Harrison Bergeron Kurt Vonnegut Analysis

“Harrison Bergeron” is a short fiction written by Kurt Vonnegut, the story is set in the year 2081, and it talks about a futuristic society where all people are equal. No one is smarter, beautiful or stronger than the other, and if someone happens to be better than the others they find themselves compelled by The United States Handicapper General to wear what they call “handicaps” in order to bring down their abilities to the most basic levels as the others. Throughout the story, Vonnegut expresses a strong and vigorous political and social criticism of some historical events in the US during 1960s such as the Cold War and Communism, television and American Culture and Civil Rights Movement.
“Harrison Bergeron” was published in 1961 during that time several events were happening around the world in general and in the US in specific which was engaged in a series of political and economic crisis with the communist Soviet Union know as The

Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” In this passage Vonnegut shows how irrational such principals can be and how impossible to achieve absolute equality unless by handicapping the brightest citizens and bringing their abilities down to level of the “average “people. The story mimics the way Americans perceived communism and Soviet Union at that point of history where schools introduced courses to students such as Communism Vs. Americanism in order to wage the propaganda war, this paranoid climate was the result of many factors, one of them is the establishment of a communist government in Cuba by the rebellious Fidel Castro with the support of the USSR .the idea of having a government based on such principles just nine miles away from the US left Americans in a state of panic