"I am the most powerful figure in the world", Idi Amin

"The Last King of Scotland is a 2006 British drama film based on Giles Foden's novel of the same name, adapted by screenwriters Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock, and directed by Kevin Macdonald. The film was a co-production between companies from the United Kingdom and the United States, including Fox Searchlight Pictures and Film4.

The Last King of Scotland tells the fictional story of Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a young Scottish doctor who travels to Uganda and becomes the personal physician to the dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker). The film is based on factual events of Amin's rule and the title comes from a reporter in a press conference who wishes to verify whether Amin declared himself the King of Scotland. Amin was known to invent and adopt fancy imperial titles for himself."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_King_of_Scotland_(film)

In the context of the study of Human Rights, this week, we visualized The Last King of Scotland. This is a film with a biographical and historical character that portrays quite faithfully the events succeeded during the dictatorial regime in Uganda (1971-1979).

In this movie are shown the events through the perspective of a Scottish newly graduated medical who travels to Uganda and turns out becoming the personal physician and "man of trust" of the dictator Idi Amin. Therefore, we end up getting to know the perspective of who was on the side of the atrocities committed.

“Idi Amin Dada (c. 1925 – 16 August 2003) was a military leader and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King's African Rifles in 1946. Eventually he held the rank of Major General in the post-colonial Ugandan Army and became its Commander before seizing power in the military coup of January 1971, deposing Milton Obote. He later promoted himself to Field Marshal while he was the head of state.Amin's rule was characterized by gross human rights abuse, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is estimated by international observers and human rights groups to range from 100,000 to 500,000.Amin escaped to exile in Libya and Saudi Arabia until his death on 16 August 2003.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin

In this post we will address the possible justifications for the acts of cruelty of this dictator showing his perspective.

The contradictory acts of Amin indicate that this person has a confusing and this could be explained based on his life experiences - his past. Idi Amin was abandoned by his father when he was young and grew up with his mother's family in a rural town in north-western Uganda. He left the school with nothing more than a fourth grade English-language education and he was recruited to the army by a British colonial army officer (at this time Uganda was a British colony). These events contributed to the formation of an unbalanced and poor in values (or distorted ones) personality. 

This lack of values ​​is dangerous because it makes people more susceptible to any influence. In the case of Amin, in addition to becoming obsessed with any idea, also became a fanatical patriotic and ethnical. This part of his way of being was influenced by Adolf Hitler whose story is his contemporary. Idi Amin took the idea of “one country" and "a superior race" almost as extreme as Hitler. 
Amin wanted to reafricanize Uganda, having expelled around 40,000 Asians and Jews that, at the time, dominated the economy. He wanted to make his country a world power and wanted the world to take notice of his nation. For this purpose he served up of unethical procedures which led to around three hundred thousand Ugandans, who were against his mode of government, were killed by way of betray his country. This mass murder is still controversial because, there are not enough graves for the corpses, they were thrown into the Nile to be eaten by crocodiles.

This dictator ended up achieving the worldwide recognition, but not for the best reasons. However, for him, the work what he was doing was being successful. Amin believed that the 40000 who had expelled from the country as well as the 300000 who had killed were just numbers that would necessarily be deleted. If this doesn’t happen these people (the numbers) wouldn’t allow that the progress continues. The dictator is self-labeled with various titles: "His Excellency”, “President for Life”, “Field Marshal”, “Al Hadji”, “Doctor Idi Amin Dada”, “VC”, “DSO”, “MC”, “Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas” and “Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular", in addition to his officially stated claim of being the uncrowned King of Scotland.

The aim of Amin was just to make Uganda a symbol of prosperity and wealth (the dream of every governor). The ways that he used weren’t certainly the most assertive, but were used to the better purpose - to launch Uganda globally.

Text written by the authors of the Blog

Cristiana & Margarida

"The man who claims freedom is thinking in happiness." Claude Aveline

On 10th December of 1948 the United Nations presented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a document, with thirty articles, that includs a common standard of achievement for all people and nations, so every individual and every organ of society must struggle for education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and progressive measures, national and international.

In this post we will approach the articles that discuss freedom, the different kinds of freedom (transcript in the next column).

The first article of this document relates to human freedom and claims that each and everyone of us is free from the moment one is  born. This freedom can be conditioned by our acts and / or the society in which we insert.

