Act Of Killing

This film mainly employs two distinct genres of documentaries. The first is a complication film. The filmmaker uses footage that is archival and well as pictures from the events. This film uses powerful images like those of lynching

After nearly half a millennium of rule, the Romans began to lose their grip on Europe in the fifth century. The Fall of Rome left in its ruin political chaos, confusion, wide spread devastation, although the Romans at the time had no idea the fall of Rome was occurring. Divide of Western and Eastern Rome, invasions, military disloyalty, and economic instability are some of the factors associated with the fall of Rome. In AD 476, the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, was removed from power by Odovacar, leader of the Goths.

In modern society’s media we find solace in the idea that heroes are able to save the day, whether they have some unexplainable powers or are your average pedestrian that does an act of heroism so extraordinary that it has to be covered. When these acts are performed, whether they are in movies or in our own reality, the question is presented whether or not the action was morally just or not. A form of media that truly represents said moral question is Andre Dubus’ “Killings.” For the father of Frank Fowler, Matt, the idea of killing Richard Strout is justified because of the actions committed onto his son. To analyze the killing of Richard Strout one must first assess why Strout deserved to die.

According to Gregory H. Stanton, President of Genocide Watch there is 8 stages of Genocide and in his opinion Genocide is a progress that is developing in the eight stages and which is predictable and not inexorable. At each stage there are possibilities to stop or at least influence Genocide and Oskar Schindler’s deeds are one example of moral courage and active resistance to the worst Genocide in the history of humankind during the Second World War. The following text will deal with evidences of Stanton’s eight stages of Genocide in Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List” and Schindler’s attempts to stop Genocide in the different stages.

David Nirenberg talks about two types of violence, “cataclysmic violence” and “systematic violence”. The first part of the book discusses “cataclysmic” violence, while the second part of the book focuses on “systematic violence.”

“The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world” (Arendt pg 80). Violence is contagious, like a disease, which will destroy nations and our morals as human beings. Each individual has his or her own definition of violence and when it is acceptable or ethical to use it. Martin Luther King Jr., Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt are among the many that wrote about the different facets of violence, in what cases it is ethical, the role we as individuals play in this violent society and the political aspects behind our violence.

The filmmakers use emotion in various ways throughout the film, Hotel Rwanda, in order to make you care about the refugees that take shelter in the Hotel Mille Collines. In the beginning of the film, Paul Rusesabagina and Dube have to drive through a march of Hutu people which made me feel hostile and inferior. This same hostility and inferiority are key emotions that I felt throughout the film because whenever the Hutus came into contact with the refugees, the Hutus would become aggressive. The acts of aggression towards the Tutsis made me become more connected with the harsh living conditions the refugees went through. Furthermore, the unresponsive actions by the world superpowers towards the war going on in Rwanda created a sense of frustration.

From prehistory to 21st century, violence and warfare permeate human existence. Tribes, cities, and nations have pitted their youth against one another in hopes improving their position. However, these Soldiers regularly fall short of maximizing their killing potential. In the book On Killing, Dave Grossman scrupulously examines war throughout recent history; specifically the human element in killing. His thorough assessment of the psychological factors associated with homicide is vitally important to individuals who wish to successfully lead their Soldiers during and after combat. Its ultimate value clearly visible in light of four major facets: the background of the writer, the general points of the book, analysis of essential concepts, and the insight provided.

Cruelty: A Human Instinct? In his final novel, inspired by his own personal encounters with the cruelty of the human race, Peter Matthiessen exemplifies to us that, “All nations, he continues, and all religions, cultures, and societies throughout history have perpetrated massacres, large and small: man has been a murder forever” (203). Such experiences have led him to write this novel based on the cruelty of some races or ethnic groups, solely on the premise that history has a way of repeating itself in the most derogatory ways. Peter Matthiessen, a strong environmentalist, a frequent practicer of Zen Buddhism, and a former CIA agent is widely known for his deep interpretations of his views in works of both fiction and nonfiction.

(Pinker) For instance, Glover’s description of the horrors in My Lai (Vietnam) will resonate with any reader well after he or she have finished the novel: “They [the American troops] burnt down every house. They raped women and girls and killed them. They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others… Pregnant women had their stomachs slashed open and were left to die” (Glover 58). Although for some, the My Lai Massacre may seem less important than the Holocaust, for example, because of the smaller number of deaths, Glover does not see it that way. In his eyes, it does not matter how many deaths there were; just the mere fact that humans have let themselves do such obscene acts to other human beings is what matters. But what is even more important than those past events is how humanity, as a whole, can stop events such as the My Lai Massacre from ever happening again.

Because of their detachment from society, killers never experience the simple pleasures regular civilians experience in their daily life. However, just like all humans, they crave feelings of joy, happiness, and tranquility. They achieve this by murdering a multitude of people. One killer from the Holocaust confessed that “the gassings [that] [occurred] had a calming effect” on him (Hӧss). Because he was unable to receive any feeling of peace from another, less violent action, he killed millions in gas chambers without a second thought.

This helps to build the realness of the story and is the foundation of the documentary. Morris’s use of re-enactments is interesting, although, in my opinion not always successful. The re-enactments themselves feel like a quickly throne together skit, rather than truly intentional moments of acting. I think that there are moments that are really interesting, for example as mentioned in the previous question, the shots of the victim’s injuries drawn out with the sound of gun fire was really powerful. Other shots were not as powerful for me, for

In this scene the Congolese people are celebrating one year. The movie bounces between Lumumba’s last minutes of life and the celebration. At the celebration we see Joseph, a man who once played friend to Lumumba, sitting on a throne and one can assume he is now the person in power. Ironically, he encourages the people to stand for a moment of silence honoring Lumumba. This part sticks out to me the most because I was not sure if Lumumba was already dead during the moment of silence or f this was an inference made by Joseph while Lumumba was still being tortured. This part also stuck out to be because Lumumba knew he was going to die, yet he stood tall and dies with dignity. The soldiers even had a moment of silence before they shot him, almost as if he was being

The history of human nature has been bloody, painful, and even destructive. Nonetheless, before understanding their environments humans used to kill each other based on their own mindset on the ideal of violence, and what it actually meant. Pinker describes narratives of violent acts from the past, that today are foreign to us. He gives us a tour of the historical human violence and how the violence in human nature has changed throughout time. The main idea from Pinker’s book,“The Better Angels of Our Nature ', is “for all the dangers we face today, the dangers of yesterday were even worse.” He provides its readers with explicit violent stories beginning from 8000 BCE to now, and describes how violence has evolved from a blood lost to more of a peaceful existence.

Written for both scholars and everyday readers who are interested in the question of how ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing, the use of the primary and secondary source material have been collected in the development of this book. As a result the emergence of this primary source material, such as, “form scholars of holocausts and genocide studies, and the opening of archives throughout Eastern Europe, emergence of primary source material from Cambodia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, and the cultivation of oral collections form victims and perpetrators of extraordinary evil around the world continue to yield even more documentation to be translated, sorted, and analyzed,” an incredible exhaustive account of inhumanity we perpetrate