Another excellent example of rehumanization takes place in the film when Swoffat comes across a convey of burnt vehicles and charred bodies, the aftermath of a coalition bombing campaign. We see both civilain and military casualties in this scene showing what appears to be regular citizens who were fleeing the war zone and were in the same vicinity as an Iraqi platoon that was bombed, innocent victims, illustrated most profoundly when we see the charred body of a young girl still sitting upright with a ribbon in her hair seated inside the school bus. Swofford goes off on his own and encounters a bombed out group of Iraqi soldiers and sits down across from one, taking in the whole experience. In this scene we see pain in his face as the nature …show more content…
As noted earlier, we witness the soliders gathered around watching numerous war movies using these as a sort of training to show them what to expect in battle and also serve as a way to pump-up the troops making them battle hungry. Reality however sets in upon arrival into the battle zone when the soliders realize that war is not an endless, adreneline filled adventure as depicted in the movies but rather a series of few anticlimatic situations (Swofford’s platoon do come under fire a couple times instilling true fear that witnesses Swofford urinating his pants but even those short burts of action are rare and “non threatening” as the enemy appears to lack compatent ability to aim its artillary properly) with the majority of the primary battle consisting of fighting the boredom of endless training, constant drills, and a daily montonous routine that begin to take a toll on the mental condition of the soldiers. Simultanously during this period of stress and fatigue the Marines also experience further difficulties as they find themselves becoming more and more detatched from society and from the norms of everyday life. The soldiers become estranged from most civilan relationships – this is noted throughout the film/book as we see numerous men lose their girlfreinds or wives (the rule and not the exception) and their photos put up on the wall of shame of women who have …show more content…
President Bush and Dick Cheney and the generals, and Saddam Hussein ... we’re fucking the sand and the lonliness and the boredom and the potentially unfaithful wives and girlfriends...we’re fucking our confusion and fear and boredom; we’re fucking ourselves for signing the contract ... we’re angry and afraid and acting the way we’ve been trained to kill, violently and with no remorse. (Swofford 21)
It is through such tight bonds that soldiers are offered a way to cope with and handle the experience of war providing them with a sense of commradeship sharing a mutual situation very few will ever know and perhaps somehow aid them in making it out of it all alive or at least with their sanity in tact, despite that all this might just be wishful thinking:
We turn the inside of our hooch into a circus, and inside of this circus we cannot be injured, inside of our circus we cannot be touched.
But we are insane to believe this. (Swofford
“We did not break down, but adapted ourselves” These soldiers know that modern warfare is extremely complicated and demands knowledge and experience. They learn how the differentiate shell sounds, when to take cover, when it’s safe to take off your gas mask, how to tell shrapnel from high explosives. It is shown through the naive and inexperienced recruits that not knowing and applying this knowledge is fatal. Some soldiers call on their innermost animal instincts to allow them to kill mercilessly on the field, using the assistance of a metaphor Remarque writes “We are dead men with no feelings, who are able by some trick to keep on running and keep on killing.” Granted war is a barbaric affair, ironically sometimes the worst of conditions can bring out the best in people. This is through the form of comrade and mate ship. On the field fellow soldiers would provide mutual support for each other and create extremely tight bonds. This is shown in All Quiet on the Western Front through Paul and his tight nit platoon. Paul’s unique experience with mate ship is how especially close he is with his friend Kat. This is expressed in the recounting of when they stole and cooked a goose together. Remarque writes “We don't talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have.” This shows how mate ship was
War is a series of deaths for a greater gain for the people who do not fight at the front. However while on the front it becomes a fight for life through battle and friendship. The bonds created allow success and support. The family bonds created in the trenches are the most important effect of war and debatably the only good one. Throughout war it is seen that these relationships are the only light, in the never-ending darkness of war.
When the author of Night, Elie Wiesel, arrives at Auschwitz, the Jewish people around him, the Germans, and himself have yet to lose their humanity. Throughout the holocaust, which is an infamous genocide that imprisoned many Jewish people at concentration camps, it is clear that the horrors that took place here have internally affected all who were involved by slowly dehumanizing them. To be dehumanized means to lose the qualities of a human, and that is exactly what happened to both the Germans and the Jewish prisoners. Wiesel has lived on from this atrocious event to establish the dehumanization of all those involved through his use of animal imagery in his memoir Night to advance the theme that violence dehumanizes both the perpetrator
In Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer, a German soldier, along with his comrades, suffer through traumatic events and devastating losses as they struggle to survive the violent maelstrom of the Great War. As they fight, the grave circumstances and decimated landscapes they witness has a haunting effect on them. In order to cope with this drastic setting, they resort to dehumanization. By seeing their enemies as less than human, the war conditions them to kill, relying solely on instinct alone. They distance themselves from their comrades by dehumanizing them, making it easier to cope with their deaths. To maintain their sanity and face the horrors of the war, Paul and his company must suppress their humanity.