Any society suffers changes over time and such changes may lead to better or worse, depending on the associated factors.

But this freedom that characterizes us at birth does not make us for itself in free beings. In such freedom must be associated with many others, such as freedom of thought, opinion, expression, conscience, choice, etc., without which beings would be "vegetables" without any opportunity to voice their opinions about the life and the future of each one. So the first article in this statement is complemented by articles 17 and 18 from the same declaration.

Looking back, we see several times in the world history that these articles were absurdly defaulted.

Starting with the basics  (Article 1), is an example of violation of this Article any situation in which a person is born with their fate already determined, as an example:

> The period of slavery, in which the black people would have to serve  Caucasians necessarily;

> Or even still in our time, in India, which operates a very rigorous caste system, in which there is exists even a group of people who, according to this social division, does not belong to any caste and is considered as powder (Dalit), this system requires that people from one caste only marry people of the same, and if not, anyone who marries a lower caste is replaced by the same variety being disinherited from their family. In this system no one goes "up", if there is any change, just "down."

The article 18 refers mainly to the free choice of what we believe - religious freedom. The violation of article is part of our books in two great moments of history:

> The Inquisition (XVI and XVIII, in Portugal) - during this period all those who were not Catholic Christians were sentenced to death if one didn't convert (to New Christians), it is needless to say that there was a mass murder, since many people refused to subjugate their faith to something they did not believe;

> During the second World War, the Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust, the killing of approximately six million Jews as well as two million Polish and four million others who were deemed "unworthy of living" (including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet war prisoners, homosexuals, Masonic, Jehovah's Witnesses and Gypsies) as part of a program of deliberate extermination.

In Article 19 the right to freedom of opinion and expression are listed. An example of this violation is easy to identify for all of us (Portuguese people). Until a few years ago, Portugal was subject (30 years) to a dictatorial regime, which functioned with a rigorous machine of censureship and an oppressive police, which didn't allowed individual thoughts, and those who exposed their thoughts out loud were imprisoned for years. This way of government was overthrown by force of will of freedom exercised on 25th April 1974, in the Carnation Revolution. However, today we still find dictatorial regimes that exercise the force of oppression on individual freedoms [for instance, in Libya, until recently, was in effect a dictatorial regime, which was overthrown with a great revolution; in Equatorial Guinea, Angola, North Korea and Cuba there are a dictatorial regime also - these are just some examples of the vast number of dictatorial regimes that still exist (there are 22 nations under the dictatorial power)].

With the Allied victory in WW2 it possible the formation of the United Nations was and, therefore, it was possible the realization of this Declaration which has been signed by most of the countries of the world. 

Now remains that, over time, there is a greater individual and social awareness for this cause so that situations of violation of these articles, such as those listed, can be avoided and overcome without astronomical damages. 
To this end, it is crucial that we all learn to live in society and before that, we all know that there is a society beyond ourselves!

In this cartoon of Bocage we can read: “Ah! If your freedom is carefully guarded, how are you an usurper of others freedom?”

Citations obtained from: http://www.citador.pt/

Text written by the authors of the Blog

Cristiana & Margarida

"As I Grew Older", by Langston Hughes

This week we started a new unit, which is related to multiculturalism, Human Rights more specifically.

In this post we will examine a poem by James Langston Hughes (1902-1967), North American poet known for telling stories (in their work) of his people (black people) that reflected their current culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

The poem that we will analyze is As I Grew Older, which refers to the American Dream that is impossible to achieve for the black people in these years. In this poem, Hughes reminds his  long time ago dream, which was almost forgotten. This is the American Dream, the dream of prosperity, success, wealth, progress, growth, quality of life, health, education, etc. A dream that is “Bright like a sun”.

According to this author, and many others, this dream is pure mistake since the “land of opportunity” is not for everyone. This deception is shown from a metaphorical wall which corresponds to a barrier erected between African-American (black people) and caucasians(white people) (“And then the wall rose”), this barrier can be compared to the forwer Apartheid regime in South Africa, but in a less violent and less explicit way.

