[D]iscussing his views with The Weekend Australian, Vonnegut said it was "sweet and honourable" to die for what you believe in, and rejected the idea that terrorists were motivated by twisted religious beliefs.Proving again they're not anti-war; they just hate the United States. Under the banner of peace and pacifism, they cheer the enemy and wish us dead. Mere critique isn't the question; and they're well past appeasement. Rather, Vonnegut joins Code Pink, Ted Rall and Michael Moore as unpatriotic and anti-American.
"They are dying for their own self-respect," he said. "It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's like your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing."
Asked if he thought of terrorists as soldiers, Vonnegut, a decorated World War II veteran, said: "I regard them as very brave people, yes."
He equated the actions of suicide bombers with US president Harry Truman's 1945 decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
On the Iraq war, he said: "What George Bush and his gang did not realise was that people fight back."
Vonnegut suggested suicide bombers must feel an "amazing high". He said: "You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation - it must be an amazing high."
Vonnegut's comments are sharply at odds with his reputation as a peace activist and his distinguished war service.
More:
Michael Yon's got photos of Iraqis gone missing from the MSM.
(via Best of the Web, My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy)
13 comments:
This is really too bad. Vonnegut is (was?) a great writer, but clearly he's now totally lacking a compass or rudder as to any kind of enduring truth or even common sense. Moral equivalence is a pretty sick thing up close.
I already wrote about this elsewhere. I'm going to just replicate it here --
Kurt Vonnegut is a complete idiot.
> http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17293730%5E601,00.html
> ONE of the greatest living US writers has praised terrorists as "very brave people" and used drug culture slang to describe the "amazing high" suicide bombers must feel before blowing themselves up.
and
> Vonnegut suggested suicide bombers must feel an "amazing high". He said: "You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation - it must be an amazing high."
…Demonstrating what an
------****incredibly****------
--------ignorant twit-------
Vonnegut *really* is --
From Michael Yon's column (start at "Day 17"):
Many things are well-known here in Iraq but seldom, if ever, mentioned in the news. For example, Jihadist bombers are notorious for engaging in debauchery on a stag party scale the eve of their "holy mission." The modus operandi for their crime against humanity is to get drugged up and thoroughly drunk the night before, lay up with a prostitute and then start the countdown on their souls by turning themselves into bomb delivery devices which explode while they are still high on drugs.
(there is plenty more there!)
If they are "high" it's because it takes that to get them to do something as insane as blowing themselves up, despite their religious fervor (and even there, sometimes it's only the fact that they will be killed outright if they fail to do it themselves!)
QED -- Vonnegut is an ignorant fool at best spouting off on things he knows utterly nothing of.
Frankly, he hasn't written a thing worth a damned since Report on the Barnhouse Effect
KB:
Amazing how rapid the road between "pay any price, bear any burden" to "Bush = Hitler." In only 40 years, the left transformed from internationalist to isolationists.
Face it. Your crummy house of cards is tumbling. ANY dissent from Cheney's canned speech is treason. Kurt Vonnegut is, how did you put it? A "pro-terrorist cabal conspirator"?
Yes, that's it.
Kurt Vonnegut hates America!
You boys are going on firesale. You see it, right?
Nick:
I'm a big fan of "Barnhouse," but don't forget "EPICAC," and "Harrison Bergeron."
> The question is still relevent today. "Why do the Left hate Iraqis?"
You might as well ask why they hate blacks so much they want to condemn them to a life of government slavery.
Or why they hate America so much they want to condemn their children to dhimmitude at best...
See a pattern, yet?
They hate.
It's a projection of their own self-hatred. That's why old anonymous Phil up there doesn't actually dispute anything, he just posts boilerplate and repeats it or echoes it -- he's too consumed by hate to actually manage to accomplish anything one would call "reason" -- and besides, reason is anathema to hatred. If he reasoned, he'd be unable to continue hating (at least others)... so he avoids it like the plague.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I`d like to know how you all define Anti-American and unpatriotic; that seems to be the crux of what Carl has raised.
Mihn-Duc: It cost our nation over 50,000 lives fighting YOUR civil war.
Now, we are trading with our former enemies.
Has it occurred to you that we were propping up a corrupt dictatorship in preference to another corrupt dictatorship, and that the latter turned out to be more popular than the former?
Just wondering ...
Anyway, all I want to say is fuck you and your hangdog "hate the Iraqis" line of shit, pal.
The Iraqis had a choice and made it. They are perfectly content to house and protect anyone intent upon killing our troops. Just as the Vietnamese, your countrymen, did to us.
Assistant Village Idiot, so aptly named, a double-fuck-you for apologizing to ANY FUCKING VIETNAMESE whining about how not letting more of OUR PEOPLE get wiped out in HIS lost cause brings shame upon our nation.
You right-wing chickenhawks have the deliberative power of gnats.
Unless, of course, the containment of communism was in our interest, and we didn't head for Vietnam for exclusively altruistic reasons.
Just a thought.
I'm sorry Mihn-Duc had to get that kind of ass-backwards answer.
Dirt, So am I.
Minh-Duc: It's a good question; I'd like to suggest a broader one. I'm not sure they hate Iraqis. I'm sure they never bother to know or listen to Iraqis--or most anyone else. No longer JFK-type internationalists, lefties confine themselves to the cocktail parties and newspapers with which they already agree. With terrorism out of sight and mind, they presume America's greatest challenge is increasing funding for "Head Start." Communism, if considered at all, brings fond memories of Pete Seeger singing at socialist summer camps.
Minh-Duc and other Vietnamese in the West suffer from simplified lefty history--it's all America's fault; Communism wasn't too bad; anti-Communists were all McCarthy-ites; and wrong as well. What Blue States have forgotten -- liquidation of Kulaks 1927-35, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Articles 2, 3, and 9-15 of the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam 1973, Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, etc -- vastly outweighs what they know.
The late Michael Kelly detested Americans who retained their socialist ideology long after the Soviet Union crumbled:
"At some point it becomes a seriously immoral act to refuse to acknowledge the truth. At some point, you have to ask whether it is morally acceptable to regard those who yet refuse to come to terms with communism other than as people who have chosen to adhere to known evil. And that point has been long passed."
Three-thousand vaporized victims wasn't enough to teach the left to recognize, much less confront, evil. Whether the issue is continued communism in Vietnam or illiberal Islam, I fear it's too late for them to learn.
What is happening here is this: Vonnegut's remarks are being misconstrued entirely. He is not venerating terrorists or their actions, but rather addressing the issue from a vantage point that most of us are quite uncomfortable acknowledging:
It doesn't matter who you are or what you believe, it takes courage to lay your life down for your principles.
Anyone familiar with the human body's natural "drug", adrenaline, would be hard-pressed to make the argument that radical Islamists are somehow deficient in this chemical, the source of the "natural high" Vonnegut speaks of.
Vonnegut is simply addressing these radicals, killers though they may be, as human beings. There is nothing in that passage to give a rational person cause to believe that Vonnegut sympathizes with their motives, but rather that he is attempting to understand fellow human beings and what makes them capable of their actions. Please do not let one passage, taken entirely out of context, distort your view of a man who is actually exercising some critical thinking skills.
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