BHP Billiton is admired for its aspiring expansion tactics, which have directed the company around the globe. It now operates in 26 countries and has over 141 locations. However, the corporations’ most ambitious move was a bid for its competitor, Rio Tinto in 2007. Had the union gone ahead, the merged company would have controlled over 75% of the seaborne iron ore market, essentially creating a…
Gerda Weismann remembers when the war started. She heard shooting coming coming from the roof. Her family moved into the basement of their home to hide. There was no water, electricity, heating, or air conditioning. Her brother was forced into a labor camp shortly after the war started. Gerda says the worst day of her life was on June 28th 1942, it was the last day she saw her father. When she was taken to a concentration camp her and her mom were separated. She was on a truck leaving her mother and she jumped off. The soldiers put her back on the truck and told her she was too young to die. Gerda was taken to a slave labor camp where she got very sick. The woman who ran the camp saved Gerda’s life by making her work even though she was sick.…
This article was about four former child soldiers in the Sierra Leon civil war that were interviewed by Newsweek. They each relive the horrors of their prior lives during the war and give us a walkthrough of just how savage these young boys were living at the time. The interview topics range from before the war, being forced into service, drug factors, atrocities, life after and future goals. The now teenage boys reminisce on their crusades of murder, amputations, tortures and rape in their younger days. This article is filled with individual stories of unthinkable evils these boys committed in a corrupted…
The story told by Ishmael Beah in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is an amazing recollection of the effects that the extreme violence of war can have on a person, including physical, psychological, and social trauma, in which a boy tries to survive and escape his past as a child soldier. Civil war brings along not only violence, sadness, poverty, death etc. but also horrible conditions in which the victims that suffer the consequences are the children. Kids in third world countries, like in Sierra Leone, that are going through civil wars are forced to join the fight in order to survive; it’s the only option they have. War impacts their lives long-term in unimaginable ways that leaves them bruised for life.…
Early in the Holocaust, German army units participated in the massacre of the Jews in Eastern Europe. Among these, the Reserve Police Battalion 101 was made up of civilian police men, German men, and volunteers subject to the military draft. They were middle-aged working family men with a lower middle class background. Their main purpose was to be an essential source of manpower in holding down German-occupied Europe. In 1941, they were told that they had to perform a gruesome and undesirable task executing the Jewish population in the area they patrolled. My paper will be focusing on factors that lead up to how these “ordinary men” allow themselves to be a part of a systematic genocide. In trying to understand the factors that made these men’s crimes possible the factors that are central to their actions are several: peer pressure and conformity, the roles, the developing of a rationale for killing, and the environment they were in. Without these elements, the men of Police Battalion 101would not have become executioners.…
The violence found and experienced in war is an entity so vigorously potent and robust that it can easily consume and ruin even the most capable human beings, let alone children who are still developing their own minds. In Ishmael Beah’s novel A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, the retrospection of a boy’s attempt to survive and flee from a war in Sierra Leone expresses the consequences of extreme violence and war that influence the physical, psychological and social characteristics of a person. Certainly, Ishmael’s many violent experiences teach a lot about the intended consequences or repercussions of acts of violence. In the novel, the transformation of Ishmael from an innocent boy to a mindless killing machine due to exposure to…
Ishmael Beah’s autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can determine – perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century. This book tells us how a young boy was forced to become a soldier to preserve his life and live to tell his story. Although Beah was from an under developed nation, he had the dreams and thoughts of any normal teenager from the west. It is heartbreaking to learn that such dreams of millions of children like Beah are crushed down and ripped apart by the institution of War.…
The idea of war brings up many questions about life and death, suffering, and consequences. While many people may see war as something that affects people as a whole, such as nations or a persecuted group, war further impacts every individual, whether or not they are directly involved. War limits freedoms and individualism, and in most cases people find themselves with less rights than during peacetime. People base their choices not on what they feel, and more on what they have to do to survive. Soldiers and civilians alike are influenced by war in different ways, however, these tie together when the overall effects of war are examined.…
Often, and as in the clients experienced, children were manipulated into believing and knowing who the enemies of war were and that violence was an answer or solution to the warfare. Use of terminologies further enforcing the notion of who is control and who is the enemy. Once violence was introduced as a means of securing food and supplies for survival, Ishmeal begins associating his own people as civilians and his the soldier maintaining order. Later, this confusion extrapolates feelings of guilt when the realization of their actions. As discussed during the intervention section these conditions require therapy to be more individualized, rather than structural and greater care taken to the reintegration process both by the child and the community in which they transition into (Vindevogal, 2011, Bentancourt et al.,…
During the late 1930’s the world was contaminated by the Second World War and the Holocaust. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Holocaust is defined as follows: “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire.” During the Holocaust, the Nazis, under the command of Adolf Hitler, liquidated over six million Jews. There is one Jewish survivor whose story especially touched my heart and changed my attitude towards life for the better. This amazing woman is Krystyna Chiger. Krystyna and her family escaped the Nazi liquidation by living in sewers for fourteen months (qtd. in “The Girl in the Green Sweater” 5). Accordingly, thorough assessments of my personal experiences according to the life lessons of Krystyna Chiger descriptively visualize the Holocaust and its everlasting impact on society.…
When events like these take place, a question of who to feel sympathetic for arises. Society tends to challenge an individual’s sense of change and often causes the person to feel lonely, fighting against the entire world in pursuit…
Within the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the author Erich Maria Remarque captures the transforming essence of battle amidst the Great War, and how once-ignorant adolescents become part of the Lost Generation. A key character, Paul Baümer, reflects upon his perception of the war, “We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces” (88). Initially, the young, energetic soldiers alongside Paul romanticize the idea of warfare and the possibility of heroism. However, while experiencing life on the front, emotions of terror and anguish discolor their views and lead to a detachment from their natural inclinations in order to cope.…
In Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, violence and child soldier’s struggles is a major and common point. These passages were heart wrenching and difficult to get through. Beah went through a lot of hard times but he survived and pulled through with incredible strength and courage, even when that was not an easy thing to even think about doing. I believe that even though violence is an awful thing that no child should have to endure, I learned a lot through Beah’s awful experiences including war’s injustices and the importance of hope and courage.…
Smith, D. (2001). Children in the heat of war. Monitor, 32(8), 29. Retrieved 17 November 2011 from http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep01/childwar.aspx…
Have you ever stopped to think about how fortunate you are and how facile survival is for you? Survival means to manage to stay alive in any situation using whatever methods required to maintain yourself alive. Today, there are numerous people who have to survive by escaping their homes because of wars occurring there, such as the Syrian refugees. They abandon their homes and almost all of their possessions in order to survive the situation and start their lives anew somewhere else.The Holocaust was a terrible moment in time where millions of Jews and other groups of people were massacred purely because of their beliefs. Under Adolf Hitler’s rule, Nazi Germany slaughtered a countless amount of Jews because he thought that they had committed crimes against them in the past. Two examples of young girls who endured the Holocaust were Anne Frank and Krystyna Chiger, who entered hiding because of the Nazi persecution. Both of these girls were forced to use similar yet diverse survival skills to be able to stay alive during this period of time.…