Tag Archives: humanity

The disease of nationalism

Posted by Dorian Dawes on

It’s very easy to allow one’s self to be caught up in the frenzied sea of what seems at the time to be a positive outlook. Brightly-colored flags waving around, everyone seemingly unified with their kin and countrymen, out of a love for the little piece of geography they all occupy. This is particularly true here in the US, where everyone seems that much prouder of the rock they live on, all convinced that this is the greatest country on earth.

That is a horrible thought. This is the country of people who ousted natives from their homeland, enslaved others in the name of their own freedom, massacred entire tribes, allowed their fear and paranoia to burn innocent men and women at the stake, and years later imprison their own countrymen for fear of race. This is the same country who’s government has been involved in child-sex scandals, later covered up by their own bureaus of investigation. This is the country who’s elected officials lie and swindle its own people, and try to keep information quieted in blatant attempts to police so-called “free speech.”

And we’re supposed to be the greatest country on Earth? Forgive me for weeping at the thought! For the most part, those who disagree with me will point to our alleged freedoms as the basis of their argument. Peaceful protesters are gunned down in the street, pepper sprayed, the homeless and mentally ill beaten to death by the police officers our tax dollars pay to protect us, journalists are arrested for reporting the truth, and you expect me to believe that we’re free? On suspicion of terrorist activities alone, suspicion mind you, it is now legal for you to be indefinitely detained at Guantanamo Bay, where still today water-boarding and other such torture practices are implemented for the sake of security. That’s not freedom, that’s docile tyranny.

Here lurks the symptoms of that disease called nationalism, the blindness, the inability to criticize the behaviors and practices of the society and politics of one’s homeland. It causes you to turn a blind eye to the horrors that are occurring all around you, and we are not united in improving ourselves, but in a senseless, raving cheer. We support our wars without even knowing the real horrors of battle, watching blindly helpless from the sidelines, always afraid of an enemy from the outside, and never once suspecting the enemy within.

When we should be uniting as people, as humans, with love that extends beyond the borders of our nations, we place ourselves into boxes, into unnecessary and harmful “us vs. them” mentality. The cost of this is our own humanity, when we willingly shed tears for a stranger of our own race, but never once for the Middle-Eastern child gunned down by one of our own Military Drones. Does the geography of another’s birthplace determine the worth of a life? The color of their skin?

We believe that to be united we must love our country at all costs, and that any form of criticism is harmful, deadly. This is not free-thinking. This is the thinking of dictatorships, of oppression. Criticism is what this country was founded upon, of a group of people seceding from their masters, forming their own opinions and criticisms and wanting a place where those criticisms could flourish, that we might all move forwards, forging a path ahead into a day and age in which everyone could decide their own future, free from governmental intervention. It was founded upon the ideals of dissent, not blind, unanimous agreement. How quickly we forget that rebellion is the path that forges us towards the future. It is only through rebellion that positive change is made.

Nationalism is the enemy of rebellion. It is the enemy of progress, of free-thought. Don’t be afraid to criticize your country, or your government. Do so openly and freely, and as often as you can. It does not mean that you hate your country, or that you are ignorant of the sacrifices that have been made by others before you, but rather that you are honoring those sacrifices by using those rights, the rights that every man, woman, and child upon this earth deserves. You are forming your own thoughts, your own opinions, and voicing them the way you were meant to, freely.

A government cannot give you, your rights. You already have them. They are your rights as a human being. The business of government is to see that those rights are enforced, and any government that views those rights as privileges that can be taken away, must be overthrown and then rebuilt with a new system of checks and balances, that human progress may continue.

Infection: Human Nature

Posted by Dorian Dawes on

May 23, 2012 Man rushed to hospital after his cousin bites his nose off.

May 26, 2012 Naked man allegedly eating victim’s face off is gunned down by police.

May 28, 2012 A Chinese man dubbed by local residents as the “Cannibal Monster” is arrested under suspicion of having killed and eaten eleven men. Witnesses say they could spot green bags with what appeared to be bones hanging from his house.

May 29, 2012 Canadian Police launch manhunt for suspected serial killer. Body parts were discovered around the areas of his apartment, and a gory scene in his room. Video was found online of him sexually assaulting his victim after brutally murdering him. The same man is also infamous for the video footage of him repeatedly killing kittens on the internet, dubbed on Facebook pages as the “Vacuum Kitten Killer.”

