Nobody loves me, but my mother

The article ‘Born and Raised in a North Korean Gulag’ by Choe Sang-Hun, published in the New York Times on Monday, July 9, 2007 was a shock to me. Having read 1984, a fantasy book, I should have been prepared for this, but I had no idea this kind of world could really exist nowadays. How naïve of me to think that something this terrible couldn’t exist in our modern world. I was aware of the fact that torture, death, murder and child labor existed but that someone or a group of people could create a camp like this where people in there don’t even know that there is an outside world, seems unrealistic. The prisoner that was released was in that camp for over 20 years. In 1984 of course, people have spent their whole life there, under this regime except the elder ones that can remember that it used to be different.

When Shin Dong Hyok describes his life in the camp, it seems like he’s talking about a bad war movie, which has an ending that’s only partly happy. The day someone told him about the life outside the walls of the concentration camp, he starts to dream and wishes to be free. In 1984 Winston develops these same feelings when O’Brian hints at him that there is ‘another place’, and he starts to fight for his freedom to love and to have a life of his own. In camp n.14 as well as in 1984 Oceania, the people are ‘deprived of their ability to have the most basic human feelings, such as love, hatred and even a sense of being sad or mistreated’ (Choe Sang-Hun p.2). As terrible as it sounds, it is probably for the best, because if the people in the camp were to feel love and sadness, their lives would be a simple torture. In these camps the people aren’t treated like humans, but like machines. Each day is repetitive and equally awful. Women have to work from 5a.m. ‘til midnight, I wonder how they survive longer than two weeks. The survivor describes a scene where a girl had been beaten to death for hiding wheat grains in her pocket. What kind of person would do that, and how can someone not be terrified and shocked at that view? I don’t understand how you can be immune to those feelings of disgust and fear, while watching it happen.

In Valley no.2, where Shin Dong Hyok used to go to school, there was a slogan carved into a wooden plaque saying: “Everyone obey the regulations!” We have talked about propaganda in class, and it is common in dictatorial regimes to help the popularity of a party using catching or patriotic slogans. The best examples are the Soviet Union with Stalin and Lenin, Hitler’s rule in Germany and also 1984. In this case, the slogan was put there to remind everyone of the single thing they have to do in the camp: Do what you’re told to do. When he escapes from the camp, he admits that he misses being told what to do. He finds it much simpler than having to make your own decisions, which I can understand to some extent but it baffles me how you could miss being treated like a rat. Dong Hyok watched his mother and his brother die. He sat in the audience when his own mother was hanged, and all he felt was hate. He didn’t love her, he hated her for trying to escape, even though he doesn’t know if it’s true, and he still can’t forgive her. Living in the camp, it never occurred to him that something was unfair or that he wasn’t treated right.

It is amazing how similar life in this concentration camp and life in Oceania are. Orwell’s book was his imagination, his warning about the future, but this article actually describes something that happened. Still today there are concentration camps like this one in many countries that we don’t know of and unless someone lucky and smart enough to escape comes and tells us what’s going on, we might not find out about all of them anytime soon. The thought that there are still people living in these exact conditions, not feeling a thing, not having any emotions, scares me. It’s a good thing that this man could escape even though his friend had to die during the escape, because now the message is out there. Now the authorities can take action and hopefully they already did with success.

You can't handle the truth

The truth. How do we know something is absolutely true? Is there such a thing as truth?

In class we each presented an object or a statement that we thought to be true objectively. How can we know if there are really an infinite number of points in a circle, and how do we know if the cover of a DVD box really displays what the DVD is about? To be honest, there is no real answer. It might or might not be true, depending on how you look at it.

In 1984 the people their truth is manipulated easily because the government makes up and changes the past, the words and the truth every day. The citizens are manipulated in believing everything they’re told, but is their truth the truth? What is true to one person doesn’t have to be true for everyone. If the truth changes everyday then it can’t be an objective truth. That’s why the definitions for words in a dictionary aren’t objectively true. Definitions change and word’s meanings change every day because we give them different meanings. Laws of Physics are relatively true because we can’t prove them wrong anyhow. Then again we base our judgments on our senses, on what we see, hear or feel. And people might sense something different than the others and then the law might be proven wrong to that one person. Also if the person is blindfolded, how do we know something is happening? A good example of that is the law of conservation of momentum of a pendulum. Even if you are blindfolded, the pendulum will not hit you and you can therefore prove to yourself that even though you didn’t see the pendulum swing back and forth, that it didn’t hit you and didn’t swung back higher than before.

Believing something is true gives us security. We feel safe when we don’t have to question everything. When we can believe the cup we’re drinking our coffee out is red, then we feel safer than if we had to wonder if it was green or red. The truth is something that can be manipulated, and therefore there is probably nothing that is true all the time, everywhere and to everyone. It is hard to define truth because truth is what is true to us, but how do we know everyone sees it the same way? We don’t and therefore we can’t define something as being absolutely true. I think that there is an exception though when it comes to actions. To our personal actions. We know what we did, and how we did it. No one can manipulate our actions in the way that we believe them to be not true. Our personal truth is hard to manipulate unless we believe everything we’re said.

