这是一篇写的比较好的thesis论文，采用的MLA格式进行写作。作者是针对一个特定的元素在丹尼尔·伯格纳所著的一本书籍关于塞拉利昂内战的评判。她回应伯格纳的想法通过使用研究论文位置和支持的位置。她的三个支持主题和她的论文出现在最后的“介绍。”她还提供了一个简短的“总结”的书在一个单独的章节之间的“介绍”和第一个主体部分，本文引用了8个资源。thesis作为留学生最重要的论文之一，大家一定要引起足够的重视。hotessay为各位留学生提供了thesis代写服务，我们将智能匹配与您专业相关的写手进行定制写作，1V1客服售后支持，100%通过保障，让您轻松获得毕业证书。
SPECIAL NOTES: This is a well written MLA undergraduate thesis paper. The author is responding to a specific element in a book by author Daniel Bergner. She responds to Bergner's thoughts by taking a thesis position and supporting the position using research.
Her three supporting topics and her thesis occur in the final sentence of the "Introduction." She also provides a brief "Summary" of the book in a separate section between the "Introduction" and the first main body section.
Holly Peterson
Composition II
Inver Hills College
Thesis Paper - Draft 4
War-Torn Survivors
by Holly Peterson
Introduction
Surviving war and the massacres that come with it requires that people act selfishly: survival is a very independent activity. A person’s ability to live in a civilized way will be almost, if not completely, eradicated by the exterior influence of a war-torn country. Today this unfortunate reality is most often present in third world countries. One of the greatest, and most tragic, examples of this is the every day individuals affected by the conflict in Sierra Leone. Smillie says that "Sierra Leone's rebel war became a tragedy of major humanitarian, political and historic proportions . . . "(1). Daniel Bergner's book In the Land of Magic Soldiers chronicles the terrible effects war has on people even after the conflict is over. Once vital to survival in a war-torn country, self-serving behaviors like a lack of respect for authority, a tendency to use people, and an unhealthy reliance on arbitrary excuses are exactly what are making it so difficult to rebuild the country.
Summary of In the Land of Magic Soldiers
Bergner wrote his book just a few years after the end of the Sierra Leone, West Africa civil war. The war spanned just over a decade; in Bergner's book, its repercussions are still obvious to Bergner, who is an outside observer, and enormously relevant in its citizens' lives. The political infrastructure continues to struggle, and the physical appearance of the Sierra Leonean people speaks volumes about the pain and suffering they endured. Bernger shows that the conflict in Sierra Leone was barbarous. Family members were forced to war against one another, and mutilation, killing and rape were commonplace. The psychological and physical traumas resulting from these events are still present in the daily lives of many citizens in Sierra Leone.
Lack of Respect
In his book, In the Land of Magic Soldiers, Bergner notes that Sierra Leonean people seem terribly lazy: on closer examination this laziness seems better classified as a lack of respect for authority figures. Instructors and military leaders alike complain to Bergner about poor retention, laziness and generalized immaturity in the civilians they encounter, all of which culminated in an overwhelming sense of disrespect (155). They would ask a native to perform a simple task and time after time the tasks were left incomplete. Bergner tells the story of a man who was assigned to pick up riot kits for the prison and instead, without telling anyone, he "go[es] off on a mission of his own devising . . . what appealed to him at the moment" (Bergner 157). During the war, this lack of respect was understandable and probably life saving. Most authority figures could not be trusted then, but the modern world requires order to function, which makes consistently selfish behavior destructive. A machine cannot operate properly if its parts do not do perform as expected. Similarly, an organization or country cannot function if built on unreliable shoulders.
Venter, in his book about mercenaries, further describes the lack of respect with the story of a mission to take down the rebel control of diamond mines and the difficulty faced in its completion. The lack of respect between natives and mercenaries made it almost impossible for the mission to move smoothly. Venter says, "Several times the column ground to a halt, paralyzed" (431). Some of these hitches were legitimate, due to weak bridges or obsolete machinery, but other times the local help the mercenaries had employed proved so incapable of following orders or taking productive initiative that the mission quite literally could not move forward.
Diamond mining is a prime example of the lack of respect that characterizes citizens of Sierra Leone. Diamonds are a significant resource in Sierra Leone, but the absence of enforceable laws surrounding the diamond trade makes it almost impossible to derive any significant profit from them. After walking the diamond mines, which are nothing more than huge pits in the middle of ghost towns, Bergner observes that "there seem[s] to be no law whatsoever" (157). Nothing and no one regulates the diamond trade in the legal sense: people are ready to defend what is theirs through any means necessary. When Bergner walked the mines half of the crowd surrounded him, brandishing their digging tools, while the other half crowded around, trying to sell him stones they had found (157). There is no respect for either the outsider or the peer in Sierra Leone.
Even children suffer from the lack of respect so inherent to Sierra Leone. As Fofana points out, many "children, some of them former combatants, some orphans and street children, are hired by adults to do their dirty work for them." Children, already robbed of their childhoods by the civil war, do the jobs no one else want as a means of survival. With few laws, no organization, and a lack of respect for the laws and authorities that do exist it is unspeakably difficult to create a workable infrastructure.
Exploitionships
Another significant problem Bergner ran into is that very often friendships that seemed legitimate oftentimes turned out being underhanded attempts at making a little money, or "exploitionships." Bergner experienced exploitionships himself, and he was not alone, as he discovered while commiserating with photojournalist Corinne Dufka, who found that "'I would like to be your friend,' had come to mean . . . 'I would like some of your money'" (Bergner 165). Although this is a more significant problem for white people, whom people expect to be wealthier than their dark-skinned counterparts, the reality is that the mindset of exploitation permeates much of Sierra Leone.
