This week, we look at the theme of nationalism within The Hunger Games movies and books. Of course I bring up how the old white man (#notmypresident) is just the perfect symbol for oppressive nationalism and imperialism while Chris looks to positive things like solidarity. We also both think a lot about what made certain districts exhibit nationalism vs revolution, and wish the books addressed international applications a little more overtly. (Let's face it, the U.S. is the Capitol after all.)
We start the episode off with the perfect quote from the Reaping:
Listen to the episode here:
Below, I wanted to give you the sources for some of the ideas we mentioned during our Character and Lessons Learned Segments.
Character:
One of the reasons I chose President Snow as my character is because, in the Everdeens' study in Catching Fire, he employs some classic imperialist rhetoric - oppressors have to maintain control because their colonies can't manage resources on their own.
Funnily enough, this sparked Chris' impromptu (yet somehow consistently returning) "What I'm Learning in Grad School" segment, and Chris essentially said I could write a graduate school textbook. (No, I'm not exaggerating! You're exaggerating!)
For Chris' Middle Eastern history course, he recently read Timothy Mitchell's argument for how some of Western imperialism was justified through the idea that oil rich countries weren't "civilized" enough to manage the oil themselves. Therefore, Europe and the US "had" to invad - erm, I mean "help" manage it for them.
If you want to learn more about resources, power, and imperialism, check out Mitchell's book called Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.
Take-Aways:
Now my doom-and-gloom lesson learned may have seemed characteristically cynical of me, however, I was actually wildly optimistic! I had said that for every 1 degree C that the world's temperature rises, warfare increase by something like 6%. Well, I tracked down the article "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallance-Wells and, terrifyingly, the statistic is actually that there is a 10-20% increase in the likelihood of armed conflict per HALF-degree of warming.
Here is the quote from the article's section VI - Perpetual War:
"...researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century."
Although the article is long and isn't filled with cheery anecdotes, I would definitely recommend reading it because, you know, the future of the planet is pretty important. Just think of it as reading the Hunger Games mixed with a self-help article that may kill you if you don't make the recommended changes in your life.
On that happy note, where do you see nationalism in The Hunger Games? We would love to hear your thoughts!
...and until next week - GEEK OUT!