Anti-War Sentiments
Vonnegut and Sassoon -- Anti-War Sentiments in Writing
Kurt Vonnegut and Sigfried Sassoon are both war veterans turned writers who have writings that can be expressed as anti-war. With both men, their experiences in war left them very much opposed to it and with a sense of its futility. They chose to express these feelings in writing, but did so in very different ways. Vonnegut expressed his anti-war sentiments in prose, most notably in his famous novel, "Slaughterhouse Five." Sassoon expressed his in poetry. Also, Vonnegut's anti-war sentiments are more metaphorical and have to be teased out of his writing, whereas Sassoon's are much more literal and are evident in every word that he writes. There is no mistaking how Sassoon feels about war once one reads his poems. This paper examines "Slaughterhouse Five" and three different poems by Sassoon, and how these writings express the anti-war sentiments of the…...
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References
Sassoon, Sigfried. Counter-Attack and Other Poems. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918.
Sassoon, Sigfried. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. New York: Simon Publications, 1930.
Sumner, Gregory D. Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. New York: Delacorte, 1969.
Neoliberalism is both an ideology and philosophy which believes that "human welfare is best promoted by economic growth, which in turn is best enabled by reducing the interference of governments in the private sector. Neo-liberals also support measures that enable trade and finance to have unrestricted movement across national borders. These policies attempt to 'roll back' the state and the role of government, and leave decisions about allocation, production and distribution in the economy to the global market thereby excluding or limiting government measures that restrict or redistribute the wealth of individuals" (faxed material3, par. 18).
These ideas were materialized through the policies of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation.
Liberalization, or trade liberalization to be more exact, is of course at the heart of free trade. This policy acts towards the removal of government restrictions on goods that are imported and exported. It also refers to the liberalization of financial capital. Privatization, on…...
Owen's poem appears to inspired by the many deaths of soldiers he saw each day in the trenches of war. He starts the poem off, describing innocent young men being sent to war like cattle are sent to slaughter. He abandons his original views of war as heroic and glorious, and describes it as one large funeral where young soldiers are not given a proper goodbye. Instead…...
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Bibliography
Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children. Tr. Eric Bentley in Representative Modern European Dramas. ed. Lee Gun-sam. Seoul: Pan Korea Book Corp., 1978.
Lewis, Day C. (1963 ed). The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. By Wilfred Owen. New York: New Directions, 1963.
Roberts, David. (1998). Short Biography of Wilfred Owen. Saxon Books.
Vietnam Antiwar Lit Review
Vietnam Anti-War Literature Review
The Vietnam War marked a lot of "firsts" in relation to the course of American history. It is the first war that the United States lost. It is one of the first major military actions where actual war was not declared. It is also the first war that was brought to a halt by a public uproar and political fallout. The people were a major reason (if not the main reason) that the war ended the way it did and this movement took on many forms. There have also been many scholarly and pundit-based treatises written and scrutinized since then that are worthy of review. This report covers a dozen sources relating to the Vietnam antiwar movement and they range in time of authorship from during the action to since then up through the present day. While the war could have potentially been won…...
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Bibliography
Berkowitz, William R. 1974. "THE IMPACT OF PROTEST: WILLINGNESS OF
PASSERSBY TO MAKE ANTIWAR COMMITMENTS AT ANTI-VIETNAM
DEMONSTRATIONS." Journal Of Social Psychology 93, no. 1: 31-42. SocINDEX
with Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed February 25, 2015).
This is also possibly the least well-documented phenomenon in the racializing of Arabs and Muslims leading to the widespread acceptance of profiling and related loss of civil liberties." (2002)
The work of Nicole J. Henderson (2001) entitled: "Law Enforcement & Arab-American Community Relations After September 11, 2001" reports a study in which Arabs living in the United States were interviewed. Henderson reports that when asked about hate crimes "...community respondents across sites mentioned fear of government policies, at times equating the detention of Arab men and special registration with hate crimes. Another leader felt that "before 9/11, there were always questions of bias from people -- from individuals -- but not ever about the government and the police." A business leader commented in response to whether or not hate crimes were a problem in his community, "Now we're dealing with another prejudice. Right now, this is a very serious problem…...
