In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
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Please. Given some of the activities in the news recently of actual police, this comment goes beyond silly.
As I said in a recent comment, I have easy and inexpensive access to a wider variety of recorded, downloadable, streamable, and live classical music than ever before in my 40+ years as a listener.
I understand that you are deeply unhappy about some of the means and mechanisms, but the reality is as I've stated it.
And wouldn't it be wonderful if the music humour police could be persuaded to hibernate as well?