Reflection Paper On Night

The Opinions of War “Meir, my little Meir! Don’t you recognize me … You’re killing your father… I have bread … for you too … for you too …”. Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel depicting his life in Nazi concentration camps. During his time in camp, Elie lived through a tremendous number of horrors, such as starvation, disease, hard labor and the crematorium’s ominus smoke fuelled by corpses. He also saw firsthand how people became almost less human by killing their fathers over bread crust or stealing from others to slightly boost their own chances of survival. This seemed to be the best survival strategy as there was never enough of anything for anyone. “From the mound, Mr.Tanimoto saw an astonishing panorama. Not just a patch of Koi,

Although the blast created from the bomb was powerful enough to destroy most of the buildings and kill many from falling debris, the worst effects were seen from widespread fire, radiation sickness and a lack of medical treatment that followed in the wake of the bomb.Faced with such challenges, the survivors of the bomb find ways to survive and eventually repair their lives long after the brilliant flash of light had disappeared. “When we were incarcerated inside the building we could smell the stink of the place. Prisoners from Garmyan had been there before us. We could easily feel the repulsive stench of dead bodies”. The Al-Anfal campaign, led by Saddam Hussein in 1988 was a military operation for carrying out the genocide of the ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq. The Kurds were viewed as a “strategic vulnerability to the Ba’ath regime”. At least 100,000 Kurds were killed by the use of chemical weapons, airstrikes and other illegal modes of destruction. One of the most infamous examples was the chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in which thousands were killed while survivors were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. In all of these horrific events a common theme is shared; war has changed how people view and treat others based off of what group they are a part of , whether that be their ethnicity, nationality,

Although Pearl Harbor killed thousands of members of the military and caused mass destruction, it pales in comparison to the one hundred thousand innocent civilians and countless buildings destroyed in Hiroshima alone. The ethics of using the atomic bomb are also disputed as some of the foreign priests “consider the bomb in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civilian population” (114) while others believe that in total war the lives of soldiers and civilians are the same. Some like Dr.Fuji said there is nothing to be done but “many citizens of Hiroshima, however, continued to feel a hatred for Americans which nothing could possibly erase”, showing just how powerful war can be in influencing people’s