What happened at Abu Ghraib was not an insolated incident. Sadly it reflects a phenomenon deeply rooted in American history and present in the country from its earliest days.
The blacks and the Red Indians were — and have been — subjected to atrocities, persecution, extermination and humiliation.
Memories of atrocities committed by the Ku Klux Klan against black Americans, which all went unpunished by American law, are still fresh.
A further object of hatred for white Americans was the Red Indians, the native Americans.
They too were barbarously uprooted from their lands and systematically exterminated. All this is an undeniable part of American history.
We may also remember the rape of Japanese women by American soldiers which was hidden for long but which surfaced a few years ago.
These atrocities, however, pale when compared to one of the worst examples of American barbarity. It occurred in Dresden, a beautiful German city, as World War II was drawing to an close. It was vividly and movingly documented by the American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel ‘Slaughterhouse Five.’
On December 14, 1944, Vonnegut was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He was held as a POW in Dresden, a city with no major industries or any significant military presence.
The bombing of the city was sudden and unexpected. Vonnegut and other prisoners were among the relatively few survivors.
They stayed alive in a meat cellar, deep under the slaughterhouse. Vonnegut was witness to one of the most gruesome massacres in history but he survived to write about it.
The extensive American bombing of the city killed 135,000 people. That number is greater than those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the Americans dropped their atomic bombs on the Japanese cities.
The horror of the Dresden bombing is that it was pointless since the Germans had already notified the Allies of their desire to surrender.
