The Khmer Rouge Essay Example for Free

The Khmer Rouge Essay There are many genocides that people are not aware of. One of them is the attempted genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was able to gain power and remain in control of Cambodia for years without interference because they isolated the country from any foreign influence. Other countries had no idea what was happening inside Cambodia until years later. The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, wanted to create their own ideal communist society. So how did The Khmer Rouge gain so much power and control? Some argue that Pol Pot was the only one responsible for the power and control gained by the Khmer Rouge. On the other hand, others say that the notion of social hierarchy was reversed and that is how power and control was gained. The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge leader was Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, during which time two million Cambodians died from torture and starvation (The Khmer Rouge-Wikipedia 1). Anybody who was seen as a threat was killed by the Khmer Rouge. This organization is remembered primarily â€Å"for its policy of social engineering, which resulted in genocide† (The Khmer Rouge-Wikipedia 2). They tried to transform agriculture, but instead it led to hunger, insisting on absolute independence, even in the supply of medicine. Thousands died from treatable diseases. People were brutally murdered and tortured for no reason. The Khmer Rouge seized power by using force, authority, and fear. Cambodians had no choice, it was either obey or be killed. During Pol Pot’s time in power, he forced urban dwellers to move to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor camps. His goal was to â€Å"restart civilization† (Kiernan). Thousands of families from Cambodia were moved from their homes and were forced to work. Overnight everybody from Cambodia became a farmer including doctors, clerks, cooks, and business owners. They took Cambodians into the countryside, where they became peasants starving to death (Carvin 3). Some say that Pol Pot was responsible for the power and control of Cambodia because â€Å"Pol Pot cut Cambodia off from the world. He banned foreign and minority languages and attacked the neighboring countries of Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand in an attempt to regain ancient ‘lost territory’† (The life of Pol Pot- Cambodia ). This statement is true because the Khmer Rouge did gain part of their power by isolating the country, but Pol Pot is not fully responsible for that. There were other people involved, like Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan all of these people were also leaders in the Khmer Rouge. Nuon Chea was the second leader in the Khmer Rouge he is known a s â€Å"The evil genius of the movement† (Chandler 1), because he is the one who was in charge of the prison system. He was one of the one’s with a heartless mind, planning tortures and executing innocent people. There was also Ieng Sary who was the one responsible for the deaths of many intellectuals who were supposed to be re-trained at a camp, but instead were killed (Chandler 2). Sary was also a cold blooded man who contributed in The Khmer Rouge, killing intellectuals thinking they were prone to exploit others. Sary is another accomplice of the Khmer Rouge who helped gain power. Son Sen was the prime minister of the Khmer Rouge he was also in charge of S-21 which was a jail. Sen was killed in 1997 by Pol Pot for participating in a peace process outlined by the Paris Peace Agreements (Son Sen 2). Even though he may have regretted what he did, he was still part of the Khmer Rouge and did not make any attempt to stop anything when he was supposed to. Last was Khieu Samphan, David Chandler a Professor of International Relations, explains that Samphan was described as having in his prime a nimble, even mischievous mind – but at the same time was meticulous, doctrinaire, slavishly obedient to his party superiors and extremely rigid in his thinking. Samphan would do anything he was asked to do step by step. The argument that Pol Pot was the only responsible for the power and control in Cambodia is weak because as we can see there were many master minds that helped the Khmer Rouge, they all worked together to gain control. According to Judy Ledgerwood a cultural anthropologist, power and control was gained by the notion of social hierarchy being reversed. Those who were wealthy and educated were treated as slaves, monks and kings from Cambodia were nothing but labor workers for the Khmer Rouge. Ledgerwood says that â€Å"crucial reversal was with regard to age. The Khmer Rouge saw adults as already poisoned by the previous regime, but children were still pure and could be properly indoctrinated† (Ledgerwood 3). The idea that adults were â€Å"poisoned† by previous regimes is ridiculous. The Khmer Rouge just knew that adults had more reasoning and experience to understand what was happening. They used children to brainwash them and turn them against their parents and adults. Children helped the Khmer Rouge maintain power since they were being trained to spy on their parents, maybe to see if any parent was a threat to the Khmer Rouge. Gender rolls also played a part; young women were given a degree of political and military authority (Ledgerwood3). The Khmer Rouge knew they needed women in their side; they had the potential to help them politically succeed and gain more power in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot wanted an ideal communist society. According to Andy Carvin, â€Å"peasants, in fact, were the Khmer Rouge communist ideal†¦ Peasants were seen as simple, uneducated, hardworking and not prone to exploiting others† (Carvin 3). The Khmer Rouge did not want any Cambodian to be smart or successful. If there were any educated Cambodians they would be killed, since Pol pot and the Khmer Rouge did not want anyone to get any ideas that might- over throw their plan. It was a smart idea but they did not need to kill to have their â€Å"ideal communist society†. The Khmer Rouge could have used those people to create better ideas for his plan, a plan that did not involve killing people. Secrecy was also one of the best tools for controlling the population. Cambodians were told that the country was being run by Angka, no leaders were mentioned (Carvin 1) to keep the identities of the leaders hidden. They just controlled the people by lying and tricking them into believing whatever the Khmer Rouge wanted them to believe. This also helped them maintain their power and control over Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was able to gain control and maintain it for so many years because of the secrecy, the fear that was created, how they trained and brain washed the children as well as the adults and isolating the country. Without any of these, the Khmer Rouge could have been stopped and they would not have gained so much power and control. Secrecy was important to hide their identities, and to not be blamed for all the murders. Fear was a powerful tactic to use because Cambodians knew that they had to obey to everything, if not they would get killed. Children were a key to maintaining their power and control, because the Khmer Rouge trained them their way and converted them into heartless, cold blooded children. Isolating the country was the most important in gaining power and control, because Cambodia was helpless. There were no outsiders involved, and that help them maintain power and control.