Since May 26th, with the news of the face-eating attack that occurred in Miami going viral, the internet has been abuzz with jokes and conspiracy theories involving zombies, demonic possession, and a slew of other reactions to something that is unfortunately all too common. Nearly everywhere I look there are gamers showing off their personal gun collections with a link to the CNN news article on the Miami Cannibalism story with captions such as “ready.” And some who take the matter more seriously and have linked the story with other stories involving murder and cannibalism and Hazmat disasters.

I highly doubt anyone actually believes such nonsense. If they do, then we’re looking at a plausibly more realistic threat to human civilization in a profound and startling ignorance sweeping the globe. We are not looking at a fresh batch of recent surges in violence and animalistic behavior from human beings, but in fact a series of events that are actually quite common and happen daily. Through the recent interest in such events due to media highlights and showcasing, the illusion is created that these things are new or somehow connected.

For my most recent work, I was researching news stories regarding infanticide. I found several stories each within the same time period of last year of couples who carried their children to full-term and then brutally murdered them or locked them away to let them starve. One story I found had a woman carrying her pregnancies to full-term, and hiding both pregnancies and children away from her family and husband, locking the infants away where she hid them.

I found so many similar stories I had to walk away from my computer.

Now, in a society where we can mindlessly murder our young with no regards to the legal or psychological consequences (much less the concept of killing a child, your own child), and this is not even relevant to the controversial abortion debates, but an actual breathing crying, screaming, laughing, shitting baby; what makes you think that we would not readily eat each other? We are animals. We are violent because we are nature and nature is the most violent of all.

Society’s reactions to these cases alone prove how unsympathetic and unfeeling we actually are. We walk around with grand facades of caring and sensitivity, and yet when it boils down to it all we treat murder and violence as mere illusions of entertainment. We’ve been desensitized, no longer knowing fiction from reality. Everything is either a joke, or a conspiracy to write down because we’re just glued to our computers and television sets, eager to know the next chapter of this thrilling story. Nothing is real to us anymore. It’s all an illusion, a fabricated reality that we don’t actually take seriously. We treat a story of death and destruction the same way we treat a gory death in a horror film, with winks and laughter.

This too is nothing new, or do we need to look at the calculated killing of Nazi Concentration Camps, the laughter and cheers heard from the Roman Coliseums where men tore each other to pieces for the entertainment of the wealthy upper class. Human nature will always dictate to us that given the chance we will rend each other to shreds. We will shit on our young. We will piss on our mothers. We will eat our friends and drown our sisters in our semen, laughing all the while.

We don’t need a zombie infection. We are already infected. We are infected from birth with this disease called humanity.

Last House on the Left: Original Vs. Remake

Posted by Dorian Dawes on

Here’s a confession,

 

I refuse to see the Last House on the Left remake. While I understand that it was critically lauded and deemed a commercial success and that Wes Craven remade it himself, I can’t get over the emotional power behind the first film. There was something that happened while they filmed it, something very visceral that occurred out of all the jokes and the winks and the nods that went on into its conception and eventual filming.

 

It became real. The shitty camera quality, the slow-pacing of it all, and the way you just watch these people transformed by the tragedy of the events that follow it transcends horror fiction and becomes a character study of human beings. I have only watched this film once, years ago, and images from it will remain forever burned into my mind.

 

I want to watch it again, only I have never felt my gut churned so deeply by a film. I’ve never felt the ugliness that film creates inside you anywhere else. It takes you to a disturbing place, dark and gruesome, and it’s not the blood and the gore I’m referring to, it’s the humanity. It’s watching people descend into something primal and disgusting and then carry on like nothing ever happened.

 

Moments like that cannot be repeated. Such is the case of art. In all of our analyses, all of our predictions and intellectual essays, dissecting each and every facet of art and what makes it work, there’s still that missing mysterious element we haven’t discovered. It’s the reason you can remake a film shot for shot by the original, have the same great cast, and use the same score and it still lack the power and the ferocity of its predecessor. There’s something unexplained that happens sometimes, the same as with writing a moving novel, or composing a song that brings grown men to tears. It’s magic almost, as there’s no other word to describe this missing element.

 

I still don’t consider Last House on the Left a horror film. If it is a horror piece at all, it is the horror of mankind, of the terrible things we are capable of inflicting upon each other.