A Broken World

I asked my mom earlier today, “Did people really fear a nuclear war? And did it change life in any way?”

“Yeah, we really did–we were actually very afraid. We were even taught at school to fear the Soviets. I didn’t really know why at the time, but they [the government] put more emphasis on science and math at schools.” (She was in America, during this time)

The A-Bomb, then the H-Bomb–you were right to have been afraid, Mom. But my mom says ’science and math’ were being heavily focused on in school. I’m sure if I were in that generation, I would also have questioned why science was becoming such an important subject to learn. It would have been strange because now, it seems that in the U.S. education is failing. In contrast, during the Cold War, according to the Modern World History: Patterns of Interaction textbook, “the U.S. government poured huge amounts of money into education” (480).

So how is education in the United States doing at this point?  According to Rep. Berman’s site, “President Bush’s budget for fiscal year 2007 includes major cuts to funding for education from kindergarten through high school in California, according to a new analysis from House Democrats.

 When I was living in America last year, I could sense the major cuts in California public schools. A lot of things were cut: entire schools, electives, teachers. It was a pretty sad sight.  I must ask: must we be in a Cold War for education to improve? It is only getting worse as money is pouring into Iraq.  No wonder American students are falling tremendously behind. From the Central Coast Astronomical Society’s education alert:

“Our nation has been relying heavily on scientifically based manpower trained in the 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, to run our country and power our businesses and economy.  It literally provided our nation’s strength, power and security.  Apollo and Space Shuttle series of manned missions, is quickly reaching exhaustion as the long-standing scientific workforce enters its retirement years. But, the output from our high schools and colleges of young adults educated in mathematics and the sciences is dramatically shy of what is needed.  And it appears to be getting worse, with the number of science-educated graduates proportionately declining every year compared to our nation’s demand for science related industry, products and services.  Our nation’s tremendous needs for workers having science backgrounds is understaffed.  The future picture is very dim.  We have become dependent on skilled foreign labor, which we trained in our colleges and universities, working in our nation’s businesses.“(emphasis added)

What is basically happening is that science and math is on a major decline in the United States, as they are no longer in a Cold War. Other countries are gettting ahead, while the U.S. is falling behind. The Cold War scientist’s generation is retiring, and we are not improving in science and math education. This is a very desperate problem. If we don’t have a generation of scientists, how are we going to combat equally important issues as the Cold War,  such as global warming? A decline in education is one of the worst things to be happening at this time. Rather, in these years, we should be stressing science and math education, just as they did in the Cold War.

I am not secretly wishing that there’d be another Cold War. However, it’s somewhat evident that Americans are getting dumber without it, though. The Cold War sparked a generation that was intelligent in science and math. Space—human’s new frontier was being traveled in. Now there’s no Cold War, students are just resting easy. Interest in science and math are at its all-time low. Shouldn’t the government be doing something about it? Shouldn’t they be bringing change? Or must we have another Cold War for math and science to become significant again?

 (An individual among thousands of others identical that are exactly identical to the individual. What do you think?)

As I read through the history textbook, I’m increasingly becoming aware of how scary ideology is. A pattern can be detected in terms of education in a system of dictatorship : dictators such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini educated young children of their political beliefs, while disdaining everything that was against their beliefs.

If you think about it, ideology is what made the Germans believe that the Aryan race was superior than any other race in the world. On the contrary, we are aginst rascism because we are taught that way everywhere : at home, at school, and at society.

Every year in North Korea, the birthday of Kim Jung Il is celebrated at a very big scale. The whole country prepares for it : young girls perform gymnastics, others perform music. The nation as a whole is celebrating his birthday, as if it is their own. And looking at thousands of children wearing the same uniform, shouting

 ’??? ???? ??!’ (Hail father (leader) comrade!), I suddenly feel goosebumps appearing on my skin. The same question comes up in my head. ‘Do they really believe in him that much?’ And now I know why. We live and believe things based on what we have learnt. That’s why education affects us so much. And sure, if they are born to hail Kim Il Sung from the minute they were born, of course, they are going to turn out that way.

Then, I’m thinking that we should never unite, the North and South Korea. Over half a century, our differences created a wider gap between us. We are trained to live in a capitalist world, where money often helps people gain power and position. It’s fundamentally different from the system of communism, where resources are ’supposed’ to be distributed equally among everyone.

Furthermore, the question is : does ideology link to brainwashing? Where is the fine line where ideology turns into brainwashing? I’m sure people will not have a hard time agreeing with the fact that Hitler and Stalin both brainwashed people to believe in Fascism and Communism. But the decision comes quite hard when it comes to whether we, the children of capitalists, are brainwashed to belive that success and money are key (or even elements that help people gain happiness) to living a comfortable life with respect and friendship.

I’m not trying to say that our world is bad. No, I’m not. It’s just that what we learn doesn’t seem to provide us with distinguished, perfectly supported facts. This is somewhat very different from 1+1=2.  I think that this part is where we think for ourselves, and where our ideas towards the world differentiates.

My point is, that ideology is indeed very effective in creating people’s belief system.

We are all affected by ideology.

 Jiyeon Han

+ This video shows how Hitler claimed that the Aryan race was physically superior to other races. This is real ideology and brainwashing. It’s actually quite scary, but if you had no idea of whether Hitler was a bad person or not, you’d probably find this quite persuading.

Wars in history seem complicated and grand but they are not. If you look closely into why some wars happened and compare them to actions of kids, you’ll realize that they have so many similarities. A single conflict can blow up a whole country and cost billions of dollars and lives, but that conflict might be between differences in opinions. When you observe how and why little kids fight, you realize that they fight due to small ridiculous reasons such as who gets the doll or who gets the blue paint instead of the pink. Same situation happens right now. America is currently having a warfare against Iraq due to the reason that they have a nuclear weapon but I think the actual reason Bush is so obsessed is because of the oil in the country. Oil, at first, might not seem so important to you but look around you; heaters, cars, and millions of other things are run by oil. Oil can be interpreted as power these days because we are running low of coal. It’s funny how Bush tries to claim other country’s oil even when it’s not his. He doesn’t mind sacrificing some billionds of dollars and lives if he can get the oil. Even though he’s currently the president of the most powerful and the most developed country, even though almost all of the citizens are against him, even though this war is just harming his image,  he wants more. This ridiculous reason can be found when kids fight. Even if a kid has her own high fashion doll, she just can’t bare anyone else having something different or perhaps better. The kid will do anything to get the other doll or destroy it; simply because she wants to. Just because the war happens between adults and uses guns and machines instead of pinching doesn’t mean it happens due to a better or a meaningful reason. Another example is the WWI when countries fought over land. Geo-politics was a smart way to “carve” countries but it became a problem when countries wanted the same land. This is also similiar to bullies trying to take other kid’s paint or doll, just because the paint is blue or the doll has a prettier skirt on. Anyways, the lands that they were fighting about was not theirs in the first places; same with bullies.

I thought the reason why we learned history was to learn from the mistakes and not make them again but I don’t think we have learned the lesson enough. Do we need to go through more painful wars and sacrifices in order to learn our lesson that our war are no better than catfights between little spoiled kids? Who is the mom or an arbitrator that will stop this nonsense? Kid fights are actually better because they can be stopped.

 By: Iljee Kam

Totalitarianism- sure it was successive… for Stalin. After all his five year plan not only lasted five years, Russia industrialized and “agriculturized” for more following years. And the best part of this plan would be of course- The Rise of the Women.

We have heard the story of Stalin. After the sudden death of Lenin, country’s turning point to a vacuum power society starts to fall apart. Trotsky and Stalin, two men who were known to be the strongest leader were split into two ideas of communism. Trotsky, who believed they should spread the idea of communism. Stalin who believed they should be the one 1/6 of landmass country to be the strongest communist country. Now- pretty obvious story. Stalin was a man who would literally knock down every man that got in his way. When an evil man like him and Trotsky meets? Splat. Trotsky falls on the ground with an ice pick on his head. Think of other millions of men and women who were killed by Stalin. This man existed only several decades ago. 43,000,000 numbers of people were dead under this man. This is about 172,000times number of the people in current KIS high school.

http://www.cominganarchy.com/images/HitlerVsStalin.png

In this comic, you see Stalin on the left and Hitler on the right. I chose to put this picture on my page of blog because behind Stalin, you can see man dieing- Stalin on the other hand says, “Adolf (Hitler) at last we meet” showing how Hitler was the next on his way of succession. It is hard to believe how a man can go so far to get what they want. What did they really want? Land? Population? Money? Or, to win the battle of “who kills more people”?

 By:Iljee Kam

History happens in the past. In a normal “boring” history class, you would learn and memorize when the event occurred- why event occurred, how the event occurred, how the event affected the world. In a fun history class- we go beyond.

History not only occurs dates and events. It includes psychology, science, language, sociology and more. In fun history class not only you learn about how a certain event affected the world but how humans react to those events that caused that change. It’s like psychology. You learn how humans would react to such an event.
             Like we learned before. There are patterns to revolutions. In a revolution there are gaps between classes. There would be conflict between those classes economically, politically, and socially. Then we see physical actions, protests, and revolts that begins the revolution. Like Gihoon says- czar/leader falls and dies. In French revolution, we saw a king runaway- caught- and killed. See how this involves psychology? History isn’t just about stupid dates and events. Loving history not only means you like history, but many other subjects included. It is really interesting to see how things change and progress. 

