"I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, page 101

Even now, three decades later, I haven't finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don't. - Tim O'Brien, Vietnam War vet reflecting on his experiences (during that war) with the Americal Division in a 1999 address, The President's Lecture at Brown University.

Item: Museum's decision to adapt text sets dangerous precedent
Val Ross Globe and Mail Canada August 29, 2007

The battle's not over yet. But under pressure from Bomber Command veterans' groups and sympathetic politicians, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa will adjust the wording on a panel dealing with the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. "The final wording has not come out," Fredrik Eaton, chair of the museum board, told The Globe and Mail yesterday. "But we expect to have it installed by October." Many observers warn of the precedent of a public museum adapting its texts in response to political pressure. "I am very disturbed," said Margaret MacMillan, warden of St. Antony's College at Oxford, author of Paris 1919, and a consultant to the museum on the controversy. "This exhibit was a fair one." The fight over the 67-word panel, titled An Enduring Controversy, erupted shortly after the Canadian War Museum opened in May, 2005. A group of veterans objected to its saying that "the value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested," and to its contrasting 600,000 dead with the statement that "the raids resulted in only small reductions of German war production until late in the war." ... One in four Canadians who served in Bomber Command during the Second World War were killed, and the survivors insist on honouring those comrades' memory. Art Smith, a former Bomber Command captain and former Conservative MP, explained: "The words said that we were responsible for 600,000 dead. I took offence that we were just helter-skelter bombers. We always had justified targets." The veterans threatened a boycott, attempted to have a private member's bill introduced, and finally got a senate subcommittee to look into their complaints. In June, the subcommittee urged the museum to compromise. Then, Mr. Eaton volunteered to chair the board. "I thought the museum was taking the wrong slant," he said. "It wasn't right that the museum should fight with the vets. I determined to effect a solution." Two weeks after Mr. Eaton became chair, museum CEO Joe Geurts - a dogged defender of his institution's curatorial independence - departed. Ever since, board members, former board member and retired General Paul Manson, and the vets have been negotiating a new text. They'll continue into September. ...

Yes, Fredrik Eaton is an Eaton. According to Wikipedia, Fredrik has been recognized as being the most intelligent and capable of the Eaton brothers. In 1990, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for having "contributed to many aspects of Canadian life. Through his leadership in a variety of organizations, in fields as diverse as those of business, education, nature, health care and the arts, he is continuing his family's tradition of exemplary service to the public." What he said about the family empire in 2005 is sorta how we have felt about Canada: "When Eaton's celebrated its centennial, in 1969, just two years after Canada, I believed it would go on forever. But it didn't." In 1969 we held the same belief about the nation—that it would go on forever. But now? Now, we don't. We commiserate with Fredrik but once again feel Fredrik is contributing to the death of something he loves, this time his country.

Related: In 1969 Kurt Vonnegut published a novel, Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death, based in part on his experience as a POW in Dresden. When the book was released, the bombing of Dresden was not widely known and was rarely discussed by veterans and historians. The book led to an increased awareness of the bombings and a reevaluation of the justifications given for aerial bombing of cities by the Allies during the war.

At last, Kurt Vonnegut's famous Dresden book
Books of The Times New York Times USA March 31, 1969

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe." He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance. Next to being born, getting married and having children, it is probably the most important thing that ever happened to him. And, as he writes in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, he's been trying to write a book about Dresden ever since. Now, at last, he's finished the "famous Dresden book." In the same introduction, which should be read aloud to children, cadets and basic trainees, Mr. Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure "because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." He's wrong and he knows it. Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story. The story is sandwiched between an autobiographical introduction and epilogue. ...