Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I picked up a random book by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., expecting a science-fiction type of story, but instead got a book about war.
I never liked books or movies about war, they glorify it by telling stories of heroes and their gallantry, whereas the dead sidekicks and other collateral damages barely constitute an afterthought.
I’d hate to be such a sidekick, and hate it even more if I were such a hero.
War is so ridiculously pointless and painful, and it always happens because somehow people are lead to think that wars can solve problems. I’m not a student of history or of the human psyche, but it seems to me that at every chance where an in-group/out-group distinction can be made, someone will inevitably feel the need to assert the superiority of their own group identity, by launching wars of some form. What’s especially sad is most often people never actually try to get to know know the other side, the human beings they are trying to persecute.
I also just realised that I’ve read a lot more stories about WW2 from the perspective of Europeans and Americans than stories from Asia-Pacific, even though the war there lasted longer and is no less gruesome.
I can’t recall any Chinese book that tries to combine personal experience of the war with some elements of fiction (I’m sure they exist, but just somehow never crossed my path), or any other book that tries to uncover the futility of war. Maybe at that point in China wars of different shapes and forms had been going on for too long and desensitised the people living through them. Also I think part of the reason is there was never any serious, deep-level reconciliation between China and Japan, and on the other hand the current government in China is more than happy to exploit this piece of history for their “patriotic education”.
I’ve also never explored Korean or south-east Asian literatures so I know very little about what happened there. And I also don’t know how Japan as a country feels about that period, but maybe these books can shed some light - I’ll read them later: