Achebe's essay really made me step back and think of the similarities between Africans and Cambodians. Achebe's essay really made me think of another side to war such as : Westerners are programmed to think of people such as Africans and Cambodians as "outsiders". The "outsiders" are depicted as having no language and are portrayed as savages because they do not live their lives like westerners do. Which in turn makes westerners feel like they should take control and change the "outsiders" way of life. None of these "outsiders" have a voice or say in anything that happens to them in their normal lives and in wars.
This can very much be a bad thing because soldiers will feel like they have some sort of justification for hurting or murdering these people because their country says it's ok to murder people who are not "westernized" or to murder anyone who is not "like them". The people in control of these wars paint their own images of Africans and Cambodians without realizing the truth and then tell these soldiers that it's ok to kill. Sometimes people in control are not seeing these other people for what they really are (people just like them, with regular hearts and regular souls) so westerners create this opposite image so they can understand themselves and justify their actions. They're so afraid of a shared community and dehumanizing others makes war more possible.
Maybe these soldiers would not be so angry or traumatized or even kill if they felt like these "others" were just ordinary people like them. But the thing is, Western society tells them these other people are not like them, so it justifies their actions. But I think deep down, they know that murdering these people is not justifiable and that is why they get traumatized when they are forced to murder these people and that's what makes it so hard to live with. It's a shame that these soldiers who do not want to fight unjust wars have to anyway.
Here is a good article to read: Vietnam War article
These native people were not as advanced as Westerners in term of available technologies and resources so they were deemed to be not civilized and needed to be educated and taught the ways of civilization. The ideas of imperialism and colonialism had integrated into the Western people for generations so it was not easy for them to change that point of view. However, these Westerners were not as civilized as they thought. They wanted to change the way of live of the native without even trying to understand their cultural values and why they did what they did. They even used force to make the natives do the things that they were "supposed" to do. They had little sympathy to hurt and/or kill these native people since they were lesser people. That made us think who was really the savages here.
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