Myths and heroes.

Myths and heroes

Good morning,

The notion I have to deal with is myths and heroes. We will focus on heroes only. First, I would like to give a definition of a hero, I would say that a hero is a person who is admired for his courage, outstanding achievements or noble qualities. It can also be a modern-day hero, a person who have performed a heroic act or simply our own personal hero, our role model, who we look up to. There are different heroes like a national hero, a fictitious hero, an icon, a personal hero or also an unknown hero.

In order to illustrate this notion I have chosen to talk about twentieth century’s heroes and more precisely we may wonder if being a hero once means it should last forever ?

To answer this question I will start by dealing with the example of Alan Turing and his important role during the world war two. We also study Aung San Suu Kyi who is a burmese hero, she fight against the burmese political regime and she become a symbol of peace.

The first document I have chosen is a documentary about Alan Turing on BBC news. The journalist exposes how much Alan Turing is a brilliant mathematician.

Indeed, Alan Turing is a computer pioneer who have cracked the enigma code which is a nazi encryption code to send messages. He saved many lives and shortened the war. But Alan Turing was not a hero in his time because he was homosexual. In nineteen fifty two, he had to undergo chemical castration because he was convicted of gross indecency. It was an injustice due to his sexual orientation. Whereas Alan Turing commits suicide with cyanide poisoning, the state don’t acknowledge the mistake. More than a half century after there was a campaign for his name to be cleared and he received a posthumous pardon granted by the queen.

Thereafter, the second hero I have chosen is Aung San Suu Kyi, the burmese hero. Her father died when she was only two years old, he was gunned down by political rivals when he fight for Burma’s independence. She mainly lived in England when she came back in Burma to take care of her dying mother. Burma was under military junta power and she had decided to fight like her father for independence. She won elections in nineteen ninety but political rivals canceled the results. Thereafter she went in a house arrest during twenty years, she refused to abandon and to go back in England. She received the Nobel peace prize when she found her freedom in two thousand ten. Her fight has been continued but she can’t be elected again because new laws prevent that, however her party won dozen places. But today, some people think she should be stripped of her Nobel prize because she refused to support the Rohingyas who are a muslim ethnic-minority in Burma which is buddhist. They are more than a million living in this state which not recognize them. They are stateless, they not live only in Burma, but also in Bangladesh or Malaysia in impoverished camps. Eventually, Aung San Suu Kyu has denied the accusation of human-rights abuses and the government was accused of ethnic-cleansing.

Then, I can establish a link between the two documents, both depict a situation where someone has been a hero but at another time he’s not anymore a hero cause of people mentality or not taking position. On one hand, Turing was a hero after his death. On the other hand, Suu Kyi have been a hero and thereafter she was no longer heroic.

To conclude, I could say that : we could be heroic once, in a particular situation. But this is the society who decide if you are or not a hero. And the evolution of history or of mentality could implies that you can become a hero or no longer be.

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