time the internet loses its mind over some aspect of history i am violently reminded that most people just look at history and go “but MY SIDE was justified actually” when that’s such a BABY IDEA OF HOW HISTORY AND WAR WORKS.

I Feel that it's very funny that The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and Dune are such wildly different takes on the universe, and yet are all a product of the same generation of white American sci fi writers. Like, "Hey what flavour do you want your future to be? Spooky, Utopian or Cocaine-knife-fight?"

this, aftr israeli officials call for gaza to be bombed like dresden

watching a ww2 documentary while looking at sheep figurines

Really struggling to comprehend using the bombing of Dresden as a defence of anything

Shut up about the bombing of Dresden I swear to GOD!!!!!!

Nächster Tatort aus Dresden ist erst am 5. November, aber immerhin schonmal ein paar Fotos 🫠

“I didn’t know of a sound that could possibly frighten me more until I heard three slow knocks on the door. 

It was such an ordinary, everyday sound that was so viscerally wrong in that moment that we all collectively froze. We looked at each other to make sure we weren’t imagining things, having some shared hallucination. It wasn’t debris, and it certainly wasn’t a bomb—it was a human knock, and a polite one at that, as though someone had come to visit for afternoon tea. 

No, it was impossible that someone was alive out there, exposed to the firestorm… but it was that impossibility that made me rise to my feet and cautiously approach the door. I ignored the cries of protest from the others and, holding the wet towel against my nose and mouth, threw it open.

First, the powerful winds blew toxic, blistering air inside, full of poison and ash and death. As I grasped the door frame and looked out, I didn’t see anyone at first—just the flames of white and yellow licking the nearby buildings that threatened to melt the very skin from my exposed flesh—but then I looked down.

I reckon this is where my memory will be dismissed as the mad, traumatized hallucinations of a man trapped in an inferno, but madness or not, this was what I saw. I would never lie to you, I swear I would never lie. 

Enormous black wings flickered into view. They were set ablaze, burning down to the bones. As they fell limp once more, they disintegrated completely into ash and embers that blew away into the firestorm. I saw, then, what these wings had been attached to: someone in a flight suit was crawling, reaching, into the open door at my feet. There was a great flaming tear in his flight suit that exposed his melting human flesh. He looked up at me, a head completely covered by a helmet, broken goggles, and an oxygen mask, its tube severed and whipping in the wind. Instinctually, I took hold of his flight suit with both hands and hurled him inside, closing us all inside once more.”

-Staying Aloft, “Prologue”

happy pride!! you found out you're not the only gay cousin and your other gay cousin is dragging you to the pride parade in the most homophobic part of the country. love is love ig

A lot of folks' idea of fighting fascism is making sure the silent majority is never held accountable. Is this effective?

Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits: the altar in the Fraeuenkirche, Altstadt, Dresden, Germany. 

Now restored and looking fabulous.

It was utterly destroyed in the bombing of Dresden, February 13-15th, 1945. 

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Dresden and the Technology of Mass Destruction       

The bombing of Dresden on February 13, 14, and 14 of 1945 was the most devastating air raid in Europe, and among the worst of the Second World War. In this episode I discuss the application of scientific and technological reason to the technologies of mass destruction, yielding what Karl Jaspers called the New Fact of history, and what Edith Wyschogrod called man made mass death. In my discussion I touch on questions such as: What are the limits of historical parallels? Can we define the appearance of absolute novelty in history? 

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:              https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:      http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Podcast:           https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nick-nielsen94/episodes/Dresden-and-the-Technology-of-Mass-Destruction-e2fp0oo

Dresden

Between February 13 and 15 there were 4 raids on Dresden. The Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden was carried out by the British Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force (USAAF) in four phases from the night of February 13 to 15, 1945. The photographs in this blog were taken by Karl Rauscher. He was part of the , the Luftwaffe. Specifically from the so-called Werftabteilung;…

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