Essay on In Love and War

War can be defined as “an active struggle between competing entities. It’s truly hard to tell who is right or wrong during a war. Both sides are fighting for what they believe in and what is true to their heart. In the end there is always two things promised – destruction and death. These two objects can explain the result in every facet of war from the physical to emotional.

In Afghanistan, Women’s rights were very denied and completely dismissed. Women were treated horribly. They were beaten, abused verbally, and even killed. Under the rule of the Taliban, women were better off staying in the safety of their own homes.

Today in the post –Taliban era, women still struggle with their rights. Resolutions were produced and rights for women have advanced since September 11th but in order to move forward, much work needs to be done. Hundreds of years of repression for Afghan women will take a lot longer than a few years to actually revolutionize. There is violence towards women that are not practicing traditions customs and fear retaliations from the Taliban. Customs are difficult to change as well as government policies. (Bora Laskin Law). In Afghanistan, religious and cultural values, politics, and an uncertain acting government have played a major part in the struggle for women’s rights.

In most societies, men feel the need to reinforce the idea of their superiority upon women, so thus they use religion to prove their dominance. A Talib told Mariam of how ‘God made us differently’(Hosseini 324). These “differences” that the Talib speaks of is one of main ways patriarchy is defended, since God made man and woman differently, the Afghan community assumes that they must be treated differently as well. Also, there must be one sex that is superior to the other then, many communities along with the Afghan community chose to place men above women due to sexist beliefs of the

The Constitution that was created in Afghanistan during the 1920’s, stated equal rights for women and men. In fact, during the year of 1959, new policies created educational and career opportunities and voluntary removal of having to wear the burka. Women’s roles become similarly equivalent to male roles; they had the opportunity to acquire knowledge from universities, and were provided jobs in industrial, business, and entertainment settings. The atrocities that came about during the Mujaheddin and Taliban control were unheard of years prior, when women lived in peace and prosperity

Growing up and living in Afghanistan as a woman has its challenges. Parents choose who can marry you and they choose everything for you. In this book, Laila and Mariam both show the struggles it is to be a girl, and how much disrespect they get in Afghanistan. Both Mariam and Laila are married to the same man, and he is abusive to both of them. They also live under Taliban rule, and the rules that they set are very unfair for women. In Khaled Hosseni’s novel, he has many different themes but the most prevalent one is of woman inequality, and that is shown through multiple accounts of abuse, disrespect, and unfairness.

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

A Thousand Splendid Suns, a book written by Khaled Hosseini, gives us a unique and informative glimpse into life in Afghanistan in the early 1960’s to the 2000’s. In it we can see many different political and social issues ravaging the country, with the most evident being gender inequality. Though many diverse groups of people were being discriminated against at the time, most of the subordination fell onto women as they had more and more rights taken away from them when various ruling powers took control. The author relays this information to us and educates us as to what happened through compelling and thought-provoking literary devices such as symbolic characters and objects, and allusions. By using these

Historical events can play an important role in a person's life.  In A Separate Peace, the whole atmosphere at the Devon School changed as World War II progressed.  The boys either eagerly awaited the draft, enlisted in the area of war they wanted, or did not want to go at all.  The students at the school created new activities for enjoyment since the customary past times could not be played due to a lack of materials.  When a friend "returns" from the war, the boys at Devon got a real sense of what the war was like.  The boys learned that going to war was not all fun and games like they had anticipated.  The influence World War II had on the characters in A

What was it like living during the Great Depression? What strategies did Australia use to get out of the Great Depression?

The Taliban is an extremist Islamic group highly emphasizing a strong interpretation of sharia law that arose in the early 1990s after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Referencing the BBC article, a common belief holds that the Taliban first emerged in religious seminaries that preached a hard line of Sunni Islam. The Taliban’s promise to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the surrounding area was to restore peace and security using their interpretation of the sharia law once they were in power (“Who Are the Taliban?”). Along with the many new policies and regulations of society, there arose a new interpretation of the role of women in society. Women became very restricted and had to live in a way that was extremely submissive to men to the point where it was almost dehumanizing, as many would argue. Although the Taliban has been out of control in Afghanistan since December of 2001, remnants of their oppression towards women remain. In this paper, I will demonstrate the Taliban’s remaining effects in Afghan society regarding many aspects of everyday life, such as the workforce, education, healthcare, and human rights. To begin, I will give a brief overview of how Afghan women participated in society before the Taliban came to power. I will then provide information and examples that shed light on women’s life during Taliban rule. In the final section of this paper, I will describe how the lifestyle of women has changed as a result of the Taliban’s oppressive laws and

The Taliban implemented laws restricting the movements and actions of women in Afghanistan in public places. While attempting to visit her child in a home for young girls, Laila is beaten within an inch of her life as a consequence of walking outside without a male escort (Hosseini). The extreme course of action, beating a woman for walking alone, demonstrates the illogical and unjustifiable actions the Taliban promotes the practice of in Afghanistan. The women and men have dramatically unequal rights.

Khaled Hosseini presents the struggle Afghan women go through every day by discussing honour, marriage and the place of women in society in Afghanistan.

During the Taliban rule, Afghan women’s fight for their rights increased and strengthened in response to the strict rules that the regime enforced. However, the problem in advocating for their rights was the fact that a lot of the Talibans were stationed in almost every area. If the Afghan women had to the chance to, at times, standing in each direction of their way was the Taliban who would stop them with any means necessary before they could even get their point across. For instance, Latifa an ordinary citizen, who had lived during taliban rule “freely admits that fear of the Taliban drove her to stay inside and risk this depression" (Cole, 2008, p. 148). Latifa along with other Afghan women who were surveyed under the oppression of the Taliban

It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting.