Guided Learning Response #5

Lord of War stars Nicholas Cage as an arms dealer who capitalizes on the dissolution of the Soviet Union by acquiring stockpiles of weapons from shady Russian generals and selling them to warlords in African nations. Cage's character, Yuri Orlov becomes fantastically rich with his arms dealing business and enjoys a lavish lifestyle with his family. His wife is somehow clueless to what his real means of generating income is, but this changes at the end of the movie. Throughout the movie Orlov is dogged by his nemesis, an Interpol agent played by Ethan Hawke. The two characters play a game of cat and mouse throughout the movie with Hawke being continually frustrated by Orlov's ability to weasel his way out of situations. Orlov is active in the arms market in the war-torn countries of western Africa and he is a regular seller to the warlords in control of the region. Orlov is finally caught up in all his lies at the end of the movie and his entire life basically comes crashing down around him.

In this movie Nicholas Cage's character Yuri Orlov interacts a great deal with a warlord in western Africa. Orlov travels to the country to sell the warlord and his son massive stockpiles of former Soviet weaponry and effectively keeps the warlord in power. The warlord and his son are portrayed as maniacs on power trips with no regard for the lives of others. They terrorize the residents of the region they control and enslave people to work under their command, killing them on a whim to make a point. They are only interested in a lavish lifestyle for themselves complete with prostitutes, drugs, and money, some of which they try to bribe Orlov with. At times Orlov is uncomfortable with the fact that he is supporting a psychopath and a plethora of other criminal figures, but the money always wins out and he continues to broker arms to anyone who will pay him. The movie attempts to draw a parallel between the psychopathic warlords of Africa and the political leaders of the United States. The level of success in this attempt is dependent upon the opinion of the viewer. This movies does a good job of portraying the evil of warlords who use violence to maintain their power and is a frightening look at how easy it could be for them to acquire their weapons. In the end the film depicts Orlov as something of a necessary evil in today's society and the overall message is dark and far from encouraging.

Urban and Rural Poverty

1. One aspect of poverty that differs between rural and urban areas is the amount of reliance people have on the environment. Much of the poor in rural areas in the developing world rely on some form of agriculture to provide their necessities. Many rely on seasonal variations in the weather to provide the proper conditions to grow and harvest crops. This leaves them completely at the mercy of Mother Nature and sets them up for a devastating blow if the weather patterns do not behave as hoped. This is especially evident in areas of Asia where much of the agriculture depends on the seasonal monsoons to water the crops. When crops fail due to weather or other reasons, many of the rural poor decide to migrate to urban areas in order to find new opportunities. In urban areas the poor have little reliance on the environment as they did in rural areas. The urban poor are dependent upon finding reliable employment because everything in the city revolves around having a source of income. This is in contrast to the rural areas where the poor can use agriculture to provide for themselves. In the city they must rely upon an employer for wages which they use to provide for their families. When employment is unavailable and housing becomes unaffordable, the urban poor will resorts to living in squatter settlements or "shantytowns." They have no agricultural means to feed their families so the level of desperation becomes even higher than it was in the rural areas. This can lead to the high crime rates seen in the urban poor and possible migration back to the rural areas.

2. Another difference between the urban and rural poor is the quality and availability of health care. Urban areas have numerous health care options for residents while rural areas may have little or no proper health care available. This is especially true in the developing world where infant mortality rates are much higher due to the lack of health care in the rural areas. The AIDS pandemic is another example with Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia being the hardest hit areas of the world. Both of these regions claim extremely large rural populations where health care is either unavailable or extremely limited. Even in modernized countries such as the United States the difference can be seen. Residents of southeastern Kentucky where poverty is the highest will often travel to Lexington to receive medical care. While health care in the rural areas of the United States is much more readily available then in the developing world, it is still not of the same quality as the available health care in the urban areas of the United States. Just being in an urban area does not guarantee proper medical care though. In the United States insurance is a necessity to receive the medical care everyone deserves and many of the poor simply cannot afford this cost. Proof of this can be seen in cities like New Orleans where infant mortality rates are on par with countries in the developing world.
In urbanized countries like the United States, health care can actually compound poverty due to its lack of affordability, while in developing countries the lack of available proper health care leads to high infant mortality rates and low life expectancies.

