Red tooth and claw

Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse during World War II. Later, he wrote a fable to make sense of his own memories of the strategically unnecessary Allied air raid on Dresden that killed 135,000 people.
    
The narrator of the fantasy, like Vonnegut, has lived through the raid as a prisoner in a subterranean abattoir. Like Vonnegut, he too has spent more than two decades trying to chart the limits of metaphoric understanding in a book.
    
For all that, Vonnegut’s novel is cri de coeur against the horrors of war. As a reviewer in Time wrote, “Few modern writers have borne witness against inhumanity with more humanity or humour as Vonnegut has.

Indeed, he sometimes sounds eerily like the 16th century mystic Sebastian Franck.Appalled by the cruelties men worked upon one another in the name of religion during the Reformation, Franck wrote: ‘whoever looks at mankind seriously may break his heart with weeping.’

Then he added: ‘We are all laughingstocks, fables and carnival farces before God.’” Vonnegut’s atheistic philosophy is equally caustic: He suggests, for instance, that the story of the Crucifixion might have been more appealing had Jesus not been the son of God but a faceless nobody!

In this regard, Indian tradition seems as pragmatic: Manu justifies the general philosophy of violence and carnivorousness as follows:
    
“The Lord of Creatures fashioned all this universe to feed the breath of life, and everything moving and stationary is the food for the breath of life. Those that do not move are food for those that move, and those that have no fangs are the food for those with fangs; those that have no hands are food for those with hands; and cowards are the food of the brave...”
    
Manu also transforms five of the earlier animal sacrifices into vegetarian ones to avoid violence!

The lawgi ver goes on to argue that these five sacrifices themselves are expiations for the inadvertent slaughter of small creatures committed by normal householders.
    
The five slaughterhouses of the householder are the fireplace, the grindstone, the broom, the mortar and pestle and the water jar.

That might explain why the Dharmaranya Purana says, “How is food to be got without violence? Is there anyone on earth without tendency towards violence?” It even talks about the ‘violence’ of thinking badly about others! Can Vonnegut beat that record?