Loung Ung: First They Killed My Father

Loung Ung 's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers follows her struggles as a child during the Angkar rule. Children in Cambodia directly suffered from trauma, which obviously dismisses the myth that children experience less pain than adults. The importance of Ung 's book is the emotional impact she has on the reader because she gives a voice to the victims and to the dead. As Americans, this topic, the Cambodian genocide does not get taught commonly in education. It shows the trauma that the citizens went through and how it affected the country.

The most common, (one of the most common) yet the most horrifying, displays of social injustices upon religions are genocides. During the 20th century, there have been many mass murders of people groups. Most were motivated to a significant degree by religious beliefs. A genocide that had a global effect was Adolf Hitler and the Nazi’s organized extermination of about 11 million people including 6 million

A society or a people cannot let a government lead them blindly. With misrepresentation comes a whole new form of unjustness. The strong are the ones who do not give into demands placed upon them if they do not agree; those who refuse to conform to society; those who stick to their beliefs, no matter the cost. In many cases, those people are the ones who practice civil disobedience. Martin Luther King, Henry Thoreau, Socrates… All advocated that they should not be denied their freedom, and all were considered disobedient.

In “The Worldwide Attack on Christians,” David Aikman highlighted the different forms of religious persecution suffered by Christians throughout the world. The forms of persecution ranged from political oppression to gruesome murders. Additionally, Aikman provided a list of culprits that included familiar Islamic nations but also less familiar non-Muslim regimes. Further, he examined several factors undermining the U.S. State Department’s and President Barack Obama’s obligation to thwart religious persecution happening abroad.

War in the the mid to late 70’s was violent. Many of the targeted people were children. The children were forced into child labor camps and made into child soldiers. The controllers of the war had a specific outlook on they controlled the affected people. Their goal was to take over the country and make all of its inhabitants equal. Phnom Penh was overtook by the khmer rouge in 1975, forcing all of the people who lived in the city to evacuate. Loung Ung’s family was forced out of their second class home during the evacuation. Desensitization played a huge role in the loss of innocence that took place during this biography. In the biography “First They Killed My Father” written by Loung Ung, Loungs loss of innocence is destroyed due to the harsh rule of the Khmer Rouge.

nstead of disregarding what his country said and speaking from his heart, Beah is able to make a lasting impression on the United Nations. By using his own experiences, he is able to more accurately convey the hardships that people in his country have to go to. The other kids that came to that UN meeting are now able to see what people are able to do for their loved ones in a way that effectively establishes anguish in the reader. Many people were willing to disregard their morals and even kill in order to get rid of pain in any way they feel necessary all because they feel taking revenge on innocent people will make them feel better about the loss of their own families.

In the beginning of First They Killed my Father, Loung Ung uses a tone of nostalgia to emphasize that the lighthearted, well-off family will never be the same after the Khmer Rouge regime forces them out of their home. Words such as “sing” and “buzz” indicate the fondness with which Loung remembers Phnom Penh and her own innocence within a world where her greatest concern is her mother’s fussing over her appearance (Ung 1). The reader knows that she will soon lose her naïvity when tyrannical government, making the beautiful description of Cambodia’s capital sickeningly bittersweet. Additionally, in the first chapter, the reader meets Loung’s father, who is her idol and most trusted adult. After reading that Loung “believes everything” her father

One example of intolerance is during the Nazi regime. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he tried to imprison and kill all Jews and nobody for the most part tried to stop him. Hitler didn’t stop there though, he still thought that everyone who didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes were not good enough, because they were not what he thought to be the perfect race. There was the holocaust. There were about 42, 500 facilities in Germany that were used for slave labor, mass murder, and other human right abuses. It is to be predicted that about 200,000 Jews died during the Holocaust. Jews were hunted down and were forced to go into hiding. If they were caught, they would be sent to concentration camps where many died. Six million Jews died, including 1.5 million children during the Nazi regime. Five million

Regan and Henderson theorize that a regime will engage in more repression if its leaders sense a great political threat. While a typical autocracy allows zero expression of opposition and a democracy offers numerous channels for expression,

Some of the serious violations committed by the government against the people includes the closing churches and arresting religious leaders and members of

Background knowledge. Research. Information. Investigating the topics of a novel before reading the book can be very helpful, especially when one is reading a story based on historical events. I believe doing research prior to reading a novel is useful because it makes one’s understanding of the story more clear. For example, before I began the novel First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung, I conducted an analysis of the Cambodian Civil War and did research about the author as well. Throughout the multiple sources I read about the Cambodian War and Loung Ung, I discovered background information about the war and the author’s family. This prevented me from developing questions about the less significant details of the story, and allowed

One of the main characters in the story was Loung Ung, a 5 year old and a second last born who comes from a middle class family of eight children. She was a daughter of a former member of the Cambodian Royal secret service and they lived in Phnom Penh. Loung's father loved gambling and used to win most of the times until the day he went too far and bet all his money and house on a game to the extent of almost losing his own family. The Khmer rouge was a group of communists who stormed Phnom Penh city in 1975 which forced the Ung family to flee their home and move from one village to another in order for them to hide their identity for safety. Not only is the Ung family fleeing, other families that lived in the city were also fleeing the area

The memoir First They Killed my Father by Loung Ung is a captivating and riveting account of the Khmer Rouge reign in the country of Cambodia. The memoir follows Ung’s family as they are forced to move from village to village and work in what became known as the killing fields. The question arises, what kind of society was Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge trying to create? It is evident throughout the course of the novel that the Khmer Rouge attempted to form a communist, agricultural based society free of outside influence and completely independent from the outside world, specifically the western world.

Despite religious freedom being a fundamental human right under international law, more than 5.1 billion people live in countries with strict religious restrictions (Johnson, 2013). In a more and more connected global community, religious persecution is on the rise, according to pew researchers (Johnson, 2013). Religious repression worldwide can be attributed to mob violence against minority religions, sacrilege of holy sites, detentions of religious enemies, and many more crimes against humanity (Johnson, 2013). The nature of Fundamentalism is called into question, as extremist religious figures lead intolerance of other religions, resulting to violence and ethnic cleansing to make their interpretation the only interpretation (Johnson, 2013). Questions are raised over the U.S inclusion of religious freedom in its foreign policy, and a remedy of the ineffectiveness of the Presidential Administrations since the Religious Freedom Act (Johnson, 2013).

Meet 5-year-old Young Ung who is trained as a soldier in the era when the Khmer Rouge assumed power over Cambodia in 1975. A reign of terror and genocide starts and about 2 million Cambodians are killed. Ung is forced out of her ancestral home to train as a soldier while her siblings are taken as laborers.