The Three Unique Characters of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher Es

The Three Unique Characters of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher In Edgar Allan Poe’s, â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher,† the three characters are the unknown narrator, the narrators old time friend Roderick Usher, and Roderick’s sister Madeline Usher. The three characters are unique people with distinct characteristics, but they are tied together by the same type of â€Å"mental disorder†. They all suffer from insanity but they each respond to it differently. Roderick and his sister seem to have a spiritual attatchment, and the narrator begins to get sucked into it. The narrator is called for help by his old time friend Roderick Usher. There is a split feeling in the narrator’s mind between the rational and the supernatural. When he first arrives to the house, he sees a face in the tarn, a split crack in the house and the double image of his own face on the image of the house. Unlike Roderick, the narrator appears to be a man of common sense. He seems to have a good heart in that he comes to help a friend from his boyhood. Being educated and analytical, he observes that his friend Roderick has a mental disorder. The narrator tries to find scientific explanations for what Roderick senses, but when he can’t find one, he criticizes Roderick for his fantasies, and claims that Roderick is â€Å"enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenated†. The narrator tries his hardest to help but he can’t because he ...

Bilingual Education: Critique Essay

According to Brisk (1998), when bilingual or bilateral education is implemented in private schools the results are very encouraging. Students of all ages benefit from such approach producing at times amazing results. When, however, the bilingual education is implemented in public schools for lingo-minority, the results become controversial if not questionable. To understand such a disparity, a lot of studies have been conducted during the last two decades. One of this studies that Brisk described was done by UNESCO more than 40 years ago concluded that when children were taught in their second (or minor) language they experienced difficulties in their education. From their report, one could see clearly that researchers at this organization favored the mother tongue declaring that children get better education when teachers teach them using it. Logically, the language is the medium to transit knowledge. If the native language was and is spoken at home, the major cultural elements are being transited to the children of the family. Language encapsulates the concepts that language carries and that are transmitted on to the young child as he or she absorbs the culture within the micro-culture. Before the child goes to school, many concepts absorbed through the native language are already a part of his or her cognitive development. Even more so, the elements of personality have also been transmitted through the native language and continue being reinforced if and when the parents speak the native language at home. When that child goes to school, he or she feels immediately confused for that personality core cannot be expressed nor reinforced by the dominant language that the child hears in school for the duration of the entire day. The transition from the native language into the concepts learnt with the dominant language is happening very slow and never in its entirety leaving some confusion and unclear definitions. That lack of clarity prohibits the child from asking questions (especially if that child is more shy by nature) and that feeling of confusion grows into frustration. Shannon Fitts (2006) examined how bilingual instruction affects the students’ learning and how â€Å"parallel monolingualism† afford the students â€Å"to explore linguistic forms and their attendant social meanings. † It appears that her initial perspective of the â€Å"parallel monolingualism† implies that the children artificially separate two languages to absorb the instructional input. Indeed, there are intangible ideas present in the native language that cannot be expressed in the dominant one. Thus, the lingo-minority students can be easily taken advantage of by other students or even by teachers. Throughout the Fitts’ paper there is a dominance of an idea that teaching in bilingualism is unjust and unfair to those whose dominant language is not native. She justifies this view by trying to conceptualize her opinion of â€Å"conceptualizing native languages† and thus viewing a language as an isolated medium of knowledge transference. She referred to