In the novel, the men have this sense of alienation that completely takes over them. They feel as though after the war, their life has become meaningless and unimportant, “A sense of alienation becomes overwhelming . . . The young soldiers feel cut off from their now- meaningless prewar existence, unable to visualize a future after the war . . .” (Armitage). Paul finds it difficult to imagine a life without war and to remember how he felt before the war. He feels uncomfortable wearing the attire any other normal man would wear on a daily basis. He feels as though he cannot live a normal life with a suit on, “I feel awkward. The suit is rather tight and short; I have grown in the army. Collar and tie give me some trouble” (Remarque 149.) Paul finds it difficult to speak with his family now since he has returned from war, “These requests all lead to Baumer’s alienation from life at home. . .As the war’s madness increases, home fades into alienation for Baumer” (Schileper). “Some men may even begin to doubt the purpose of their mission, question the reason they are fighting and distrust the justifications of their leaders . . .the more cold- blooded they become in their own thoughts and actions”
In the beginning of Sledge’s memoir, he depicts his desire for joining the war. His feeling that the war may end soon prompts his aspiration to get into action. While the military students are at Georgia Tech to continue their studies before being sent to boot camp, Sledge (among a few others), purposefully fails classes so he can be sent straight to boot camp and begin the journey to the front. Sledge wasn’t prompted only by patriotism. He has a superficial idea of what war entails. During this period in his journey, his morals are high, and he views the war to be a positive. However, some of this feeling could have been encouraged by the fact that they were Marines. Marines were not just your typical soldier and he took pride in that. This pride itself gave him more hope and confidence going into the unknown. Even though Sledge is upbeat and excited for and during boot camp, you can sense a small fear that lingers in the back of his head about the dangers that his future holds. This sense of fear increases as he nears his departure for Peleliu. Sledge writing this book well after he completed his stint in the war comments after he described the excitement to begin boot camp and their journey ...
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.
This affects each soldier when the war is finished. When a soldier returns back to his home after the war, he is unable to escape his primitive feelings of survival.
Whenever thinking of war and battle, the thought has always come to mind of Sun Tzu’s, “Art of War”. From there, my curiosity pinpointed on the relationships between soldiers and the bonds of loyalty that are formed in battle. The type of leadership defines the effectiveness of an operation. In this case, the leadership involves respectful acknowledgement and a leader who is aware of the needs of those in their command. The soldiers themselves must have affectionate love for their leader and to an extent each other in order to have a reason to be fully loyal. The abstractions I found in “Loyal Beast” written by Chretien de Troyes and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” which was written by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, intrigued me, further, the keynotes of fealty and symbiosis were compelling by how they balance and feed off of one another. Symbiosis is defined as,” a relationship between two people or groups that depend on each other,” by the online Merriam-Webster dictionary which logically exemplifies the commonality between “Loyal Beast” and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” by the example of the bond between
The soldiers are first trained in basic level where they are motivated to destroy their individualities and build comradeship amongst the men. The bond is so important among men because when they are in battle, they have to fight for eachother. In the beginning of the basic training, the recruits are all worn out. The training is being done in an island where they are conscripted to do what is being told by the drill instructor without question. Neither they can leave, nor they can communicate much with the outside world. Basic training is basically about giving mental and physical pressure to create motivation. In the first three days, the recruits are being hustled, yelled, and shouted. They learn the basic orders of drill that enable them to work in large groups. They have to surrender their clothes, cut their hair, cut their physical evidence of individuality citizen identity. The recruits sleep aside a series of hasty rituals and given no time to reflect or to look back and think about their families, friends. So that the recruits donot backout, the frantic bustle of forming is set. The creation of an environment that romanticizes the milita...
...often times tragic and can ruin the lives of those who fight. The effects of war can last for years, possibly even for the rest of the soldiers life and can also have an effect on those in the lives of the soldier as well. Soldiers carry the memories of things they saw and did during war with them as they try and regain their former lives once the war is over, which is often a difficult task. O’Brien gives his readers some insight into what goes on in the mind of a soldier during combat and long after coming home.
During the first scenes of the movie the drill instructor made it clear that he is the man in charge and that they are less than human. He used dehumanizing and humiliating adjectives like “ladies, bags of crap, etc.,” to make men feel worthless and incapable to do anything. Clearly he showed no sympathy for them because he was in inferior position. The drill instructor was not concerned about trainees well being, all he had to do in eight weeks was to prepare them for battle. There were no expressions of respect for these young men because the drill instructor new his commands are the law and they must be obeyed. Thus, he had little to no regard of how they perceive him as long as they followed orders.
A soldier’s “greatest fear is not death but failure, and the shame that accompanies failure. More than anything else, warriors fear letting themselves down and letting their leaders and friends down at a moment when it matters most. They fear most not losing their lives, but their honor” (Nash, 2007, p. 25).
Metropolis and Nineteen Eighty-Four shows dehumanization as a product of the progress of a society, both technologically and socially. The significance of these two texts is that they serve as a didactic warning for the future, hence are immensely reflective of the rising issues of the day. Hence, elements of dehumanization originate from the respective contexts of each text. Fritz Lang constructed Metropolis with the influence of the advancing military technology in WWI. During the plight of the war, the advantage of having powerful weaponry quickly boomeranged on the battleground when both sides had equally as lethal artillery. Causing more deaths that the Black plague, the promise and faith in new technology quickly spiraled. Lang represents this through the dehumanising effect of
In war, relationships are different than in civilian life as they focus more on just trust and not necessarily liking the other person. Tim O’Brien illustrates this concept in “Enemies” and “Friends” from his book The Things They Carried. These chapters follow Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk as they go from enemies to friends of sorts during the war in Vietnam.