There are histories to everything; history of biology- such as Theory of Evolution by Darwin, there are histories in mathematic, histories in languages. History involves much more things than just dates and events. As I took this course, I not only learned about those dates and events, I got to know what history was.
History isn’t just History.

     Since the period of industrialization and imperialism, militarism was the key to dominance and power. As Jessica expressed her concern in her entry, there are massive, massive amounts of TNTs - more than enough to make the earth into a powder - being developed around the world; even though there are only about ten countries that signed a Nuclear Pact, declaring their possession of nuclear weapons.

     We endlessly emphasize to discard and disable these weapons. The two world wars have clearly shown us the horror of mass destruction; especially the nuclear attack in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In Hiroshima, about 140,000 people died within the year the nuclear bomb was launched. It was thought that such weapon was never to be used again, after the world saw the terror of it.

     However, I don’t think that our world has changed much since 1945. Many of MEDCs still develop weapons, although they claim that they are built only for the purpose of self-defense. When other countries, such as North Korea and Iran are thought to be developing such weapons, however, they become terrified, and start condemning those countries.

     When that is the case, the MEDCs have no choice but to listen to the country which has recently developed the weapons. I was quite surprised at how USA changed their policy towards North Korea when they succeeded with the nuclear experiment last year. North Korea is getting what they want by presenting their military technology, because the last thing that MEDCs want is North Korea selling their TNTs to terrorist organizations.

     This means that any country can develop weapons of mass destruction in order to get other nations to listen to what they have to say : they are able to use what they fear as a tool for gaining power.

    Countries are actually building masses of what they are so afraid to use. Yet, they know how effective they are, which makes them continue with the process.

     If the power of weapons of mass destruction is so massive, then every nation in the world could develop them, because nationalism and patriotism can cause endless desires to bring up a country into #1 position of the world.

     And if the power of weapon technology is still so great, our world still is in control of militarism.

Did we really understand something from the Hiroshima incident?

But why didn’t we change?

 By Jiyeon Han

By Jessica Yun

Historical events, with similar patterns, occur over and over again, with variations, in time. Maybe we should look at why we get such destructive outcomes. From the presentations, we’ve learned that nationalism, imperialism, militarism were three forces that could call for disaster. These causes brought on devastating WW1, and we have to admit, its on the brink of happening again.

Nationalism still commonly exists today. One, is Japan and Korea. Even nearly a century later of the Japanese occupation, some Koreans feel bitterness toward Japan. Even economic competition happens between the two nations. Also, today’s Olympic events or World Cups boil up nationalism and national pride. These are just examples of healthy competition. However, nationalism comes in more deadly forms. For example Ethnic Chinese that live in Indonesia have been singled out as a minority and are the target for looting and raping, as a result of nationalism. Evidently, nationalism, good and bad, is still here.

And we cannot ignore the fact that militarism is also at its pinnacle these days. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, there are currently about 20,000 active nuclear weapons today. In other words, 20,000 cities are at the potential to be destroyed. This is a substantial amount of potential damage, noting that a nuclear weapon can range from 500,000 tons to 50,000,000 tons of TNT. This fact worries me!  Germany was much like this, acquiring a huge military and advanced weapons. What surprises me is that–the U.S. holds the most nuclear weapons. Yet, it is telling DPRK to get rid of theirs. Anyhow, militarism is very evident in today’s world.

Ronald Reagan said, “The United States has much to offer the third world war.” WW3?! Perhaps. Frédéric Passy’s quote—“the entire able-bodied population are preparing to massacre one another”. It could happen. UN’s Disarmement is trying to battle this crisis. Yet, I’m afraid. Aren’t you? Black Eyed Peas released a song with Justin Timberlake a while back, called “Where is the Love”. It really talks about why wars start in the first place. Wars wouldn’t happen if we were smarter and had less ‘id’, the part in our heads that cause racism, nationalism, imperialism, and militarism. The world is following the same path that world powers in the early 20th century have traveled. We already know the end of that path; yet, why do we continue to walk on this path? 

Even though the world was “broken” during this time, fortunately, there was hope among the people. They would share their feelings and have faith that a much more better day would come. I think that’s how the Jews would’ve felt waiting in line in front of the gas room. That there would be a day when they could say this part of my life is “happiness”.

If any of you read this over the weekend, and are in E Period, I need your help.  It will take you five minutes.

I think I successfully added all of you E period students as “authors” of this blog.  That means you should be able to log in, click “site admin,” and write a post on this blog.

But remember, since I’ve never set up a blog this way–and since the whole “kisblogs” program is new to us all–I’m learning this just like you are.

So you can help me by trying to write a post for this blog.  If you do, please email me at my gmail account and let me know what happened.  (Or if I’m online, you can call me on Skype.)

Thanks, E Period.