Familiar Fiction Essay

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Familiar Fiction: A Commentary on John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time, with a comparison to William T. Hathaway’s Summer Snow. By Michael Gaty Student # 3047340 Sociology Assignment #6 Milan Kundera, a writer of Czechoslovakia’s history of being exiled by the communist regime, opens John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time’s first chapter with a quote, which states “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (Pilger, p. 20). This quote summarizes the first chapter of Pilger’s researched accounts of those who have struggled for freedom. Memories can be vivid and emotional ways of reliving the truth in everyday lives, however these fade as human beings get older. Kundera compares the struggle of people inevitably forgetting their memories to the struggle of people against power. The theme of people against power is very prominent in Pilger’s first chapter of Freedom Next Time, titled “Stealing a Nation.” That is exactly what happened in the case of Diego Garcia, a tropical oasis, free of extreme weather, that lies in between Africa and Asia. Found in a series of islands called the Chagos archipelago, Diego Garcia was home to an estimated two thousand people. John Pilger takes a look at the freedom that was taken away from these people, the peaceful home that was destroyed, and the human beings who were treated as animals in this heart wrenching first chapter of Freedom Next Time. Diego Garcia was home to a gentle, Creole nation, whose ancestry went back to the eighteenth century when the French brought slaves over from Mozambique and Madagascar in order to work on a coconut plantation. After Napoleon was defeated in 1815 the islands ruler switched from French to British, and under twenty years later, slavery was abolished. The Chagossian society continued to grow, and by the twentieth century a distinct language had developed
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