ARW 4/24 Response

Today, we had a class discussion on the first chapter of Lies. Before we get into it, Rab first taught us the difference among communism, socialism and capitalism. Although I had some ideas about how each type of government runs, I have never learned in details even at high school in U.S. It was a good opportunity for me to learn.

It was also interesting to think about the real meaning of democracy. I learned that none of the "democratic" nations are really considered democratic, which is very ironic but definitely true. One example was several types of limitation for voting. Only those with certain ages, nationalities, and without any criminal records are able to vote. Democracy is supposed to reflect opinions from all citizens to ameliorate the government, but not all of them obtain the opportunity to join.

And we divided into groups and started discussing about Lies, and what Rab told us about the relationship between depth and range of the content in textbook, article, essay, or any written document, was interesting. It is impossible to cover wide range of topics in depth in any kinds of academic document, so the choice will be explaining short range of topics in depth, wide range of topics shallowly, or both in the middle. This is why, on the entry for this chapter,  I wrote every historical character should get an equal amount of attention because it is impossible to describe all figures' biographies on one textbook.

In a group discussion, we discussed two things: what was our reaction and is Loewen so far successful with claiming his point? My reaction was basically astonishment about how Helen Keller is not known much and Woodrow Wilson is overly "heroified." Edgar had an interesting point. Before mentioning anything stated by Loewen, he explained his judgment on whether what Loewen says is reliable or extremely biased. Since we looked up 3B's about Loewen we knew that he has enough knowledge about sociology, but it is still important to doubt the obvious things.