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Bibliography
El-Amine, Rami (2006) Anti-Arab Racism, Islamophobia, and the Anti-War Movement. Left Turn Magazine. 1 Oct. 2006.
Akram, Susan M. (2002) the Aftermath of September 11, 2001: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims in America. Arab Studies Quarterly March 2002.
Ibish, Hussein and Stewart Anne (2003) Report on Hate Crimes and Discrimination Against Arab-Americans. The Post- September 11 Backlash. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Online available at http://www.adc.org/hatecrimes/pdf/2003_report_web.pdf
He turns some readers off with his vitriolic attacks. Further, his attacks are is blatant propaganda. hy? Because while Taibbi does mention that the Democrats already crafted legislation more than once - setting timetables for withdrawal and tying those timetables to funding, bills that Bush subsequently vetoed - he uses quotes from unnamed "congressional aides" to solidify his assertion that the Democrats just wanted to "score political points without ever being serious about bringing the troops home."
Taibbi does use evidence that there are anti-war leaders outside of ashington who are discouraged and bitter. But he fails to build a case for his most radical assertion, that the Democrats "hijacked the anti-war movement itself" in order to play to the voters, and that the Democrats filled the "ranks of peace groups with loyal party hacks." This is pure propaganda, and the evidence he provides is very thin. He doesn't name…...
It explains how an Iraq War Vet became a military consultant in Hollywood. It quotes a professor who says that as the war goes on, the stories of war will become the fabric of American culture and identity. For example, many popular television programs began to incorporate the Iraq War into their stories. hese include the episodes from ER, Las Vegas, Extreme Makeover, comedy Arrested Development, and soap opera Days of Our Lives. he article quotes one producer saying: "I think people are just ready to watch . . . something that is contemporary and important and dramatic and exciting." his comment by a producer shows that war generates interest in war stories and thus people's love and glorifying of war stories. Explaining to my viewers that such breeding of interest in war stories may have very negative consequences for our culture and the nation is important to my…...
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The second material I am using is an article by ABC News Good Morning America "Iraq War Images Seep into Popular Culture." It is available online at This material mainly explains how the war in Iraq is becoming part of America at home. It explains how an Iraq War Vet became a military consultant in Hollywood. It quotes a professor who says that as the war goes on, the stories of war will become the fabric of American culture and identity. For example, many popular television programs began to incorporate the Iraq War into their stories. These include the episodes from ER, Las Vegas, Extreme Makeover, comedy Arrested Development, and soap opera Days of Our Lives. The article quotes one producer saying: "I think people are just ready to watch . . . something that is contemporary and important and dramatic and exciting." This comment by a producer shows that war generates interest in war stories and thus people's love and glorifying of war stories. Explaining to my viewers that such breeding of interest in war stories may have very negative consequences for our culture and the nation is important to my blog.http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/IraqCoverage/story?id=759253&page=1 ,
Third media material I am using is the "war and militarism" section of FAIR [Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting]. The website is available at FAIR is dedicated to challenging the mainstream media reporting. It has specific sections that deal with a variety of issues, but most important for my blog is the section on war and militarism. The articles here show how often mainstream media reports present wrong impressions of wars and militarism. The media often lies about the realities of war and militarism and many people accept media representations as truth and fail to see many negative consequences of wars. For instance, Pat Tillman, a former popular soccer player who went to war but became an anti-war soldier and killed in a friendly fire, was at first reported to have been killed in a heroic fight with the Taliban. FAIR helps to expose these kinds of lies of the mainstream media.http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=7&issue_area_id=26 .
All three materials are important for my blog. The documentary extra featuring George Gerbner explains the relationship between violent images in the media and American culture. The video tells how heavy exposure to violent images has affected America's national psyche. Many people are addicted to violence and crave for more and more violent imagery in films and on TV. The ABC News article is important to my blog because it explains how an ongoing war -- in this case, the Iraq War -- enters the American society. It explains how the Iraq War is becoming part of our popular culture. And the third media material is invaluable to my blog because it regularly publishes articles that are relevant to the topic of war, violence, and the nation. I will add these materials to my blog and also add my detailed commentaries because my purpose is not only to present media materials, but also try to explain some of the consequences of our culture's increasing obsession with war and violence.