Exploitionships should not be entirely surprising, as one of the most common symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is feeling "detached or numb" ("Post Traumatic"). This startlingly common mental illness is caused by "exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened," and is finally accepted as a legitimate diagnosis. People from war-torn countries live constantly with the illness, making it difficult for them to conform to "new" social expectations and maintain healthy relationships. Weine points out how important it is to address family dynamics, focusing on any strengths found in the unit, when attempting to rehabilitate refugees (1215). In Sierra Leone, where children killed or maimed their own family members, the sense of trust necessary for a healthy relationship is often lacking. The psychological wounds sustained are nearly insurmountable hurdles that require overcoming, nonetheless.
Adding to the sense of exploitionships, many Sierra Leonean people expect gifts from foreigners. This may be, in part, because of British and UN interference and aid. Bergner mentions children playing on the side of the road, emulating their parents and older siblings, by creating check-points and demanding gifts at their tolls (150).
Bergner tells the story of the children who put a string across the road and would not let anyone pass without giving them something first, even if that something was a mere "four dusty tissues" (151). Getting something for nothing more than the rather pathetic courtesy of asking for it is taken for granted. Again this makes it difficult to build a self-sufficient nation. A country made of dependent people will have trouble being independent.
Excuses, Excuses
When terrible atrocities occur, people need explanations, and if none are readily available, it is easiest to fall back on excuses. If one can discover why something awful happened, perhaps he or she will be able to stave off the horrors the next time. It is hard to see children, once "good students [now] having bad dreams at night and difficulty in school by day" (Gordon 19). It is important, however, to find the root of the problems, rather than to assign petty blame.
Sometimes, though, the root cause is so painful or well disguised that people merely invent excuses. Blame is assigned to something simple, straightforward, and all too often completely illegitimate. In the case of Sierra Leone, this excuse has become a racial one, blame falling on skin color. A bartender Bergner met "rubbed his dark forearm and said, 'It's in the skin,' blaming his race for the failures of his nation" (142). Skin color cannot be "fixed." It is something over which no one has any control and, therefore, is an easy scapegoat. As Frazier points out, overcoming racial discrimination is something that requires a "joint effort" (1). Unfortunately, no one seems to know how to go about that and, as such, race stops being a surmountable issue and instead becomes a fallback excuse that seems more credible than it should.
The excuse of a racial mindset makes it harder for the country to take control of itself, because varying skin colors, and therefore racism, will always exist. In a country where people see themselves as "black adult children lost without the direction of a paternal white hand" (Bergner 154), it is very difficult to inspire qualities of leadership. An inflammatory political incident, a history of discrimination, a charismatic individual with a propensity for terrible violence; something that lasted for a moment, wreaked immeasurable havoc, but is afterwards explained away as a terrible misfortune is exponentially better than blaming skin color. Bergner noticed this, along with the people he interviewed about their upcoming election. The consensus was that a black man with a white man's attitude was what the country needed (195). The racial excuse makes it too easy to be lazy, to use people who are more fortunate, or to resort to violence when other methodologies have failed or seem likely to fail. In fact, this underlying racism allows these issues to prevail for so long.
Clearly this excuse is the crux of all the other problems, and until it is viewed as the atrocious lie it is, very little to no headway can be made in solving the hurt in the souls of the Sierra Leonean people. Bergner himself, initially very opposed to believing that race had anything to do with the problems the Sierra Leonean people faced, found himself, much to his own chagrin, believing that maybe there was something to it after all (147). Herein lies the danger of excuses. The more they are perpetuated, the easier it is to fall victim to them, even if they initially seem wrong.
Conclusion
Living through a war does not necessarily mean that one has "survived" it. Weine says, "Refugees . . . continue to grow . . . and their complex needs are far from over once they have been resettled" (Weine 1215). Friendships emerge broken, families are torn apart, and the individuals themselves emerge both discombobulated and, for good reason, distrustful. Until people are able to forget that family members and turned against each other in panic and fear, until authority figures can again be trusted, until new faces cease to be potential swindlers; it is absurd to imagine that Sierra Leone can become another resounding echo of the social, political and economic structure the Western world has imagined for it. One day it may happen, but there is a serious amount of individual healing to achieve first.
Works Cited
Bergner, Daniel. In the Land of Magic Soldiers. New York: Picador, 2004. Print.
Fofana, Lansana. "Children Working in Sierra Leone Mines." BBC News. BBC News, 28 Aug. 2003. Web. 10 Mar. 2010.
Frazier, Wesley. "A Dialogue on the Question of Racism." LILIPOH 8.30 (2002): 1/ 2. EBSCO Academic Search Premiere. Web. 20 Mar. 2010.
Gordon, James S. "Healing the Wounds of War: Gaza Diary." Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 12.1 (2006): 18-21. EBSCO Academic Search Premiere. Web. 20 Mar. 2010.
"Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)." National Institute of Mental Health. US Department of Health and Services, 18 Mar. 2010. Web. 20 Mar. 2010.
Smillie, Ian, Lansana Gberie, and Ralph Hazleton. The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, diamonds & Human Security ; complete report. Darby: Diane Publishing Co, 2000. Google Books. Web. 7 Apr. 2010.
Venter, Al J. War Dog: Fighter Other People's Wars. Havertown: Casemate, 2006. Print.
Weine, Stevan. "From War Zone to Contact Zone: Culture and Refugee Mental Health Services."JAMA.com. American Medical Association, 7 Mar. 2001. Web. 7 Apr. 2010.
