US author lauds suicide bombers

The Weekend Australian ^ | 11/19/05 | Kurt Vonnegut

[TheBattman]

One of the greatest living US writers??? By WHO'S standards???

Ugh....

[BlazingArizona]

When news like this comes out, it's easy for us to forget that Vonnegut once wrote one of the short stories most beloved by conservatives (it was in National Review at the time), "Harrison Bergeron": 'It was the year 2050, and everybody was finally equal...'.

[Steel Wolf]

What a sadly romantic notion Vonnegut has of suicide bombers.

The foreigners used in suicide bombings are screened for what we would call 'emotional problems' in the West by the mosque based-recruiters in North Africa and in Saudi. Well adjusted persons are weeded out immediately. Then, the process starts.

They must pay off the handlers along the way to Iraq, often at exorbitant rates. They must accept forced confinement, and surrender to a barrage of cult like propaganda to 'prime' them for suicide. They basically live as caged animals until their handlers select targets for them, and are not allowed to question their orders.

Many who thought they were going to become martyrs fighting the American invaders find themselves being directed towards mosques, markets, and schools.

The handlers know this will cause many of them to change their minds. To counter this, they install fail safe switches to remote detonate in case the driver has a change of heart. They often will distribute hard narcotics like heroin a day or two prior, and keep them 'high' under what is allegedly a religious bliss.

Also, exploitation of the wreckage has shown that many suicide bombers were handcuffed to the wheel of their car.

Of the native Iraqi suicide bombers, most are mentally handicapped, and many are outright tricked into driving a vehicle. (They tend to be pretty ineffective)

In all fairness, a few genuine religious fanatics do put on the vest and follow through. Every now and then a senior leader will detonate himself in order to prevent his own capture. Abu Musab al Zarqawi himself is rumored to wear such a vest, and the rumor is likely true. Still, they are a small minority of the grand total.

The suicide bomber industry is a scam. The sadly unstable volunteers are manipulated, robbed, lied to, drugged, and killed. Their last moments are filmed, and uploaded to jihadist websites to be used as recruiting tools.

How many men have died while parked in front of mosques, awaiting 'further orders', never knowing that the mosque was their target? Where is the nobility in that, Mr Vonnegut?

[AndrewB]

This author is only known for writing Slaughterhouse 5 because your hippy teachers made you read it in eighth grade.

Too true. Everyone I know read Vonnegut only in high school.

[WorkingClassFilth]

I think Vonnegut's bad chemicals have won the day in his steadily aging brain.

[The Great RJ]

I hardly think that slamming planes full of innocent men, women and children into two office towers, or detonating a nail studded backpack bomb in a crowed subway to be in anyway honorable acts. At age 83 perhaps Vonnegut can claim senility as the basis for such rash statements.

[Steel Wolf]

Vonnegut's writing, on the whole, is a pedestrian sixties' mixture of countercultural elitism and disrespect for mainsteam culture (look at his view of the common man gathering in "granfalloons"), and the obligatory anti-war anti-authority dreck. His occasionally creative notions (ice nine, eg) are mildly amusing but once read are hardly worth the candle. But he became one of the Annointed Ones after S-5 and that was that.

A number of people that I worked with used to have an office pool of books that we'd rotate through. We spent about three months on Vonnegut books, and really enjoyed them. Slaughterhouse Five was one of his weakest books, though. We never really understood the hype. None of us were around in the 60s, so maybe we missed out on why it caught on.

It is ironic that he should whine now about people protecting their cultures when he himself had taken a whack at debasing the very culture that gave him his life and opportunity.

That's just par for the course. Part of being liberal means becoming inable to see evil outside of your own culture, or good within it. I've yet to meet a single liberal with a real sense of perspective. They are often right on certain details, and focus on those details to the point where seeing the big picture is impossible.

[NickatNite2003]

Everything is better than the American culture...Hi ho...

[carumba]

a grand old man of American letters.

Change letters to liter...litter...bitter...Swiss cheese. And you might be on to something.

[Savage Beast]

"But Vonnegut's latest comments are likely to make many people wonder if old age has finally caught up with..."

Of no matter--the Left will love them.

[Sam Cree]

I'm proud never to have read a Vonnegut book. Back in college days (late 60's - early 70's) the folk I knew who read the stuff sounded kind of pompous when explaining how great it was. The few pages I glanced through struck me as self important and needlessly gimmicky.

Anyway, Vonnegut is clearly an a$$hole. What a jerk.

[DUMBGRUNT]

Read and profit.

Harrison Bergeron

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html

[Sam Cree]

Nice little story, I agree with its point, I'm perplexed. It appears that Vonnegut is either not a leftist, or is a leftist who despises equality? I wouldn't be averse if you'd explain that to me, if you've a mind.

Also, I'd like to hear some justification for the above article.

[AmericanChef]

-On the Iraq war, he said: "What George Bush and his gang did not realise was that people fight back."-

Um...what Vonneglut doesn't realize is that AMERICA is fighting back, duh. Why doesn't he go to Syria and open up a self-esteem clinic?

*sigh* Another stoopit intellectual speaks.

[DUMBGRUNT]

Appears to be a stand up guy with a great sense of humor, most unusual for a avowed socialist?
Yes I did see that his son had a breakdown.

"About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.:
Kurt Vonnegut.

http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:r-fy6Mvah-kJ:www.corante.com/mooreslore/archives/003669.html+Kurt+Vonnegut++drugs&hl=en&ie=UTF-8


Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

- Kurt Vonnegut,

If you really want to upset your parents, and you are not brave enough to be gay, go into the arts!

- Kurt Vonnegut,

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

- Kurt Vonnegut,



If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

- Kurt Vonnegut,



The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

- Kurt Vonnegut,

http://quotes.prolix.nu/Authors/?Kurt_Vonnegut


Kurt Vonnegut has six children (three of his own and three adopted). Two of these children have published books, including his only son, Mark Vonnegut, who wrote The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery; the tendency to insanity he acknowledged may be partly hereditary, influencing him to take up the study of medicine and orthomolecular psychiatry. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint..

Vonnegut's three adopted children are his nephews: James, Steven and Kurt Adams. They were adopted after a traumatic twenty-four-hour period, in which their father's commuter train went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey and their mother, Kurt's sister Alice, died of cancer. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama as an infant.

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?sm1=S3VydCBWb25uZWd1dCAg&fw=-1&fc=-1&ss=0&es=0&gwp=11&ver=1.0.2.84&method=1

[Sam Cree]

Appears to be a stand up guy with a great sense of humor, most unusual for a avowed socialist?>

After reading the stuff you posted, I pretty much agree with that assessment. Change of heart on my part maybe. Still, this kind of stuff keeps my respect level way down: "he wrote that the US was hated around the world "because our corporations have been the principal deliverers and imposers of new technologies and economic schemes that have wrecked the self-respect, the cultures of men, women and children in so many other societies."

The above comment puts me to mind of a remark by Jane Goodall, that "we (meaning the West) are to blame for the suffering in Africa." I guess you could say we are to blame because we introduced them to modern civilization. Without it I'm sure Africans would still be leading traditional tribal lives without the ability to enhance violence through modern technology. But I doubt many of them would choose to give up the modern stuff they have. But I'm not sure exactly how Jane meant the remark, and if Vonnegut meant it the same way.

Also remembered that I have an avowed socialist fishing buddy. Naturally, a retired college prof. But a truly nice individual in spite of it. Though I'm not convinced that he truly understands socialism after more than 10 years of friendly arguments with the guy.