Cruelty In Slaughterhouse Five

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Humanity’s innate cruelty results from scarcity as scarcity does not allow for everyone to have everything they want, thus people must make compromises which leads to conflict and thus cruelty towards other people. World War II remains in human history as the epitome of human conflict where all nations came together to fight over scarce resources, leading to several cruel stains in human history, including the Holocaust, The Rape of Nanking, and the bombing of Dresden, throughout World War I countless individuals lost their lives for the motivations of those who controlled the Ally and Axis countries. These lost lives were brushed away as a necessity of war and thus forgotten in the tides of time - all because of countries logically prioritizing …show more content…

The bombing of Dresden, a cruel act where 100,000 civilians were lost, resulted from comparing the opportunity cost of sacrificing civilian lives to potential Ally losses, which displays the flaws of logic when making decisions in the senselessness of war (Spiegel). Although General Eaker “deeply regret[s]... the attack on Dresden…,[he] regret[s] even more the loss of more than 5,000,000, Allied lives in the necessary effort to completely defeat and utterly destroy nazism.”(Vonnegut 86) When General Eaker made this logical decision, he prioritized saving potentially millions of Ally lives by sacrificing civilians, yet thinking in a logical way shows the general’s cruelty as making such a decision during the illogical senselessness of war still results in lives lost, regardless of how many may be saved. No matter how logical of a decision made in war, people still die as the Allied nations fight not for the individuals on the ground, but for the end of the Nazi ideology. It may be easy to label General Eaker as evil for sacrificing these lives, but Air Marshal Saundby believes that “those who approved [bombing Dresden] were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that

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