The Israel-Gaza Conflict Isn’t “Genocide.” It’s War.
In light of recent campus protests, we need to look beyond labels and unravel the history of combat
On December 22, 1944, the late American writer and satirist, Kurt Vonnegut, was captured as a prisoner of war (POW) during the Battle of the Bulge. The Nazis transferred him and about 50 other Americans to the city of Dresden, a German city center of European culture and Baroque splendor. The town had been relatively unaffected by World War II, and Vonnegut recalled Dresden had “very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories.”
As a POW, Vonnegut lived in a slaughterhouse and was put to work in a factory. But on February 13, 1945, as air raid sirens wailed, guards moved him and the other prisoners to a meat locker two stories underground. Two days later, Vonnegut emerged from the bombing. More than 90% of Dresden’s city center had been wiped off the face of the earth by Allied Forces. “When we came up the city was gone …” Vonnegut recalled. “They burnt the whole damn town down.”
After the bombing, Vonnegut and other American POWs removed bodies from the rubble, which involved excavating some of the 25,000 civilians killed in the attack. Vonnegut would become a pacifist and…
