Most recent public comments by Hannah Meshulam https://nowcomment.com/users/16233 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=388175 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36344?scroll_to=388175 It seems like Louisa Schein meant well with her documentary, and wanted to show Hmong refugees in the best possible light. However, in doing so, she painted an inaccurate portrait of refugee life. She says that their choice of showing successful refugees was to depart from the stereotypical struggling refugee, because they didn't want Americans to view immigrants as purely a drain on the system, but rather contributing members of society. This raises an interesting question: is it better to be completely factual, even if it means playing into certain negative stereotypes, or is it better to omit certain things to avoid racism but which in the end paint a false picture? Mon, 19 Oct 2015 18:52:00 -0400 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=386460 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=386460 You make an excellent point: the winners of wars are the ones who write the history books, which is why you don't see a lot of Native American accounts of the colonization of America. Likewise, with the Vietnam War, we only consume the information about it that the American government wants us to consume, unless we go out of our way to search for the stories of refugees, which are going to be very different from the war stories of the perpetrators and soldiers. It's really important to seek out the stories of the victims of wars, because they give a much more accurate picture of what really happened. Thu, 15 Oct 2015 17:17:19 -0400 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=383616 https://nowcomment.com/documents/36342?scroll_to=383616 This is a really good point that Nguyen makes. We want soldiers to be heroes, which rapists are not. We have this cognitive dissonance, which is a good thing in and of itself. Our problem is not that we don't care about women. However, instead of resolving our cognitive dissonance by changing our view that all soldiers are heroes, we just ignore the problem and pretend it isn't there. After all, soldiers can still be heroes as long as they aren't rapists, so let's just pretend that "the other side does it, not us" so we can carry on with our fantasy. Rape is so horrific that no one wants to think about it or even acknowledge it, which results in stories like those of comfort women. They will never get a formal apology because no one will admit that it happened. This refusal to acknowledge their truth is perhaps worse than the trauma itself. Mon, 12 Oct 2015 09:49:27 -0400