War Resistance: Is "The Hunger Games" Laying the Foundation That We Want?

The Hunger Games

I've embarked on a long-overdue project: reading The Hunger Games trilogy.

Millions of people are into these books, and the possibly even more are into the movies.

I'm only a few chapters in, but already it seems to me that The Hunger Games provides a foundation to an entire generation to think about the deep structures that perpetuate war, and to resist the attempts of the older generation to drag them into it.

I recently wrote that "the means available to us today for eliminating war vary greatly from those available from those working to eliminate war in decades past." One of those means is popular literature and film!

So here's my question to all my readers: what do you think? What makes The Hunger Games the antiwar literature for our time? (Or do you have a different opinion?)

Comments please ! ! ! 

Update: November 30, 2015

Donald Sutherland as President Snow in the Hunger Games
movies. (Photograph: Murray Close/Lionsgate)

The newest Hunger Games movie is out, and so are the media appearances by the stars.

Here's what Donald Sutherland says:

“If there’s any question as to what it’s an allegory for I will tell you.

It is the powers that be in the United States of America.

It’s profiteers.

War is for profit. It’s not “to save the world for democracy” or “for king and country.”

No, bulls**t.

It’s for the profit of the top 10%, and the young people who see this film must recognize that for the future ‘blind faith in their leaders,’ as Bruce Springsteen said, “will get you dead.”

(See clip of Donald Sutherland on Hunger Games, the US, and war on FreeThoughtProject.com.)

More in "Donald Sutherland: 'I want Hunger Games to stir up a revolution'" by Rory Carroll in The Guardian, November 19, 2015.


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