Bride Burning in India

Bride burning is a practice seen in India and other Asian countries in which a women is murdered by being burned to death. The practice centers on the dowry system, which is when the bride and/or the bride's family pay the groom and/or his family a fee in order for the man and the woman to get married. This dowry system is an effort to find the man a suitable wife. The horrible practice of bride burning is still practiced mainly due to deep rooted cultural beliefs in this part of the world that give males superiority in society. Another contributing factor is the caste system which, while supposedly outlawed, is still prominent in Indian society.
Once married, the bride is still expected to provide the dowry to the groom and his family. When a bride is unable to provide the dowry the groom or his family may decide to take matters into their own hands by killing the woman. Many times they will try to disguise the murder as a suicide and burning is a common tactic used. The groom's family will often burn the bride to death in her kitchen and tell authorities that the death was due to a "kitchen accident" such as an exploding stove. The authorities do not look at these cases closely and the groom and his family are rarely held accountable for these crimes. Corruption is common in law enforcement and these cases are easily snuffed out so that the bride's family never receives justice for their relative's murder.
The saddest part of the whole situation is that women in India are willing to put up with poor treatment and the threat of death just to be married. Often times the dying bride, just being victim to a gruesome burning, still refuses to incriminate her husband or his family. Sometimes after one woman has been killed her family will attempt to marry her sister to the same man that killed their first daughter. This sad fact is a result of the caste system and Indian culture making it so that the woman's family has nowhere else to turn for a husband for their next daughter but to the man that murdered their first daughter.
Education of women in India is critical in stopping the abuse they are enduring. These women are treated like nothing more than possessions and that is not acceptable. Women's groups need to be formed in India to empower women and to force the government to recognize that there is a problem. The biggest task of all would be to eliminate the dowry system. This will be very difficult because of its close ties to Indian culture, but it is absolutely necessary because it is the source of the problem. While other cultures must be respected, women should still not be treated like objects. Women in India deserve the same freedoms that other women around the world enjoy and at the very least they deserve to not live in fear of being eliminated like a household pest. Hopefully sometime in the not so distant future women in India will not have to fear this gruesome crime.

Source:

http://www.hindunet.org/srh_home/1996_2/msg00193.html

GLR #2 Hotel Rwanda

1. The problem in Rwanda was the hatred that the Hutu people felt towards the Tutsi people. This created a heavily divided country filled with tension. This hatred stemmed from the German and Belgian colonial rules, in which the Tutsi were the more powerful group. After Rwanda started having elections the Hutu came to power and began to take revenge on the Tutsi, which led to genocide. The Hutu began to campaign against the Tutsi, depicting them as lesser people much the same way that Hitler depicted the Jews. The Hutu assassinated the leader of Rwanda and assumed control of the country. They then began to systematically and brutally kill Tutsis by the thousands.

2. The international community's response was minimal at best and totally unacceptable. As seen in the movie the UN had a limited amount of troops there who were unautorized to defend against the violent Hutu gangs. When the violence erupted the Western countries pulled their people out instead of sending more troops to suppress the genocide. This cost hundreds of thousands of lives and these deaths could have been avoided by sending troops from Western countries to regain control of the country. The UN and the Western powers turned a blind eye to the problems in Rwanda and didn't respond until the genocide was well under way. The genocide is a black eye for the Western countries that failed to stop it and it appears that the lessons of this have been forgotten due to the situation in Darfur.

3. The film showed just how much hatred there still is in the world today. Americans read of the Holocaust and many think that events like that are things of the past. Rwanda and Darfur prove that genocides still happen and the powerful countries are not interested enough to help. It doesn't appear that the United States learned anything from Rwanda based on our lack of interest in the genocide currently going on in Darfur. Our foreign policy is based completely on what benefits us the most. Their is nothing of benefit for us in Darfur and therefore we will not easily be enticed to intervene when we are busy with Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States likes to pretend we are all about "liberating" countries so they can enjoy democracy. If this were true, the Sudan and its Darfur region would be on the top of our list due to the violence and genocide going on there.