No place for discrimination

Why all the fuss about the murals painted by Gozitan artist Manuel Farrugia in honour of the murdered 42-year-old Ivorian father Lassana Cisse Souleymane?

Are not Africans entitled to a place in heaven too? After all,  God is colourless and there is no place for hatred and discrimination in heaven, whatever the colour of the skin is.

Francis Vella – Mosta

Is Squid Game the game of life?

Park Hae-soo as Cho Sang-woo, Jung-jae Lee as Seong Gi-hun and HoYeon Jung as Sae-byeok in Squid Game. Photo: Youngkyu Park/Netflix

Spoiler alert: if you still have not seen the Netflix series and you wish to watch and enjoy Squid Game, then do not read this piece.

Before we rush to condemn Squid Game, let us just remind ourselves for a moment that, unlike most dystopian narratives, it is the ‘good guy’ in this series that survives, wins the contest and hauls in the prize money, effectively doing so without actually directly killing anyone in the six competitions that comprise the contest.

So, if there are any morals in the story, they also include some belief in the innate goodness of people.

As an aside, there is also a stark contrast between the desperate lives led by heavily indebted people, willing to risk their very lives to win a jackpot, and the untouchable ultra-rich, acting with impunity, who try to break the dull monotony of their lives by betting on humans as if they were horses. COVID-19 has probably exacerbated these social disparities in most societies.

Thus, Squid Game belongs to, and, yet, departs from, a long range of dark narratives that explore the human character in order to tease out those qualities which may lurk within us and remain subdued, contained or restrained as long as society’s moral and legal order persists.

But clutch a group of human characters out of their sociocultural safety cocoon and comfort zone and that moral imperative goes awry. Trickery, cheating, lying, invocations to the divine but, above all, brute verbal and physical violence take over.

Democracy’s putative fragile hold on people’s behaviour is revealed by its quick replacement by either libertarianism or totalitarianism.

Which makes one think: is our implicit belief in order and civilisation hanging by a thread? Are humans more sinners than saints? (Note and reflect on what has actually happened in places ravaged by natural disasters and rampant corruption and where the rule of law has broken down.)

The physical translation of the humans in these sombre experiments is typically undertaken via the involvement of a small island location.

As in Squid Game, the characters are whisked unconscious to an unnamed and remote island location.

The geographical containment of the island space ensures that its sinister actions are ‘below the radar’ of the inept authorities on the mainland, while all traffic to and from the island is under strict control and surveillance.  Even the bodies of the dead contestants are clinically cremated so that no trace is left of their erstwhile existence.

Similar stories of ‘society going wrong’ and descending to chaos, bestiality and a total breakdown of the moral fibre unfold in such gripping tales as The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells (1896), Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953), Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954), Island by Aldous Huxley (1962) and, more recently, The Beach by Alex Garland (1996) and The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (2008-2012). The last of these also involved contestants engaged in contests that involved killing competitors: it was even more morally objectionable than Squid Game because the competing characters in The Hunger Games were not even adults. 

The power and fascination of such fiction as Squid Game is that it is not that far away from fact. The deeply indebted and the bored ultra-rich exist among us. And offshore islands are the ‘elsewheres’ where social and political experimentation unfolds, safely corralled by the sea, out of sight and out of mind.

Godfrey Baldacchino, professor of sociology, University of Malta – Msida

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