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The affect of World War 2 on society
The affect of World War 2 on society
How war affects society
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Living in a war-ridden area can change one’s mentality towards war and violence as well as change their personality as a whole. The way a person perceives war is dependent upon how much their lives are impacted by it. In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah dispels the romanticism of war in the same way that Marjane Satrapi does in her memoir, Persepolis, as they both tell their stories from the point of view of a child through major cultural change, the loss of innocence in children, and the death of family members and friends.
The culture of an area changes drastically when a war takes place in it. In normal conditions, most people have compassion and try to help the elderly and poor people, but in times of war, families are torn apart
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and citizens prioritize themselves and their immediate family, unfortunately leaving others to die.
Survival becomes everybody’s main goal. It also leads to extreme distrust. In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael and a few other boys that he is travelling with arrive at a village that has been deserted by everybody except for one old man who couldn’t get away. The man is friendly to the boys and he feeds them and he tells them, “My children, this country has lost its good heart. People don’t trust each other anymore. Years ago, you would have been heartily welcomed in this village. I hope that you boys can find safety before this untrustworthiness and fear cause someone to harm you” (Beah 56). Even though Ishmael and his friends are just are group of innocent young boys, they are greatly feared by entire villages because the revolutionary front (the people who are destroying villages) is made up by groups of young boys. Fear created during war times like this can cause people to do things that they never would have done before, such as leave the weak old man behind even though they knew that he would likely die. Culture change is shown in Persepolis in things as simple as the way people dress. Before the revolution, the people of Iran could dress however they wanted to; but one …show more content…
year after the revolution began, a law was passed that stated that women had to wear a veil. “In no time, the way people dressed became an ideological sign. There were two kind of women [fundamentalist and modern]... and two types of men [also fundamentalist and modern]” (Satrapi 75). People dressed a certain way to show which side of the revolution they were on and you could be persecuted based on whether or not you were dressed “properly.” Before the revolution, things as little as clothing were not enough to get you arrested. These instances are both examples of cultural changes that a western country would undergo during a revolutionary war. Children who grow up in a war will lose their innocence regardless of whether or not they actually fight in the war.
Because of the stressful times, children will learn things that they normally would not have learned until much later on in their life. In both Persepolis and A Long Way Gone, young adults witness events that are very likely to be more violent than anything that anybody who hasn’t experienced a war will see. Children who experience war are also very likely to do something that they would never normally because they have been negatively influenced by the war around them. When they get used to constantly being worried and scared of death because of the war, they will mature quickly without realizing it. “My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen” (Beah 126). These boys were once very happy and their lives were great and peaceful; but once the war started, they lost everything and were barely able to survive. They saw things that would disturb them for the remainder of their lives and they were forced to fight in the war against other young adults. The boys in Sierra Leone were no longer innocent; they were killing each other. In Persepolis, Marjane and the other children are constantly arguing or getting in fights about politics, the war, and other things that kids growing up in peaceful areas wouldn’t argue about. Marjane participates in demonstrations against her government as a child and hears gruesome stories
about jail and, after her uncle Anoosh is executed, loses faith in her God. She no longer tries to be nice or caring towards people who have beliefs that are different than hers. Marjane Witnessing a war and the violence that comes with it causes children to mature too early and miss out on the key points of childhood and adolescence. One of the worst things that war causes is the loss of family members and friends. The characters in A Long Way Gone and Persepolis are constantly losing the people that they care about the most. “Families who had walked hundreds of miles told how relatives had been killed and their houses burned” (Beah 1). In A Long Way Gone people’s lives were destroyed by a war that they weren’t even involved in. In Persepolis, the people who participate in riots or demonstrations are the ones who are killed. People are arrested for breaking curfew, dress code, or other laws, but they aren’t killed. Marjane loses her uncle/idol Anoosh and ultimately gets separated from her family for her own safety. All of Ishmael’s family is killed as well as a lot of his friends and he has to separate from his friends and never see his brother again in order to escape death. Individuals from either war experienced loss of their family and friends even though they did nothing to deserve it. However, there is a difference between the loss of loved ones suffered by Ishmael and Marjane. Marjane was separated from her family but she got the chance to say goodbye and she had the benefit of knowing that they weren’t brutally killed. Ishmael was away from his family when the war started and couldn’t find them until it was presumably too late. Since, his family never arrived at the village that he was in, it was likely that they were dead. Even though people in both wars experienced the loss of family or friends, it was more prevalent in A Long Way Gone The way that an individual views war is largely dependent upon whether or not they have experienced war firsthand. War is often over glorified in the eyes of people who have never seen the effects that it has on others. Authors like Marjane Satrapi and Ishmael Beah who have lived in the middle of a war work to diminish this romanticism of war through writing about major negative effects that it has on people. The success of this tactic can be easily observed through the popularity of the memoirs that the authors wrote. When a person can relate to somebody whose life has been ruined by a war, they become more sympathetic towards people living in wars.
The three narratives “Home Soil” by Irene Zabytko, “Song of Napalm” by Bruce Weigl, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen all have the same feelings of war and memory, although not everyone experiences the same war. Zabytko, Weigl, and Owen used shifting beats, dramatic descriptions, and intense, painful images, to convince us that the horror of war far outweighs the devoted awareness of those who fantasize war and the memories that support it.
