Dehumanization In John Cole's A Game

Although entertainment media creates profit for industry, John Cole’s political cartoon claims that these media outlets exploit starvation, and dehumanization as a profitable venture, when in reality these cruelties happen every day to the peoples of underdeveloped countries. Central to the political cartoon is the depiction of the refugee’s emaciation. When first observing Cole’s cartoon, readers see a tarnished looking man reading a newspaper about the popular YA film, the Hunger Games. This man possesses extremely bony joints, sinking cheeks, and a disportionate head, while also being confused about the newspaper’s headline questioning that the concept of hunger is “A game?”. The way he suggests “A game” brings to light a powerful …show more content…
Syrians had fled from the harsh fighting in their native country to refugee camps in Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan. The refugee camps often housed Syrians in makeshift shacks without electricity or clean water. In Cole’s comic we see the man is given an insignificant tent with a refugee label #24A. The size and quality of the tent presents the idea that the man’s presence is rather small in the eyes of the government housing him, and that he has been reduced down to not human, simply a statistic. Many of those who would die in the barbaric arenas of the Hunger Games were often categorized as warriors from their district number, showing how they were also just a statistic of death. Western people simply saw this as a clever movie ploy, never acknowledging humans could be degraded as so in the modern world . In the cartoon, the topics of war, poverty, and genocide are mentioned in the newspaper read by the refugee, but in small text, clustered together at the bottom of the newspaper. Again, Cole takes a jab at how the Western media highlights entertainment as their front page news, whereas the problems that refugees are facing have been reduced down to small, and non essential news for the