Crises, Their Significance, and Their Narratives
Shedding light onto some of the most devastating crises in history
Have you ever wrapped your head around the disasters and violence going on around the world? We feel pity when we see such horrific circumstances, but when a victim’s story is known to us, it gives us the information to comprehend the crisis. The Holocaust, the Syrian Civil War, and the Mozambican Civil War all provide riveting instances of world crises. With this in mind, it is crucial to perceive how individuals’ personal stories or narratives shed light on the crises and how these disasters treated victims.
To start, it is crucial to observe the particulars of the largest genocide in history, the infamous Holocaust that lasted from 1933 to 1945. This crisis occurred mainly because of religious persecution. Nazi Germany’s supreme dictator, Adolf Hitler, persecuted against Jewish people since they didn’t follow the official Nazi Germanic religion of Christianity. As punishment, six-million Jews were killed. Zooming in on the crisis, a single figure stood out from the rest of the victims. Anne Frank, a teen Jewish girl who lived and died during the Holocaust, wrote down her experiences in a diary. A Diary of a Young Girl is a narrative published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017, originally written by Anne Frank, and based on the events in her diary in the story, Anne fled to Amsterdam from Germany with her family. They ultimately went into hiding. This narrative gives us a first-person perspective of the worst mass genocide of all time so that we can comprehend what each Jewish individual who went in hiding felt at any given moment. It also shows their inevitable innocence, aptitudes, and struggles. Hence, the narrative truly elucidates the complex factors of the Holocaust, shedding a great deal of light on the crisis.
Secondly, a notorious crisis that started in 2011 and is still going on today is the war in Syria. The war erupted mainly because of the ruthlessness of Bashar al-Assad, the current president of Syria, who mistreated his people and used lethal gasses to punish them for opposing his presidency. Soon after, terrorist groups such as ISIS waged war against Assad’s people and even normal civilians rebels. Recently, director Marcel Mettelsiefen created the documentary Children of Syria that finally aired in 2016 on PBS. The documentary shares the story of a real family who survived the war in Aleppo, Syria, where they faced threats from weapons and terrorists. They finally immigrated to Germany to live a new, safer life. This incredible narrative is one example of the fear one Syrian family lives with; one in more than a million. It especially shows how such a crisis can change a human being. For example, in the documentary, the children have quite abnormal knowledge of hazardous explosives and their whereabouts. Ergo, this narrative illuminates the specifics of the war in Syria, shedding more light on the crisis.
Lastly, one of the largest crises to ever occur in the continent of Africa was the Mozambican Civil War, which started in 1977 and continued for a painstaking fifteen years. It started when the party RENAMO tried to stop Mozambique’s strongest party, FRELIMO from creating a socialist one-party state. RENAMO went rogue, causing ultimate chaos and disorder in Mozambique. In addition to existing knowledge of the events in the war, the article Independence from Portugal; Civil War Begins by The Refugee Project published in 2019 adds on tremendously. This narrative zooms in specifically on the interactions between RENAMO, FRELIMO, and the public. It states how RENAMO initially abused the country’s citizens as a way of lashing out, killing one-million, and how FRELIMO defended themselves and their people by carrying out the scorched earth strategy. This narrative gives us the main problem and solution of the Mozambican Civil War, illuminating how skillfully RENAMO terminated the people who bestowed harm to their country. Therefore, because of its revealing, brief cause and effect analysis of the war, it sheds a large amount of light onto the crisis.
In closing, these three narratives help us develop a deeper understanding of the calamitous events that took place in each crisis, shedding a luminous ray of light on the disasters. Anne Frank gave us an insight into the world inside the Holocaust with her unique diary entries, the family in Aleppo shared with us their everyday ordeals living in a warzone, and an article written from a refugee research project elaborated on the tension between the two oppositions in the War. It’s salient to give your heart out to the victims of past and future crises and provide your support to save and improve fellow humans’ lives because they deserve to live their lives in harmony; a life where crises are nonexistent and societal violence is just a nightmare.
I hope this gave you a new perspective on these tragic events.
Stay safe everyone.
