Week 10 Discussion, Essay Example

Because much of the earlier class readings were written from the perspectives of victims of human rights abuses and survivors of wartime atrocities, it was often difficult to imagine how the people who were inflicting harm on these survivors and victims were able to do what they did. In the poem “Auschwitz,” the author describes how the people in the city turned away from the sight of prisoners being driven by. In a sense, those who committed these atrocities are dehumanized in the same way that victims are dehumanized. Each side sees the other only as a problem to be removed or a force to fight against. The previous readings made it possible to better understand the humanity of victims and survivors, making their struggles and occasional triumphs more personal. In Long Way Home, Ishmael Beah gives readers a chance to see the humanity inside someone who first suffered from human rights abuses and the effects of war, and then later became someone who perpetrated such abuses on others.

As I began reading the second half of the book, what I noticed immediately was how quickly Beah became (or more accurately, was turned into) a violent killing machine. The scared and innocent boy of the first half of the book disappears in an instant as he makes his first kill. Beah describes killing a man in a short, brief sentence, and then writes how “all the massacres I had seen” flashed in his head. He begins shooting and killing indiscriminately, and the 12-year-old boy we heard from in the first half of the book is gone. Beah goes on to describe the indoctrination of taking drugs, watching war movies, and eating, sleeping, and killing side by side with his fellow soldiers. It is difficult to even remember that many of them are still mere boys. The fact that Beah was able to survive this and go on to speak out on these issues is amazing, but it was even more amazing to see how easily he –or anyone- could become a monster.

Response to William Senderowitz

Your discussion post is the first one I read after completing mine, and I am not surprised to see that you commented on how quickly Beah became a soldier. Although we selected different specific lines from the book to highlight our responses, it is clear that the “rapid pace” you mentioned is the most shocking part of this book (or at least this part of the book). From the time Beah makes his first kill until he is a fully-indoctrinated killing machine only covers about two pages. I kept thinking about how young he was, and how scared and innocent he seemed in the first half of the book, and then how quickly and completely he became a willing killer. This book gave me new insight into how almost anyone is capable of horrible things under the right (or wrong) circumstances.

Response to Denise Booker

I enjoyed reading your previous response and I was looking forward to reading what you thought about the second part of the book. You focused on a different aspect of the book, the part about how UNICEF rescued Beah even though he did not feel like he was being rescued at the time. Instead he felt like he was being taken away from his family. That is what makes these discussions interesting to me, because it is possible to see how the same book can affect people differently. I discussed how quickly Beah fell into being a soldier, and how quickly the young boy from the first half of the book disappeared. Your discussion response emphasized the long-term results of this change, and how it affected him to be taken out of it and given the opportunity to take a different path. Reading your thoughts on the book helped me have a greater appreciation for the overall story.