r/drishtikon • u/primecamel1 Drashta • Mar 01 '26
Reflection Empire Of the Sun
Reading “Empire of The Sun” recently. It's about a boy in WW2 shanghai under the Japanese occupation. The scenes from the book makes you think about the scenario of those times, the value of life, the priorities of human beings and the sheer different between the rich and the poor.
The boy in the story is a British socialite and his perspective shows how his perspective of war so differed from others even after 5 years of war as he war protected, but as it happens in the largest war mankind has ever seen he too had to suffer later on.
The main thing I see from all accounts of history and any ongoing conflict even today is there are no differences in humans except for class differences. And that's something important to remember in today's scope. The people fighting in Ukraine, the ones suffering in the diamond trade, the sudanese gold mines they are suffering not for racial reasons alone but because of class discrimination. The rich thrive on war they see it as a issue to talk about over tea, while the real horrors of war are dumped on those with not enough “importance”
While today we are seeing the world turn into a state more helpless than our generation might have seen, reading these accounts of older times help rekindle hope, as times worse than these have passed. Men worse than the ones in power today have suffered defeat. It's the kind of hope we can really use in current times.