The Ideology of War

Since the first day of human civilization war is our constant companion. The first wars occurred when even governments did not exist. Nobody exactly knows when the first wars exactly happened but according to historians, it was in tribal times. These wars were for territories, food and slaves. What has changed with the nature of the war during these thousands of years? The nature is still the same. People kill each other and nobody wants it. At the contrast with our ancestors, we create the pretty envelope for our behavior. We create ideology. We stop simply killing each other because we want to. We kill each other because of religion, patriotism, democracy, nationalism and other reasons which now justify our behavior. Marjane Satrapi in her graphic novel “Persepolis” illustrates for us how war and ideology work hand by hand on her own life example of growing in Iran during Iran-Iraq war. Her book illustrates how war and ideology can switch all value in our life when death becomes a great pleasure and life is simply every day surviving.

The idea of indoctrination shows for us in the chapter “The key”. At that point war with Iraq is already going on and on the page 95 we can see a big picture of girls on the whole page who mourn for the dead soldiers. This picture has a great contrast with previous page which creates from small blocks and where we can see detailed painted images with different people. At the contrast, at this big image everyone looks exactly the same. Girls represented such as monolith of the same emotion and feeling where you can not recognize any separated human. The author use this allegory to show for us how ideology dehumanizes people and change their attention. Because government wants people to be c...

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...hole page which catches our attention. We can see that even when she tries to avoid war and escape from her worries about it, she cannot do it. The war is around her and it will never let her forget about it. The poison of the war is in her heart.

Overall, the novel Persepolis shows for us the nature of war and government repressions from not a standard point of view where we can see statistics of prisoners and plans of battlefields. At the contrast, the narrator shows for us how it feels for an average person to life and grow in this kind of atmosphere. I do not want to argue here about the nature of war or necessary of such kind of action. I strongly believe that everything happens because humans forget that they are humans. Moreover, everyone around them is also a human. But ideologists convince people that another people are enemies which should be killed.