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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(from Peter Brown's wonderful 'World of Late Antiquity')
For 'crude Christian monotheism' read fundamentalist Islam in our own times.
b.
'A Coptic priest was shot dead Saturday on al-Sentral Street in the North Sinai neighbourhood of al-Masaeed.
Gunmen shot dead a Coptic Christian priest in Egypt's lawless region in the third recorded instance of sectarian violence against Christians since President Mohamed Morsy was ousted.
The shooting in the coastal city of Arish was one of several attacks believed to be by Islamist insurgents that included firing at four military checkpoints in the region, the sources said.
A security source said Saturday that gunmen riding a motorcycle shot dead the priest, named as 39-year-old Mena Aboud Sharoben, who lived in Arish.
The source added the motivations behind the murder were not known.
Maspero Youth Union meanwhile denounced what they identified as Muslim Brotherhood attacks on churches, claiming sectarian attacks aimed at hurting the revolution and undermining people's demands for freedom.
"The president's supporters attacked [the] churches in Luxor, Qena, Minya, Towa, Sharm el-Sheikh and Marsa Matrouh," the statement said.
"We say to them, tear down all the churches, it is not going to stop us from building Egypt...We will use the stones of our churches to build our homeland."
The attack comes one day after unidentified gunmen launched simultaneous attacks with heavy weapons on security checkpoints in North Sinai, killing five police officers and a soldier, Reuters reported.
Morsy's Muslim Brotherhood has fiercely criticized Coptic Pope Tawadros II, the spiritual leader of Egypt's eight million Christians, for giving his blessing to the removal of the president and attending the announcement by armed forces commander General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi suspending the constitution'.
'http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/update-coptic-priest-killed-activists-blame-mb-sectarianism