Friday, March 29, 2013

Thoughts on the surreal

One of the things that stood out to me most about the reading was how desensitized certain individuals became to the atrocities around them during times of totalitarian rule.  Like Ukrainians who were surrounded by so much death that the only way to process it was to disassociate from it.  Surely, this happens all the time--it was just as common during the Holocaust or any example To me, it begs the question, when does surrealistic kick in during times of political extremism?  Surely, the first time one sees a body in the street, they would feel inclined to react, so there must be a moment where this disassociation begins....


Thoughts?

13 comments:

  1. I think the amount of people who died was surreal. When totalitarian governments take over and it is a "government vs. citizens" type of lifstyle, that is when surrealism kicks in. It is unbelievable that the government just decided to take everything from the farmers and their families. With millions of people dying from starvation, suicide, or by being killed, it is a reflection on how extreme measures were taken just so that Stalin could follow through with his 5 year plan and industrialize. What is even more disturbing is the fact that people were eating their own children. Cannilbalism defintely played a role in surrealism. I can't imagine what it must have been like to take people's food and money away from them and seeing their entire family scream and cry. Surrealism kicked in when millions of people died because of political extremism.

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  2. I dont think that people necessarily saw dead bodies everywhere as normal, I just dont think they had the will to do anything about it, and who would? In a totalitarian state, any person can be charged for anything, even thought crime. So if government or officials caught wind of someone who was even thinking to revolt, they could be killed or sent to jail with no proof. Because it was incredibly easy to be accused of something, people did the best they could to avoid it. If someone caught sight of a dead body they would look down and tie there shoes or keep their heads up and walk away because if they showed signs of fear or anger, they could be the next dead body.

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  3. Disassociating oneself from something like seeing dead bodies was probably a way of survival. Either you drive your self mad with the knowledge of what's happening, you do something about it and get killed yourself, or you look away and pretend it's not there for the sake of your own sanity. So i'd say the disassociation began when people realized that no one was safe and that you simply had to play along. and when it came to the famine once you realize that there isn't really much you can do because no one's helping it again becomes a matter of sanity. Sadness, to a certain extent, can be unbearable and disassociation from a situation would help numb the pain for those watching people die.

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  4. I think the point when soldiers where commanded to slaughter and rob people of their own country and burn their houses down, in oder of commonweal, this is when the situation gets totally absurd. I refer especially to the memoirs of the soldier who was asking himself the same question again and again:Why am I doing this? And again and again, he told himself blindly that it was the right thing to do, the duty to fulfill for his homeland. Even though somewhere in his mind, he knew that it was wrong. But Stalin was so successful in planting the neccesity of socialism in the peoples head that they forgot their own consciousness.

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  5. It seems to me that the catalyst for the ultimate dissociation from death was the Stalinist regime in its entirety. More specifically, it started after the five-year plan was established and enthusiastically presented to the people. But to regard surrealism as a whole, it kicks in in times of pure desperation in a nation. As an example from the article, Kopelev describes how the commonalities of the time period were "excruciating to see and hear", yet he disassociated himself completely. He explains how he mustn't "give in to debilitating pity" since the common people were "performing [their] revolutionary duty...for the five-year-plan". All in all, disassociation originates from desperation and the following hero-perceived dictators.

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  6. i think that the people who were under the extreme government saw the people who had died (not necessarily in the streets) as people who could not be the ones that would support the government as well as they could. i think it was almost a prideful thing to see ur "competition" fall and for you to be left under the rule of the leader. i think that as the legend and story of the leader rose and took over the culture, people wanted to do anything in order to be recognized and be part of the government that had rose them up. i think that the people that had died were seen as people who weren't fully invested in the government or people who would of made the government weak by sucking off of it. It was almost survival of the fitness but in worship of politics. the ones that would benefit the government and provide the most survived, those that couldn't died.

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  7. To me,i think there are three reasons that stopped those people or proletariat from having "intellectual squeamishness". First off, as the author says, they were raised as the fanatical believers of a new creed, the only true religion of scientific socialism. Which means the party became their church militant, bequeating to all mankind eternal salvation,eternal peace and the bliss of an earthly paradise as he phrased. Then, the class conflict really played a huge rule in this i think, the reason there were some stricters made such a clean sweep is because the nationalized abomination towards the kulaks originated from the proletariats, your better off and paradise must be bestowed on the dead of another in this case. The last one, and the essential reason of all matters, it seems like someone choose to ride on a tiger and now is not able to get off, he has to keep whatever he is doing, like become unprincipled piers and unrelenting executioners while seeing themselves as virtuous and honarble militants. Those people were unconditionally committed in the name of their exalted notions of good because" they were afraid of lose their heads, fall into doubts or heresy and forfeit their doubt faith"

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  8. You must learn to disassociate from things like death when it is all around you because otherwise you will be driven insane. I would imagine in the concentration camps that the best thing to do would be to not make friends. This way you wouldn't be constantly distraught about the losses happening all the time.
    I remember in ToK when we discussed how a child had died in the street of a country I think it was China, and no one acted. This was very disturbing for me, and I wondered how people could refuse to act in a situation like that.

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  9. In a time of such despair, psychological dissociation just seems like a part of human nature. Of course the first few times you witness a dead body you will find it so horrifying but as you are faced with it on a day to day basis, the mind must find a way to cope with it. All of those people in Ukraine were starving, weak, and already mentally detached from society. When you are in that kind of situation, horrifying things don't seem so horrifying anymore. Perhaps its because you are suffering so much so that you actually wish to be that dead person.

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  10. I like to think of the desensitization to violence the way some students respond to their grades slipping. At first it's a couple of missed assignments and the occasional zoning out in class, but you tell yourself that next week you'll do all your work. The cycle repeats itself, but you still feel under control because the quarter is long and a return to normalcy is always within reach. By the end of the quarter however you look at your report and a drawn out WTF is let out in complete despair. James Madison once said the greatest threat to democracy is a state of war, where we constantly feel like our rights and humanity are constantly in reach, but in reality their long gone.

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  11. I think that the first time you see a body you would freak out, but the more commonplace it became you would know to keep your head down lest you become a victim yourself. I think self-preservation kicks in, save yourself and those you care about. It takes a very special kind of person to stand up to those regimes and they were killed almost as soon as they opened their mouths, not exactly a good climate for free expression. You see this repeated in other totalitarian countries, Cambodia, Italy, Germany, and more recently Mexico (referring, of course, to the drug cartels). Nobody wants to disappear and leave nothing behind but an name and maybe an empty shell for friends and family to find.

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  12. I think that the most surreal thing about the holocaust was the death toll. I think that people would have to disassociate from all of this death because if they didnt, they would have simply gone insane. But on the other hand, I think that after a while death became more common. Of course one will never reach the point where it was okay to have these people killed, but to look past the death. With so much at stake and so much to worry about, when someone dies, it is just another statistic. There is nothing they can do to stop it unless you want to die as well. So people just didnt take as much notice to death during this time as people would in today's world.

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  13. As someone of that time period, I think that it would be much easier to desensitize death, especially when in a situation where self-security is also at risk. Considering how many people died recently during WWI, I think that the people were used to / more comfortable with death in a way that would be hard to imagine of a person of the 21st century. I think that seeing a body on the street would motivate the people of Russia to promise themselves that they would not meet the same fate, and would serve as a scare tactic to obey the laws of the land more.

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