other researchers when saying that Hispanic students â€Å"do not feel valued† while being present in the classroom of the dominant culture and therefore find it difficult to devote to their own education. She should not isolate Hispanic students from those of other ethnic backgrounds. I do not believe that anything has to do with being or not being valued as a person; it has everything to do with misconstruing definitions, half-understood remarks, not-natively implied body language, and other cultural elements. Looking at bilingual classroom from the wrong perspective will warp the impression about the students’ social make up and cultural inclusion. Han Chung (2006) expressed a positive approach in the writing style describing the code-switching strategy in addressing the needs of bilingual Korean students. The researcher’s attitude was that of nonchalant opinion with non-sided estimation. This researcher started the paper with the acknowledgement that multilingualism is the way that many people live with (i. e. Europe) and the transference between languages becomes more than cursory. She mentioned several secondary sources that conform the fact that many children grow up hearing two or even more languages at home and in the immediate environment. With the people becoming more mobile, more and more children are forced into multilingualism; however, it is not necessarily contributing to their best rate of development. Her logical discussion brings the readers into the common for the topic questions, like â€Å"How the children acquire the second language? † or â€Å"Being able to communicate in two languages, do they loose some important characteristics of the personality development transferred in to them by the first and native language? † or â€Å"What does happen to the cultural identity? † Her further discourse discusses the multiculturalism as the medium of â€Å"the complex communicative demands of a pluralistic society†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (the secondary source). Her acknowledgment that the society is pluralistic (not monolistic with domineering language) brings a totally new concept into bilingualism of its citizenship: that every resident living in that society has equal rights and equal access to the major language used in that society. The sentiment within the Fitts’ work (2006) was different. I perceived that she was referring to Hispanic students as those who must adjust to the major culture and language. Multilinguistic approach versus that of monolistic should become prevalent before we accept the fact that the right to major or minor languages within the same society should be provided to any citizen. Even that is not enough. Language minority students should feel that their native language and ethnic belonging are accepted and respected within the dominant culture. They should not feel excluded just because they have an accent or they do not understand all the nuances of the dominant language. They may feel that their language is not as important as the dominant language at their school. At some sites where there are no bilingual programs, the emphasis is not on the maintenance of the student’s primary language. Instead, the goal is to transition the students as soon as possible into all dominant language classes. The implication here is uni-sided: your culture and language are less important than ours. Certainly, such implication will be indirect but nevertheless felt by the affected minority groups. The use of the student’s primary language therefore takes a backseat, as the main language emphasized at the site is the dominant one. The maintenance of his/her language is not the main priority of such a school. Despite the controversy (Rothstein, 1998), it is given that at schools where there are two-way bilingual immersion programs, the target language, which may be the primary language of the minority student, does not take a backseat at the site. It is considered just as important as the dominant language and treated equally. The equal treatment can become tricky, and this is where the instructors’ skill and special training are needed. Unlike in transitional bilingual programs where the primary language is only emphasized in core subject classes until the student is transitioned into the dominant only curriculum the equal bilingual program treats each subject matter as knowledge with ought much emphasis with what language the students will acquire it. Rothstein’s work clearly points out at this controversy and is addressed to both kind of readers: pro-bilingualism and those who do not see the value behind it. He pointed out that the minor and the dominant