Waiting For The Barbarian Essay

The word barbarian in the time of the ancient Greeks meant foreigner. In the 1200's it turned into a much more negative term meaning people who were savage and evil. Today Barbarian means a person of a community that doesn’t belong to one of the great civilizations. So the question “How barbaric were the barbarians?” My answer is very, despite some civilized acts, for a multitude of reasons. (Background essay)

With the poorly supported claim that “torture is [justifiable] only to save lives,” Levin presents weakly supported cases that appeal to the reader’s sense of emotion where torture might be valid. In the first scenario, he describes a terrorist threatening an overpopulated city with an atomic bomb; the second, a terrorist who has kidnapped a mother’s baby.

The frequent depiction of the “Noble Savage” trope has many functions, with its main function being to portray Native Americans as sinless uneducated humans and to make their abusers and torturers seem evil and superior, which in most cases the torturers are indeed evil. Bartolomé de Las Casas and Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca use the “Native Savage” trope for different reasons, which makes their portrayal different, and not because they are writing about different tribes and groups of Native Americans. The “Noble Savage” is a very common adaptation of Native Americans, but the definition isn’t as pretty as the name of the trope may seem to be.

Throughout the Holocaust torture was used by many Nazis in order to get the Jewish prisoners to do something or give information. Torture has always been an element of Fascism, and Amery argues that “...torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence”. He continues to even say that if torture were removed from Fascism, there would be nothing left. In Hitler’s Germany, Nazis tortured for information, “but in addition they tortured with good conscience of depravity”, meaning they were aware of the moral corruption it was causing, all in all “they tortured because they were torturers”. Nazis purposefully placed torture in their ways, but became

“A Case For Torture” is an essay written by Michael Levin in which he tries to make a compelling case for the use of torture as a punishment during specific situations in the United States. Levin cites different hypothetical situations in order to logically prove his argument. His use of theoretical instances is meant to help direct the reader to an understanding of the applications of his policy on torture. The examples he uses include a hypothetical terrorist attack on Manhattan and hospital robbery. But unfortunately, the examples Levin cites lack strength due to their inapplicability to the current world. Equally important, in today’s terrorist centered climate, there is no room for Levin’s position on torture. Michael Levin in “A Case For Torture” is not logically convincing in his discussion as to why torture is a valid form of punishment, because his assertions rely too heavily on the speculative, and are not contemporary enough for use in modern times.

The Cuisine of Barbarians The journey of the Chinese-American immigrant is characterized by conflicting identities and culture clashes. In his novel, The Barbarians Are Coming, David Wong Louie captures the struggles of this journey. Using food to symbolize the Chinese-American cultural clash, Louie writes about the life of Sterling Lung, a 26 year-old American born Chinese. Sterling’s American Dream is to become a white, middle-class American. In order to do so, Sterling believes he must become a member of the wealthy class, dine with white foodways, and severe his ties with Chinese culture.

Because of this philosophy, the first victim suffers a fatal fate in the hands of Colonel Joll’s brutality. Two prisoners, a boy and his uncle, were arrested shortly after a raid incident had concluded that these two were not part of. According to the uncle, the boy is sick, and he was taking the boy to find a doctor. Sadly, even the best doctor cannot help the man as the Magistrate describe the man’s body after Colonel was through with his interrogation, “The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole” (Coetzee p.7). The uncle dies without giving up any information about the resistance. Even if he had any information, he would be filled with tremendous amount of rage to not give out any or too weak from the torture to make sense of anything anymore.

Subject: The subject of this essay is very clear. It brings up the controversial subject of whether torture can be done in certain contexts. From the beginning, we know the writer's point of view. He believes that it can’t be done on a regular basis but is sometimes not only okay, but necessary.