Sauver le monde

George Orwell’s article ‘Politics and the English Language’ relates in many ways to his book 1984. It discusses the ‘bad way’ in which the English language is. Orwell explains in many convincing arguments how and why the language we speak gets worse from day to day. He says that ‘language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes’. That’s what he thinks and so he demonstrates how it could be if it wasn’t, in 1984. There they invent the Newspeak that constantly evolves, gets simpler and simpler and forbids the citizens of Oceania to say what they want. Orwell says that our thoughts are foolish. So what if it was forbidden to think the way we do? He imagines the outcome for us in his book, where thoughtcrime exists, and where you have to use doublethink to forget about your emotions and memories.

To avoid humbug and vagueness in words he recommends to:

1.       Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2.       Never use a long words here a short one will do.

3.       If it’s possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4.       Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5.       Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6.       Break any of these rules than say anything barbarous.

When you read through Orwell’s essay, you get the feeling that everything you ever said was nonsense. In his opinion, we use verbal false limbs, pretentious diction (‘scientific words’) and meaningless words. But what happens when we stop using all of these words? Wouldn’t we just turn out to speak another version of Newspeak? I personally think that his resolution is quite pleasing. I’ve always hated complicated words in all languages that I know because all they do is: they give you a hard time. In school we learn how important it is to use sophisticated words. In English class we can’t just come up with our simplest vocabulary when it comes to writing an essay. And in Biology class we have to use scientific and latinized words in order to get a good grade. On the other hand, I agree that people tend to use all these words to sound smarter. Only, the thing is that it isn’t the word that makes them smarter; it’s the fact that no one has a clue what he’s talking about that does.

Politicians often use words to sound more educated. I agree with that, I think that when you look back in our history, you notice that many politicians (especially the ones that ended up causing trouble at some point) use foreign words to sound smarter. If you present these words with a certain passion and some enthusiasm, it’s easy to fool people by making them believe that you’re saying something completely different from what you’re actually saying. And it is a little impressing when someone has la grandeur to express themselves in so many ways that die Verwirrung is massive, isn’t it?

Do you believe in Magic?

When you have to choose a book to read, how to you choose it? By its cover? Its title? Its author? Or is it the topic the story discusses that you’re fond to know more about?

‘The Psychology of the Novel – Thirteen ways of looking at the novel’ inspired these questions that I began to ask myself. The narrator says that “the basic substance of imaginative literature is not reason but emotion, which is expressed not by the denotation of words, nor the grammar of the sentences, but through the connotations and colorations of the words as employed by the author’s style.” When reading a book, it isn’t the word choice that makes me relate to it, even though the word choice is important for a better understanding of the story and the novel itself. It is the emotion that I can relate to, and that I can feel myself while reading the book. That doesn’t mean that if I’m always depressed, I’m going to read sad books because I can relate to it, no! It simply means that the words of the author help me relate to the characters in the novel because I can feel the way they do and understand what they’re going through just because the author has the ability or provoking emotions in me with words.  Fictional books like Twilight by Stephanie Meyer or Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling are hard to relate to in the sense that they’re not at all realistic, but they are easy to relate to in the way that they are written in a way that makes us want to be in the place of the main characters. Millions of people on earth love these books because they describe their personal Utopia with all the magic, the mysteries and the love.

The cover and the title of a novel/book are important to me. When I walk through a bookstore, I won’t stop at the stand with the books that possess a boring cover and an even more boring title. What is even more important though, is the author. When we like a certain author that has qualities of the voice that we appreciate, we are more likely to take his new novel than a novel written by someone that we know writes in a very arrogant or self-obsessed tone, that lets us feel indifferent and does not move us in any way. “The reader perceives and reacts to these qualities instantly, without thinking”.

Some authors of playwrights for example, like Brecht, are trying to do the exact opposite. Brecht, in this case, doesn’t want his audience to relate to the characters and therefore not connect with the emotions the characters are presenting. He was constantly trying to break ‘the forth wall’ by pulling the audience out of their comfort zone. The spectators were supposed to leave the theater thinking and arguing about what they just saw. He wanted them to be mad and shocked about what they had seen. The theater was supposed to go on, even though the play was over. This can also occur in books. Books aren’t supposed to give you the ‘aww-that-was-a-cute-story’ – feeling. Authors are trying to pass a message, to make their readers think about a topic they care about, or something like that. In the “Psychology of the novel” it says also that the point of view of the author or the narrator is like the perspective in a realistic painting – it changes the size and shape, the nature and identity, of characters etc. A novel must have action and point of view, as well as suspense and reflection, because that is the way life is.