languages should be used equally and by the language majority students as well as by the teaching staff as a mere tool to deliver instructional input. According to some researchers in the area of bilingual education (Commins & Miramontes, 2006), equal bilingual programs may help students in the area of self-esteem, which may have an effect in the area of academic achievement. In that, Commins and Miramontes argued that students’ self esteem could be studied separately for it can be a dependent variable to the type of education program (bilingual or monolingual) the site will employ. Such a perspective always refreshes for it is obvious that the researchers do not take sides or become shifted into any opinion. In another work, Dominguez De Ramirez, and Shapiro (2006) suggested that programs such as two-way bilingual immersion programs contain ingredients that may help the language minority students raise their levels of self-esteem, and academic achievement. These researchers, as well, focused their attention at the formation of students’ personality and the program factors affect on it. These particular researchers’ attitudes appeared to be shifted in favor of Hispanic population for they specifically discuss such without any reference to any other ethnic groups. With such researchers, I would like to see more comprehensive approach discussing other ethnic groups and ethnic situations so abundantly present in the USA and especially in European Union. The situation is not and should not appear to be unique to one ethnic group in one country. Many in multiple geographical locations around the Globe experience it. Further, it would not be presumptions of me to notice that such situations happen very often with the ethnic writers writing about the population that belong to their ethnicity group. Especially these writers should be more concerned of the wider-comprehensive appearance of their work. Such critique is no way to limit their effectiveness as far as their writing skills are concerned but rather their point ness within the topic(s) they choose. References Brisk, M. E. (1998). Bilingual Education: From Compensatory to Quality Schooling. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Commins, N. L. , & Miramontes, O. B. (2006). Addressing Linguistic Diversity from t he Outset. Journal of Teacher Education, 57(3), 240+. Retrieved June 4, 2007, from Questia database: http://www. questia. com/PM. qst? a=o&d=5014939910 De Ramirez, R. D. , & Shapiro, E. S. (2006). Curriculum-Based Measurement and the Evaluation of Reading Skills of Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners in Bilingual Education Classrooms. School Psychology Review, 35(3), 356+. Retrieved June 4, 2007, from Questia database: http://www. questia. com/PM. qst? a=o&d=5017755652 Fitts, S. (Summer, 2006). Reconstructing the Status Quo: Linguistic Interaction in a Dual-Language School. Bilingual Research Journal, 29: 2 Han Chung, H. (Summer, 2006). Code Switching as a Communicative Strategy: A Case Study of Korean–English Bilinguals. Bilingual Research Journal, 30: 2 Rothstein, R. (1998). Bilingual Education: The Controversy. Phi Delta Kappan, 79(9), 672+. Retrieved June 4, 2007, from Questia database: http://www. questia. com/PM. qst? a=o&d=5001343556

Martin Luther Kings Three Ways of Meeting Oppression Free Essay Example, 750 words

The purpose of the piece is to provide a highly personal view of the situation that was facing the Negroes at a time when the blacks were feeling oppressed due to a racial segregation policy that made them politically and socially inferior to the white majority. While political and personal, King presented evidence for his position using philosophical, religious and literary examples, using inductive and deductive reasoning. In the first way of combating oppression, he cited a Biblical account, a literary authority, Shakespeare, and an anecdotal reference to show how acquiescence may be the easy way out, but not the right way to stand up to injustice. The piece belongs to social or political philosophy as can be gleaned for book s title, Strive Toward Freedom. It uses religious and moral values, especially referring to Christian values to put forward a cause for freedom using non-violence resistance. Furthermore, he enlisted the philosophy of Hegel in which path of non-violent resis tance is equated with the dialectics of history, one in which the extremes of passivity and violence paves the way for active but nonviolent resistance to evil. We will write a custom essay sample on Martin Luther King's Three Ways of Meeting Oppression or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/page