Discourses Of Livy

Introduction
“Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.” Machiavelli’s quote from Discourses of Livy manages to succinctly describe our current social and political world. Founded on colonialization and violence, the term ‘the west’ promotes the idea of certain values and concepts which make it superior to ‘the east’. I argue that the concept us ‘us versus them’, particularly when linked with the Western Ideology, justifies violence in social, economic and physical terms. This ideology perpetuates the idea that there are inherent, distinct characteristics which separate members of each race, known as race thinking. Further, it allows powerful nation-states to

By enforcing this idea upon Canadian citizens, and convincing them that they were doing their humanitarian duty by converting them to the proper, Christian lifestyle, the government was able to put the Aboriginals in deplorable reservations and commit cultural genocide in the name of good. Many terrible acts of violence, including physical, sexual and emotional abuse, were inflicted upon the children that were ripped away from their families and forced to assimilate into a world which they had no experience in. The effects of those actions still resonate in our society today, although our government is hesitant to take responsibility for

As written by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “administrative controls shape the Palestinian community and its unborn and newborn children as terrorists. This nomenclature and its political and demographic implications justify monitoring the movement of Palestinians” Israel maintains heavy security borders and checkpoints which regularly discriminates against pregnant Palestine woman trying to get into the country to give birth in an Israel hospital, which would make their child a citizen. The lengths that they go through to ensure that their children would be recognized by the Israel government is described in a testimony from Ghaida, a Palestine woman who gave birth to her child in Israel: “Because I was pregnant, I felt that the soldiers on the checkpoints wanted to humiliate and torture me more…they made me pass through an X-ray. They then decided I couldn’t cross the checkpoint because my passing permit was not “an original” … They delayed me and treated me like a criminal; they prevented me from reaching the hospital when I was in dire need to just see a doctor and make sure I was not losing my son”