Art and literature are mirrors; they take the lives we are living, the world we are living in and everything that happens in it, and reflect them, so that we can see and comprehend our own reality. Artists and authors, therefore, are given the daunting task of depicting their oftentimes unpleasant world. In particular, defense of human rights and examples of their violation are copious in both art and literature, just as they are in reality. Article 22, the right to social security, is in particular abundance, as governments have failed to provide the resources necessary to uphold their citizens’ economic, social, and cultural rights, thus inhibiting their development of personal dignity and personality, and when governments fail, artists …show more content…
The hierarchical tribe in the novel has a hefty focus on social security, but not in the traditional sense. For this community, social security is having a place within the hierarchy and having a role in the society. Achebe is able to relate this standardized view of social security and attribute the same principles to an African tribe, which allows the audience to both further understand the power structure of the tribe and their own government’s failures. By presenting social security in a more abstract environment, Achebe allows the audience to see it from the outside looking in, and thus see the multiple ways in which the government violates it. In Things Fall Apart, social security is more of a threat than a right, and because it is not guaranteed to members of the tribe, each must sacrifice their personality in order to obtain the security they so desperately desire from their …show more content…
Czech photographer Josef Koudelka uses his powerful images, which often prominently feature Romani people, to make political statements. What Koudelka does is, however, remarkably different. His works prominently feature disenfranchised peoples, those who the government has made no strides to provide social security for, and highlights their personality. While the photographs, such as his “Invasion – Prague 1968” collection depict citizens in anything but secure positions, he almost takes a stance against the last line of Article 22. By claiming that social security is essential to the full development of human personality, the Declaration inadvertently decrees those without security to be without identity. Koudelka shows us these people, taking up arms against the Soviet Union which has left them with nothing, not as empty vessels but as emboldened human beings. He embraces both the power and fragility of the human spirit without assuming either. Koudelka’s work takes the Article to a new level; allowing his photographs to criticize the government without degrading his
This demonstrates that the prisoners are part of a system where the needs of the collective are far more important than the needs of the individual (in both communism and in the prison.) It also reveals the corruption of the Soviet Union because it while it claims that everyone should be equal, the life of the prisoners in the camp are not valued at all. This could be due to the fact that prisoners in the camps aren’t viewed as people, but rather as animals that are being worked to their death.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
Jacobs, William Jay. Great Lives, Human Rights. New York New York: Simon and Schuster. 1990. Print.
Solzhenitsyn believed that it was nearly impossible to have truly free thoughts under the prison camp conditions described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or in any situation where there is an authoritarian ruler. In a pris...
Westwood, J. N., “Endurance and Endeavour: Russian history, 1812-1980”. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1981.
The fight for equality and human rights has been and still is a continuous battle played out on many fronts ranging from struggles between ruling governments and the people, the definition of societal roles and status, and also within the home on a domestic and individual level. The legacy for these battl...
Refuting in a few pages most of the recent human rights historiography, Moyn contends that modern human rights discourses exploded as late as in 1970s as opposed to the eighteenth century as argued by Hunt and early periods as many historians have said. Indeed, Moyn makes an important distinction between natural rights, which is what he believed the enlightenment project was concerned with and modern human rights. Moyn understands natural rights to be deeply bound to a state-structure power (Moyn, 20) and these were the rights the American, the French and even the insurgents in Saint-Domingue were defending. Natural rights had to do with rights which were guaranteed by a state thus were closely linked to the question of citizenships. Human rights, as it is today understood by various international lawyers and the general public transcend the state. Today’s human rights are (in theory) truly self-evident because they are possessed by all humans, everywhere irrespective of any other variables and exist (again in theory) beyond the state (Moyn, 27). This new understanding of rights came about in the 1970s when figures such as U.S. president Jimmy Carter made use of them in a political platform (Moyn, 154). In this sense, as other world “utopias” had failed by the 1970s, human rights appeared to be the “last hope” of humanity for a better
Social Security is a system that was set up in 1935 after the Great depression to help people get through tough times. "Social Security is now used by nearly 44 million Americans"(policy.com). Only people who payed into social security are eligible to collect when they retire. Many people think that they receive the money they pay in but that is not total true. The money that you pay in is used for the people that are receiving it now. "In 1950 there were 16 workers for every beneficiary; today there are only three workers per beneficiary"(policy.com). There is more money going into social security then coming out now. The extra money goes into a trust to be used when it is needed. By the year 2032 those numbers are going to drop. By this time most baby boomers will be retired and collecting social security. This will put a big strain on the funds. There will be more money going out then coming in. And it will not take long to use all the money that is in the trust. By the year 2034 they will only be able to pay 75 percent of the beneficiaries. "The projected average monthly Social Security benefit in 2032 of about 1,100 (in 1998 dollars) would fall to about $800, and would drop further in later years. Average benefits for low-wage earners would drop from $670 to $480"(www.ssab). Theses cut would effect the people just starting to receive benefits and those who are already receiving benefits. And with each year these benefits will decrease. As these benefits continue to decrease "the percentage of aged people living in poverty would rise"(www.ssab).Most people believe this is happening because of the baby boomers generation. There will be more people taking from social security then giving in. By the time my generation is eliable to receive social security there may not be any money to give.
In 1934, Sergey Kirov a rival to Stalin was murdered. Stalin is believed to have been behind the assassination, he used it as a pretext to arrest thousands of his other opponents who in his words might have been responsible for Kirov’s murder. These purges not only affected those who openly opposed Stalin but ordinary people too. During the rule of Stain o...
In Under a Cruel Star, Heda Margolious Kovaly details the attractiveness and terror of Communism brought to Czechoslovakia following WWII. Kovaly’s accounts of how communism impacted Czechoslovakia are fascinating because they are accounts of a woman who was skeptical, but also seemed hopeful for communism’s success. Kovaly was not entirely pro-communism, nor was she entirely anti-communism during the Party’s takeover. By telling her accounts of being trapped in the Lodz Ghetto and the torture she faced in Auschwitz, Kovaly displays her terror experienced with a fascist regime and her need for change. Kovaly said that the people of Czechoslovakia welcomed communism because it provided them with the chance to make up for the passivity they had let occur during the German occupation.
However, their success is subjective because they destroyed African culture in the process. Ultimately, Achebe is successful in delivering his political views, but he does so by encouraging open-mindedness and cultural relativity instead of forcing his individual ideals upon his readers. The characters in Things Fall Apart are not black and white: they are flawed, redeemed, frustrated, assertive, violent, reasonable, and genuine.... ... middle of paper ... ...
Just as the Underwarrs serve as a doppelganger that emphasizes a uniform replaceable identity in mechanical Soviet society, Korotkov and Kolobkov represent a doppelganger set that emphasizes the absence of true identity for the everyman in Soviet
Achebe writes Things Fall Apart to revise the history that has been misplaced. He writes to the European and Western culture. This fact is evident because the book is written in English and it shows us the side of the African culture we wouldn’t normally see. Achebe is constantly ...
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Yuri Slezkine. "N.I. Slavnikova Et Al. "Speeches by Stakhanovites"" In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000. 331-41. Print.
xvi Solzhenitsyn, A. I. The Gulag Archipelago, (I-II). Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973, 436.