The history of torture in Europe may seem at first to be a steady progression of barbarous tactics, leading from one social purge to the next, but this is not completely the case. Torture has been used in a progression from primitive methods to the present more modern styles. It has also developed extensively, both in severity and variety of methods used. But in the end, torture has gone full circle; modern forms of torture are more like those methods used by savages than anything in between. Overall, the severity of torture has fluctuated, growing and receding with the passing of each new time period, but eventually reverting to its original state.

The author stated that “the dark fascination of torture on [him] and many other South African writers”, seems to have two particular reasons (Coetzee ed. Attwell 363). The author summed up, “the first [reason] is that relations in the torture room provide a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims”, and reason two “that the torture room is a site of extreme human experience, accessible to no one save the participants” (Coetzee ed. Attwell 363. The element of torture creates a crisis of comprehension for the Magistrate, as well as for the reader, in Waiting for the Barbarians, however also of portrayal for

Gaza- SP- Demolitions operation on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank by Israel more incentive to do lately. Israel argued that the destruction of houses is because Palestinians do not have an official certificate and considered illegal.

Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians depict the body as the true source of identity. They also both describe torture as a way to destroy the body, and therefore the identity, by exposing the truth that the world around oneself is all relative to the body. The purpose of which, both say, is to further a political regime of some sort. Where the books take a separate stand is on the relationship between a torturer and a prisoner. Scarry describes the relationship as polar, while Coetzee describes it a more close. The reasoning behind illustrating this relationship to be more intimate is to allow for the comparison of two unlike characters, Colonel Joll and the Magistrate. The comparison ends in a realization that both characters are visages of the Empire. Each representing a different justification for colonial imperialism, both of which are determined to be lies. Therefore, according to Coetzee’s novel, there is no proper justification. From this message, a very existential idea is formed. You should take from this the fact that whether you try to do good or bad, you are just pawns in someones else’s board. Bodies are the only truth. You are your body. Therefore you are truth, and don’t need outside influences because they are illusions of truth and serve only to cloud your mind’s eye. The key is to realize this and become autonomous in your

In J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate comes to discover the humanity of the barbarian through his interactions with the blind girl, which eventually leads him to learn about the nature of his own humanity. Although the Magistrate is more lenient on the Barbarians than Colonel Joll, he still unknowingly objectifies them, while placing himself above them. It is only when he is imprisoned that he comes to realize the fragility of his own humanity. Ultimately Coetzee uses the magistrate’s journey from empirical leader to broken and fearful prisoner to express that peace and stability between people can only be obtained when all humanity is valued.

In this novel the author J. M Coetzee uses the colonization and the abuse of power hand in hand, by colonization the Colonel and his men abused the Barbarian people and the Magistrate tried to help the Barbarian girl. The novel takes place in a settlement at an unspecified time in an unspecified country. This essay elaborates on the issues of unequal power relation, moral consciousness, moral recognition of identity, torture existing in contemporary world, awareness of evil in the colonization and sympathy for the girl. As much as the novel is written decades ago, there are instances whereby the perspectives of this novel can be applied. The most common instance is torture ‘Torture that exist in the contemporary world’. Torture in the contemporary

Waiting For The Barbarians” by J.M Coetzee is a novel that truly helps the world understand how colonization might just be the worst thing human has done to destroy other civilizations culture and respect. “The Empire “ is a nation that is set up to have a centralized government. The capital is where all the power is contain and then there are other subunits of smaller governments such as the magistrate who rules the frontier of the whole country. The magistrate lives and guard a town on the frontier and from his years there everything been peaceful with the barbarians. However, once the third Berru which is a powerful branch of government arrive to town everything changes. Violence, torture, and chao overwhelmingly flood the town and the rest of the capital. Resulting in major realization of how colonization is a pattern of destruction that can be seen in this novel and in real life. A close resemblances of The Empire is The Song Dynasty which begins from 960 to 1279 and share a common barbarian enemies known as the mongols who are from Mongolia which is north of China. The Song Dynastie follows many of The Empires principles that eventually causes internal demolition.