Iraq ar
As the end of the year slowly approaches, there is an expected transition of power by the United States and its allies to allow the Iraqi people to govern themselves. The media has tried to convince us that we as a nation have liberated the country of Iraq from one of the most brutal dictators in the world's documented history. Saddam equated to a modern day Adolf Hitler. Saddam Hussein would surely have destroyed the American way of life by using his weapons of mass destruction that he had been stock piling for years. And if that was not bad enough, Saddam was also said to have supported the efforts of Al Qaeda's terroristic network. Our nightly news and all of the media hype may actually have us as a nation beginning to believe this, ah, stuff, for the lack of a better term. The war has had an…...
Katulis and Juul help put into perspective the tentative position of Iraq in saying that Iraq's leadership remains split on a draft version of SOF (Katulis and Juul, online). The Iraqi cabinet must vote a two-thirds majority in favor of their support for a plan (Katulis and Juul). This may be difficult to achieve when the cabinet is divided along religious sect lines. It is, too, perhaps the first time since the election of the cabinet by the Iraqi people that they had to put such concerted emphasis on their decision making, because, once made, there is no turning back from that decision which could result in the U.S. pulling out of Iraq beginning almost immediately. What follows will answer the question of whether or not Iraq is prepared to stand on its own against the forces of Islamic fundamentalist extremism. Leaving Iraq may see it become impossible to regain…...
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As Hanson points out, the jihadists do not need fighter jets, a navy fleet or even tanks to win their war against the west (Hoover Institution, Hanson, online). Their tools are terrorism, and this, too, seems to be one of the aspects of the present and future nature of warfare that people choose not to acknowledge. The goals of terrorism are no to destroy buildings, although the destruction of buildings as occurred on September 11, 2001, does indeed further their work; it is rather to cause a disruption of the economy, to create political division, world discord, to instill a prevailing atmosphere of fear and panic, and to bring down the society that is the target of the terrorist acts. In this regard, as we examine where America is today, and where the rest of the world is as economies are collapsing around us, it might be fair to say that the jihadists are winning their war of terrorism.
Who would have believed, as Hanson so succinctly argues, that a world amidst the technological progress where the world stands today could be brought to its knees by terrorists who have effectively enslaved the freedoms that it has taken America and its post World War II allies hundreds of years to achieve? Today, cartoon satire depicting Islamic extremists can be banned - instituting the Islamic fundamentalist goal to ban ideas and images; the words "war on terror" have been ostensibly set aside because they have become too psychologically burdensome to the public - instituting the Islamic fundamentalist goal to ban words from the language; and other examples of giving into the weight of terrorism as cited by Hanson (Hanson, online). Echoing Galbraith, the question must be asked, "Is this victory?"
At present, marijuana is the most used drug and most frequently available in United States of America. The American youth takes serious dosages of marijuana. At least 60% of the adult population in United States of America was prone to marijuana in 2002. The statistics were prepared in the supervision of The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The website address is www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov .
Social marketing campaigns as well as social awareness programs are imperative to raise and propagate awareness pertaining to excessive drug abuse in United States of America. But in this case, the social campaigners as well as social marketers are armed with effective programs and messages, but remain hesitant to reach the teen audience. It's a tad bit complicated. Wordsen and Slater (2004) concluded that creating targeted ads regarding marijuana and its abuse through PSA's tended to be less than successful or…...
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References
Eddy, M. (2003). War on Drugs: The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. CRS Report for Congress, Order Code RS21490
Teinowitz, I. (2003). "Drug Office to Yank Terror Ads in About-Face," Advertising Age, March 31, 2003, pp. 1, 89.
US Congress (2002). U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Treasury and General Government, Effectiveness of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, special hearing, 107th Cong., 2nd sess., June 19, 2002 (Washington: GPO), p. 14.
Worden, J.K. & Slater, M.D. (2004). Theory and practice in the national youth anti-drug media campaign. Social Marketing Quarterly. 10 (2), 13-27.
Anti-Federalist & ill of Rights
The Anti-federalist vs. Federalist argument is one of the most heated political debates the United States has ever seen. Though the length of the actual debate was relatively short, lasting from October of 1787, when the final version of the constitution was approved by the first congressional convention to June of 1788 when Virginia was the first to ratify the constitution of the United States. The concepts ideas and standards that were set forth by both the anti-federalists and the federalists as well as other more moderate politicians are expressed throughout the foundational documentation of the United States.
