The pills dance in my palms, gleaming white and inviting…. Somewhere in Cambodia, I dream that Pa and Ma are sleeping together in the ground. I close my eyes and wait for Pa to come take me with him. In her crib, Tori cries but I ignore her.” (180-181) Loung has a deep need to kill herself not only because of her painful memories of Cambodia but also because of her grieving for Pa, Ma, Keav and Geak.
The brainwashing would be from constant propaganda preaching how their side is fighting for the good and the other being a group of non-humans butchering anyone in their path. The military would tell the children “The rebels are responsible for everything happening to you” (Beah 113). Later on in the book the rebel children are revealed to also undergo this brainwashing as one rants as the rehabilitation center “the army killed my family and destroyed my village, we fought for freedom” (Beah 134), this brainwashing would make the children and any other soldier want revenge for their dead families. When in fact both sides were known for killing families so it was a coin toss who actually did
Imagine being younger and forced to live in horrible conditions. In Loung Ung’s memoir, First They Killed My Father, she explains how she feels about the horrific conditions she was going through as a child of war. To begin with when Ung was younger her life was threatened on a daily basis because of her beliefs. For example in the the text explains ,“Capitalist should be shot and killed” (Ung #312).
Manipulating Minors In Ayn Rand’s novella, Anthem, the children are separated from their families in order to prevent individualistic thinking and give power to the dictator much like in real life totalitarian societies. Dictatorial leaders enforce children to live apart from their families, because they want to gain complete control over society, create a master race or an army, and influence the children’s way of thinking, which is illustrated in past totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Spartans in ancient Greece, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and Nazi Germany under Hitler. Totalitarian leaders have to obtain absolute dominance over the population in order to stay in power.
In Never Fall Down, Arn’s personality alters from originally being a kind, friendly boy into a ruthless beast that yearns to kill or cause harm. As he says in the book, “At the corner, five black-pajama soldier stand, smoking cigarette, on a lookout. They’re young, these guys, so I say, ‘Wanna play?” (Never Fall Down 11). The boys that Arn refers to are Khmer Rouge soldiers, but Arn does not know that, and he would not have cared then.
Author Tim O’Brien once expressed, “It can be argued, for instance, that [the Vietnam] war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty….a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly”(O’Brien 77). The breathtaking yet sanguinary jungles and devastating guerilla warfare of the Vietnam War had a particular grandeur that overwhelmed its victims, and the author of The Things They Carried demonstrates that element throughout many passages in his collection of short stories. In Tim O’Brien’s historical novel The Things They Carried, he uses the clash of breathtaking beauty with horrendous imagery and grim concepts to establish the theme of the dark beauty of war through the lens of his
‘First They Killed My Father’ is a historical-non fiction tale that recounts author Loung Ung ’s experience during the Cambodian Genocide from 1975 till 1979, her five-year-old self fighting through pain and loss in the battle to survive with her family throughout the devastating war - her experiences invoking empathy in her readers and allowing us to connect through her viewpoint during that time and understand why she felt, thought and did what she had throughout the book. All this combined with her first-person narrative of these events contributes towards the reader putting themselves into her shoes, understanding her actions and reactions and connecting with a small part of Cambodia’s history.
Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father is a vivid, detailed memoir of a young girl’s experiences in Cambodia throughout the Khmer Rouge era. It records in expressive detail the horrors suffered by the Ung and her family while living under the oppressive rule of the insane Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, First They Killed Her Sister by Soneath Hor, Sody Lay and Grantham Quinn is a lengthy criticism in direct opposition to the aforementioned memoir. Although the authors of First They Killed Her Sister made some excellent points throughout their assessment of First They Killed my Father such as showing how Ung having misrepresented some aspects of Khmer culture and history, they completely and utterly failed in their attempt to discredit her based on the claims that she perpetuated racial tension and distorted what really happened in 1970s Cambodia, which breaks down the few good points they did have. The critics correctly assert and prove that Ung misrepresented certain aspects of Khmer culture and history, showing that at times, Ung’s description of what had happened was distorted or partially fabricated.
The documentary film, “Jesus Camp” by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady takes viewers to the American heartland where it exposes the indoctrination of children into the radical Evangelical Christian religious belief system via a ‘summer camp’ experience. Indoctrination is the politically correct term for ‘brain-washing’, or forcing another to “accept the ideas, opinions and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider any other ideas, opinions and beliefs”("Def," ). The parents of these children, though they would violently oppose the idea, are guilty of abusing their children under the guise of religion. Every parent wants what he or she may feel is best for his or her child.
The Khmer Rouge was a revolutionary group who wanted to reconstruct Cambodian society. On April 17, 1975 the Khmer Rouge attacked the capitol Phnom Penh. As soon as the Khmer Rouge got to the capitol they started to force the people to leave all their possessions and march to the rural part of Cambodia. “Hospital patients
Children are impressionable so the violence and propaganda were able to turn children into trained
The things they carried is a novel by Tim O’Brien. About the Vietnam war. About the lives of people going there. It’s a collection of war stories. Some of them true, some of the untrue and that’s the main topic that’ll be discussed in this paper.
The film, First They Killed My Father, follows a Cambodian family through the effects of government conflict. From a sociological perspective, this story has an even deeper meaning than is on the surface. On the surface, it is a sad story about a Cambodian girl in the middle of a war. However, when you analyze it, it is about more than that. It is not only about the people of Cambodia as a whole, but about pain, destruction, and the innocence that children should have.
Another instance of brainwashing is “The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it: TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE”(Orwell 160) Winston Has been brainwashed into thinking these
I started this assignment by asking myself: Is indoctrination a form of brain washing? Does it have to involve beliefs? Is it a process? Must it be a bad thing? I previously thought that indoctrination related dictators and radical leaders whose mission was to get others to believe their views without question.
