Authoritarian cities, full of dogs - Mario Vargas Llosa's "Cities and Dogs"

Nothing is more ungrateful than a government.

Authoritarianism shapes society into a binary opposition divided by a single knife. Government and people, loyalty and traitors, city and people, man and dog... All binary oppositions make the knife and the whip reasonable and consolidate the bullet's right to speak. Against this background, the inability to integrate into all the twisted and dark alleys and forced cruelty of youth under the binary opposition has become the ramblings of the Peruvian writer Yusa.

Peru, like many other Latin American countries, has experienced tyranny, revolution, warlords and dictatorships in the air, and children who are too late to experience childhood but their youth are forever frozen, learn to salute, step, and raise guns one by one. A concise and ironic analogy, the city is a space-based group, a military regime, a military school, a gang, or a society as a whole; while a dog is a metaphor for the people under the group, a beast for class and power. Young people are forced to rigidify their thoughts and behaviors to become lambs to be slaughtered in the system, but their desires are still eager to move. property, and the state never has to ask.

A totalitarian state can decide who to own, who to abandon, who to kill, and who to give the Medal of Honor. The people cannot question or debate, they are deprived of the right to think and speak, and even their growth experience is deprived. As a result, these adolescent children are deprived of Forced to sacrifice collectively, went to the altar called the military academy and dedicated himself to the great authoritarianism.

The character of the omniscient is objectively described without emotion, but the inner monologue and past memories of the characters are mixed in the middle, which makes people often have to carefully search between the lines to find who has the right to speak now. It's as if history is viewed in its inexorable light, while people are constantly trying to vindicate themselves, wanting to make sure that the story will not be forgotten. This is the story of the rebels, who never struggled, but in the face of authority, whose story can be recorded?

A city cannot be great by itself, it must be great by its people. However, in such a city, everything is dark and oppressive, and the people are like dogs, forced to move forward with the city in the direction of Big Brother and the barrel of a gun.

So dogs still walk or run in the city, occasionally being rewarded and whipped, some dogs will attack, and some will hold their tails and keep silent. Some were left on the side of the road to die, others died with no last trace of anger or sigh. Some dogs tend to others of their kind, while others gather in groups to prepare for the next fight.

Class, of course, also exists in dog society.

It's just that dogs are much better than humans most of the time.