Most notably the ill of Rights, or the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution are a reflective example of the compromises and victories of both sides but this can be seen elsewhere in the foundational documentation as well. Knowing this and being able to demonstrate it through…...
Anti Terrorism Measures
Effective Anti-Terrorism Measures
Effective Anti-Terrorist Tactics
The threat of terrorism involves many variables. The nature and degree of risk posed by a potential attack depends on a number of factors, including the goals of the attackers and their means of inciting terror. There are numerous terrorist organizations with agendas ranging from various political ideologies to animal rights, environmental, and reproductive issues. With so many diverse groups and causes in play, the number and variety of potential targets present an enormous challenge. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to address likely goals and targets of specific terrorist groups. It is important to understand, however, that the risk posed to any company or environment is related to the nature of the particular threat posed by particular terrorist groups (Bauman, 1995). In addition, while local police play a major role in gathering information about likely terrorist attacks, it is important that…...
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References
Bauman, Z. (1995) Life in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell.
Buruma, I. And A. Margalit (2004 Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York: The Penguin Press.
Cohen, N. (2003) A Kind, Really Nice Boy. The Observer, in Guardian Unlimited (May 4): 1-4.
David, M. (2004) Clash of Civilizations. The New York Times (May 13): A-25.
S. forces were made to operate on ground and targeted operations were planned against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters. There were significant individually planned battles and skirmishes between the U.S. army and Taliban often resulting in heavy losses to both sides. A tactic that Taliban often used in such conditions was the suicide attacks and planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that left the soldier carrying vehicles destroyed. The U.S. utilized an Iraqi style counter insurgency operations in the Afghan region that resulted in some strengthening of the conditions.
3.1.3 Power sharing agreements
In order to enhance the effectiveness of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan the U.S. forged agreements with many warring tribes and factions of the Northern Alliance to enhance the unity of these groups that were to be pitched against the Taliban. These agreements were aimed at removing the support base of Taliban and Al-Qaeda from the Afghan society at which…...
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References
Coll, S. (2005). Ghost wars: The secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin.
Dreyfuss, R. (2005). Devil's game: how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam. Metropolitan Books.
Giustozzi, a. (2008). Koran, Kalashnikov, and laptop: the neo-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Columbia University Press.
Jones, a. (2013, Jan). Only Three Choices for Afghan Endgame: Compromise, Conflict, or Collapse: Counting down to 2014. TomDispatch.com. Retrieved from: [ http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/28-3 ]
War Propaganda
Some of the most emotionally incendiary propaganda to utilize the medium of film was conceived and directed towards partisans during the fighting of World War II. A pair of films, Went the Day Well and 49th Parallel, delicately play upon the psyche of their intended audiences to get viewers to emotionally, (and perhaps even physically) take a stance during the fighting of the second Great War. By demonstrating various aspects of homeland vulnerability and enemy infiltration, these movies were created to galvanize audiences into an anti-Nazi stance at the time when Hitler's Third Reich was at its peak of power.
The events that constitute the plot of Went the Day Well are obviously designed to prey on the fears of British residents during World War II. The film actually was released in 1942 while the war was still contested -- and largely undecided -- and depicts Nazi's posing as British…...
War & Human Rights Abuse: Parallelisms between Japanese-Americans in WWII and the U.S.-Iraq War (Gulf War II)
Among nations of varying cultures and societies, maintaining satisfactory political relations is a challenge. This is primarily due to differences among leaders and societies that make up this nation; thus, as a result of this diversity, it is inevitable that international relations among countries of the world may experience conflicts and antagonism with each other.
Declarations of war are one manifestation of conflicts and disagreements between two or more nations. Examples of these political conflicts are the First and Second World Wars, where devastation of the physical geography of countries and millions of deaths had occurred. Human history has, over time, illustrated how individual differences can potentially lead to bigger conflicts, thereby resulting to devastating, even deadly, results.
However, a far more important issue that should be focused on during times of war and political conflict…...
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Bibliography
Cheney questions release of more photos." 11 May 2004. The New York Times Online. Available at http://www.nytimes.com .
Executive Order 9066." (1942). Available at National Archives and Records Administration.
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