The promised opportunities and all other aspects of the dreams are retained on the opposite side of the wall whichis reserved  only for caucasians where the black people doesn’t have any opportunities or anything to dream about. The author represents the black community that feels like a “shadow” of white people. And he represents the hope of reclaiming the dream behind the wall (“Help me to shatter this darkness”).

From a historical perspective we conclude that this kind of discrimination nowadays is less common although it still exists, such as all kinds of discrimination, as we approached in previous posts.

The second and last week of presentations

This week  five more Project works were presented, the last ones. Very good presentations were made which, that captivated our attention from the beginning to the end. That said, it was a bit hard to choose the best presentation of this week. We were divided between two of them but finally we decided to choose the presentation of Kcénia that talked about the Indian English.

Such as the group that we have chosen last week, Kcénia could make a very appealing and interesting presentation. It was very attractive and with all the information that was necessary for us to understand the contents of this topic.

Besides that, it is to commend the courage of Kcénia to face the enormous and frightening audience that is our class! She was only with the natural nervousness of an oral presentation, but this didn’t affect her voice projection or the clarity in pronunciation. 

We think that, like Fred's group presentation, Kcénia also lost the opportunity to interact with the audience. For us, this was the only point on which this presentation was less good, but it didn’t affect much our overall opinion! Very good work, Kcénia!

Finally, we tried to choose between our two choices (Fred, Natalia and Louise is presentation and Kcénia is presentation), but we couldn't! These two presentations are very similar and both very very good.

Shortly we conclude that these works were all very good and balanced, of course ones stand out more than others, perhaps because they have been able to handle the theme more wisely than others.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL!!

Finally the Project works!

Finally we reached the long-awaited week of presentations of the projects. And it seems to be a great start, it was almost an unanimous choice of the first presentation as the best. The group we are talking about is composed by Fred, Natalia and Louise deal with The Power of Music, Glee and MTV.

This group presented us with a very appealing presentation, original and above all enjoyable and interesting. We saw in this presentation a very well done research, alongside they were able to bring very captivating elements together. They were able to provide essential information to work through the presence of very interactive elements - the videos, and with the help of super attractive PowerPoint animations they cought our attention.

But unfortunately, we also found some break points in this near amazing work. When they presented various videos they should have analyzed  them by entering them in the context of work, making it more complete.
In relation to the presentation itself the element that pleased us the most was Frederico, who was totally comfortable in the topics discussed. He got a very assertive tone of voice, right from the beginning that captivated our attention. On the other hand they should have interacted with the audience, despite having caught our attention they do not even tried our involvement.
There, it was a very good  presentation, that's why we have chosen as the best this week!


Good work :D

Accent discrimination through the time

Over the past lessons, we've seen the classic My Fair Lady, the story of a poor girl who sells flowers and to make it better decides to improve her English; his teacher, Henry Higgins, with much effort and persistence turns out to transform the illiterate Eliza Doolittle into a true lady of high society, ended up falling in love with her. This film is based on the myth of Pygmalion (a sculptor, makes an ivory statue representing his ideal of womanhood and then falls in love with his own creation, which he names Galatea. The goddess Aphrodite brings the statue to life in answer to his prayer), and it is a musical comedy that corresponds to the post-Victorian age (in England) and shows a world of social inequalities. With these inequalities comes discrimination, this film shows specifically discrimination based on accent or pronunciation.

Society has always shown us discrimination of various orders, there are people being discriminated against every day for having a different skin tone, for being female, for having a different sexual orientation, for having a physical or psychological disability, for having less financial possibilities, everything is a reason to discriminate. This film shows us that from the moment a person has a different pronunciation (or a different accent) in relation to the Queen's English (the English that is “proper” to speak) is immediately associated with a person without possessions, without culture, without the right to be respected by others.

This film has the background of London during the the 1920s. It is a different social context of today, but equal in certain details. Discrimination is one of the various topics that are similar. Carrying discrimination discussed in the film to our days (and to our country - Portugal) we found some practical examples of this: even today the accent of the islands (Madeira, mainly) is associated to simple people, rural, uneducated, without possessions; this happens also in the interior of Portugal, or even in the North or South. Whatever the accent or pronunciation there, are always elements associated which will define all the people of a certain area: it is called discrimination. And, despite being already a topic discussed frequently on the media, discrimination is still very clear in the daily actions of many people, everywhere.