This psychological memoir is written from the eyes of Ishmael Beah and it describes his life through the war and through his recovery. War is one of the most horrific things that could ever happen to anyone. Unwilling young boy soldiers, innocent mothers and children are all affected. In most instances, the media or government does not show the horrific parts of war, instead they focus on the good things that happen to make the people happy and not cause political issues. In his book A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah dispels the romanticism around war through the loss of childhood innocence, the long road of emotional recovery and the mental and physical effects of war.
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.
their families who have suffered from war's visible and unseen effects. Some are still suffering to this day. The issues and ramifications which constitute their suffering will be examined in this
After Beah became a speaker for the United Nations, he spoke that he “joined the army to avenge the deaths of (his) family.” (p. 199) Beah soon realized that the revenge he was seeking against the rebels that he believed killed his family would never come to an end. He was in a war within himself and it wasn’t going to end until he came to accept that he was done fighting. The atrocities that Ishmael Beah and the hundreds of thousands of child soldiers around the world have witnessed are memories that will be instilled in their minds forever.
Imagine yourself in the shoes of a twelve year old boy who vigorously fought through blood and death, seeking for survival and hope during a Civil War in Sierra Leone. The novel, A Long Way Gone, tells the story of, Ishmael Beah, a young boy who experienced the mental and physical battle of reluctantly becoming a soldier. Today, majority of us can relate to Ishmael’s unfortunate circumstances through his life because it is something that we have all been affected by individually in areas all across the world. Beah’s memoirs as a boy soldier instantly caught my attention from beginning to end because of his clear, apprehensible voice and ability to draw readers into the action. Throughout this book, Ishmael focused most on very descriptive details
During the war, people struggle to differentiate their enemies from friends causing people to act on fear. Survival is paramount and trusting someone can lead to the deaths of an entire village. Beah wrote,”Many times during our journey were surrounded by muscular men with machetes who almost killed us before realizing we were children just running away from war.” (Page 72, Chapter 8). War causes people to be on edge and trust is no longer a connection but a reason that could end a person's life. The major theme in “A Long Way Gone” is survival and acting based on an emotional concept can cost atrocities.
The second bad by-product of war is the effect on children. First, war sometimes kills children’s parents or older siblings, throwing their responsibility on to the younger children’s shoulders. The children will never have a normal life of playing with others because they are too busy taking care of things. In the novel, MBSID, Tim had to grow up fast. The reason for this is that his father got killed and his brother, Sam, got killed. So Tim had to do all of the man work around the tavern.
Throughout their lives, people must deal with the horrific and violent side of humanity. The side of humanity is shown through the act of war. This is shown in Erich Remarque’s novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front”. War is by far the most horrible thing that the human race has to go through. The participants in the war suffer irreversible damage by the atrocities they witness and the things they go through.
In “The Son of Man,” Natalia Ginzburg asserts that while the war did irreparable psychological damage to its survivors, it also gave the young generation enough strength to confront the stark reality of the precarious nature of human existence. Passionately but concisely, through the use of repetitive imagery, fatalistic tone and lack of classic organization, Ginzburg shows how the war changed the world around Man and how Man changed his perception of the world.
Through Baümer, Remarque examines how war makes man inhuman. He uses excellent words and phrases to describe crucial details to this theme. "The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts," (page #). Baümer and his classmates who enlisted into the army see the true reality of the war. They enter the war fresh from school, knowing nothing except the environment of hopeful youth and they come to a premature maturity with the war, their only home. "We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. We are not youth any longer" (page #). They have lost their innocence. Everything they are taught, the world of work, duty, culture, and progress, are not the slightest use to them because the only thing they need to know is how to survive. They need to know how to escape the shells as well as the emotional and psychological torment of the war.
War deprives soldiers of so much that there is nothing more to take. No longer afraid, they give up inside waiting for the peace that will come with death. War not only takes adolescence, but plasters life with images of death and destruction. Seeger and Remarque demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men in war through diction, repetition, and personification to relate to their readers that though inevitable and unpredictable, death is not something to be feared, but to calmly be accepted and perhaps anticipated. The men who fight in wars are cast out from society, due to a misunderstanding of the impact of such a dark experience in the formative years of a man’s life, thus being known as the lost generation.
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and subjectively concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a constant battle between death and love.
Persepolis is a book that centers on the author’s family during the Iran-Iraq war that lasted for eight years. Marjane’s experience of the war is quite innocent since she saw it from the eyes of a well protected child. She grew up with need to help and make things better for everyone without really understanding what it takes to make the world a better place. In her mind the only possible way to make a change is by becoming a prophet and using supernatural powers to make the world a better place. Marjane’s childhood is proving that children form defense mechanisms to deal with difficulties. These defense mechanisms take children to “happy” places where things are better and everyone is happy unlike in the real world.
No one knows what will happen in his or her life whether it is a trivial family dispute or a civil war. Ishmael Beah and Mariatu Kamara are both child victims of war with extremely different life stories. Both of them are authors who have written about their first-hand experience of the truth of the war in order to voice out to the world to be aware of what is happening. Beah wrote A Long Way Gone while Kamara wrote The Bite of the Mango. However, their autobiographies give different information to their readers because of different points of view. Since the overall story of Ishmael Beah includes many psychological and physical aspects of war, his book is more influential and informative to the world than Kamara’s book.