I didn't mean you offense personally. I'm sorry you took it that way. My umbrage is entirely with the article and, after browsing other articles by the same author, with the tendency for well-meaning Vonnegut fans to turn Valentine's Day into "International Be Kind to Nazis Day."

See, I see some article or other about Dresden and how horrible it was about this time every year. The check boxes:

- "Did you know?"

- "Center of history and art"

- "Questionable 'strategic' value" (these articles always confuse strategy and tactics)

- "Of course Nazis are bad, but..."

Yet I haven't seen an article on the anniversary of Kristallnacht since 1988. I never see anything on the Rape of Nanking. I never see anything on the Bataan Death March. I rarely even see anything on D-Day anymore, yet every year like clockwork, somebody posts "did you know we bombed Dresden today in history?" without acknowledging that it was a three-day campaign. Even Wikipedia acknowledges that people who don't otherwise give a shit about WWII have a hard-on for Dresden:

Post-war discussion of whether or not the attacks were justified has led to the bombing becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war... The casualty figures are now considered to be lower than those from the firebombing of some other Axis cities; see Tokyo 9–10 March 1945, approximately 100,000 dead, and Hamburg July 1943, approximately 50,000 dead.

I can even tell you why this is. History is taught from whatever perspective is necessary to reinforce the status quo, and the status quo is "we're all friends now, mistakes were made, no one is entirely to blame for WWII." More importantly, English teachers like to throw Vonnegut some time between 8th and 11th grade because they know he'll be well received, while History teachers get about a week to cover WWII and it's generally the last two weeks of senior year. So most people have a fuzzy History Channel-shaped conception of WWII in general but a Vonnegut-flavored perception of Dresden in particular.

Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden. He went into a meat freezer in a beautiful city and came out three days later to see a ruin. It was obviously a formative experience on him, as it would be on anyone. But there are a whole bunch of dead people who can't share their "formative experiences" with you and nobody drags them out of the closet every year to get back at their parents.

This shit isn't academic, either: There are active Nazi parties in Greece right now, winning seats in Parliament. Anti-semitism is a real thing in France. And those boxcars were for me. If I'd lived in Frankfurt in 1938 and had no way of getting out, I'd be in Bergen-Belsen by 1942. And I've never so much as been inside a synagogue.

You brought up Dresden yesterday because you read an article about Dresden because some dipshit always writes an article about Dresden for publication February 13. Those dipshits usually use language like this:

Prior to the Nazi’s rise to power, Jewish history in Germany had been chequered with alternating periods of success and victimisation. Stretches of relative tolerance by those in power allowed the community to prosper and caused its numbers to grow with immigration — often due to mistreatment in other parts of Europe.

Do you like how "relative success" means "weren't actively being exterminated all the time?" It allows us to put forth the idea that things were hunky-dory for the Jews until that nasty Adolph fellow showed up and pulled the wool over everyone's eyes.

But it's bullshit. The United States has plenty of problems with racism, but at least we argue about our problems with racism. For most of Europe, even now, It's just a thing.

There was a post on here a week or so ago about how we logically blame the victim so we can feel better about a world full of violence. One in four Britons thinking Jews are greedy goes a long way towards making concentration camps less horrible. Yet it doesn't work the other way because we've had it drilled into our heads that the Nazis were evil, so our knee-jerk response is "well, maybe they weren't the only evil ones."

Yes. They were. Overwhelmingly so.

I posted

1) Five sarcastic words

2) one epithet

3) A picture of a V2 majestically rising in flight

4) An artistic picture of shoes

5) Big Ben defiantly rising above the rubble

Yet I'm the bad guy here because I dare to not feel bad about the bombing of a Nazi city during the desperation stage of the end of WWII.

And that's deeply fucked up, but I totally understand it, and I know of no way to have this discussion in such a way that people listen without a little shock'n'awe of my own.

So that's what I do.