WWII as a US-led Western imperialist war in Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse-Five"

Slaughterhouse-five departs from the Western official history books and romanticized heroic narratives of WWII by openly problematizing WWII as an imperialist war waged on the part of the US-led Allied forces. The novel raises the issue of the firebombing of Dresden and its erasure from official history records as a part of a larger picture, which, as this article argues, has to do with geopolitical agendas pursued on the part of the allied forces during and after WWII. The novel functions as a condemnation of the way expansionist wars are justified and domesticated to the extent they are no longer perceived as problematic and the way their violence is assigned to collective amnesia by means of cover-ups and extensive propaganda. By raising the spectre of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-five aims to provide a set of corrective and magnifying glasses for the understanding of WWII and the role of the US in it, which calls for an interdisciplinary approach based on a systemic geopolitical analysis and meticulous historical input.