"Questions of Conquest" by Mario Vargas Llosa and "Freedom and Democracy"

Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his article ‘Questions of Conquest’, that many countries seem to think that planting bombs is a way of showing self-determination and achieving justice. India in particular, he says, is fighting its battle with the past instead of facing the future. He asks himself the question: Was the discovery and conquest of America by Europeans the greatest fear of the Christian West or one of history’s monumental crimes? We don’t know what would have happened or developed in the cultures and populations that used to be the only humans on that Continent, and we will never find out the answer to this question. The main focus in the first paragraph of his article is that the most incredible things happen to the strongest populations due to stupidity. This he expresses in two other questions concerning India and Mexico/Peru.

Vargas Llosa mentions his old history teacher Raùl Porras Berrenchea, who once said that the destruction of the Inca Empire and the linking of its vast territories and peoples to the Western world was a crucial event in the destiny of Europe and America. Porras Berrenchea was about to make a book out of all his works and discoveries when sudden death put an end to his plans. The author then put himself the goal of reading and taking notes on the chronicles’ various themes, but principleally myths and legends that preceded and followed the discovery and conquest of Peru – notes that Porras Berrenchea had left behind. Vargas Llosa claims that these chronicles are the beginning of literary fiction as we understand it today, and that it’s possible to find everything in those notes.

Mario Vargas Llosa writes in the next section of his article, that The Inca Empire achieved a feat that only few empires have achieved before: they managed to survive hunger in an immense region in a way that every region had enough to eat. They had reached a level that not even Spain had reached at that point, focusing on social, military, agricultural and handicraft development. The Inca Empire was a state where individuality had no importance and where an individual’s free will was taken away by religion which turned the population into a laborious and efficient one. This relates in a way to the novel ‘We’ by Zamyatin because individuality and free will are non-existent in the ‘One State’ the main character is living in. The religion in the Inca Empire was mainly political which also refers to the before stated book ‘We’ since the ‘Benefactor’ in the novel could be compared to a very political god that has power over the whole state. Another relation to the book is that it states that the Inca Empire was capable of fighting and defeating the natural elements, but had trouble defeating the unexpected.

According to Mario Vargas Llosa, today, we haven’t yet fully developed a notion of individual sovereignty. We got our language and our name from our parents and grandparents but they also told us that every evil we do can be blamed on the devil. I’m not sure if I agree with that, because not everyone is religious and believes that there is a devil. When we try to integrate a population with another, the population being integrated has to pay the high price of giving up their culture, their language and their beliefs. That is cruel and harsh, and according to Vargas Llosa, that is also something we got from our ancestors. In conclusion he says that ancient literature gives testimony to the discovery and the conquest and that in the chronicles we learn a lot about the roots of our problems today and about the challenges we face in our everyday life that we still haven’t answered.

The second article, ‘Freedom and Democracy’ is a chapter from a book. It talks about the illusion of Individuality, like the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual in a fascist regime. The author says that we are happy to be free to express our thoughts because freedom guarantees our individuality. The author thinks that “the suppression of sponanteous feelings, and thereby the development of genuine individuality starts very early, as a matter of fact with the earliest training of a child”. He explains that independence, individuality and the capacity for noticing negative qualities in others all develop when we are children and that the adults that are around us when we grow up have an immense influence on our individuality. We learn how to be friendly to others, how to be polite and cheerful but in the process of all that we lose the capability of expressing our thoughts and opinions. “In our society emotions in general are discouraged”, he states. Without emotions we’re weakened, we lose our sense of tragedy and the individual existence is badly developed. Cultures before our time had a higher development of individuation, but when it comes to death, all cultures and religions have a different way of dealing with their sense of tragedy. Some people picture death as nothing but a shadowy continuation of life, others made death unreal saying that there is a life after death in heaven. We pretend that elements like death do not exist, because they are removed from our sight. In the chapter it also says that school influences our individuality in the very first stages of our lives by teaching us facts that are true but at the same time it discourages our original way of thinking and having a relative regard on all truth. The author says that we don’t have a structuralized picture of the world and that we don’t know what we know. We tell ourselves that we need certain things but we don’t know if it’s what we want, or if in fact it is someone else’s will.

Both articles talk about the importance of individuality and how nowadays this individuality isn’t very developed. The first article tells us that also in ancient times like in the Inca Empire, individuality and free will were small of existence. They weren’t important, what counted was the big picture. I find it fascinating how in history some things have changed so much and other stayed just the same as they were before, even if it got a little better. We got freedom but don’t know what to do with it, we can do what we want but we don’t know what we want.