Customer Reviews

Hostage

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Back when this story was penned in 1978, nearly 100 dictators terrorized the world while CIA or KGB played puppet master. Today in 2007, more than 30 countries around the world are ruled by CIA-maintained dictators. Another 30 are ruled by dictators maintained by Britain, France, or Russia. The victims of these foreign-installed tyrants cannot remove them from power because the dictators are maintained and protected by CIA, MI6, or other dictator-keepers. The dictators not only suppress freedom of speech, the press and religion, but also imprison, starve, and torture those people who demand their inalienable rights. Too often, these atrocities are carried out at CIA secret prisons.

This story is a hostage melodrama about a 15 year old boy named Wayne Bulkeley who is captured by victims of the fictional Zibalani regime. The freedom fighters are called the Seventh January, perhaps inspired by England's Fifth of November because their leader Tawfiq studied there. Tawfiq and his mates are hoping to stop the execution of their other mates that the dictatorial regime plans to execute, which is why they grabbed Wayne - to do a hostage swap.

Through his ordeal, Wayne begins to see the plight of Tawfiq and the other Zibalanis, and that the West is the dictator-keeper that holds Zibala hostage. Wayne discovers that "as a Westerner he had simply been mistaken all along" about the Zibalanis (p 152). Critics will say Wayne has fallen victim to the Helsinki Syndrome, where hostages were considered brainwashed when they saw things from the perspective of their captors.

When the army comes to rescue Wayne, he tries to help his friend Tawfiq from being captured by them. But they are all captured and the Zibalanis are hanged until dead. Wayne is not hanged because the army says he was brainwashed. Wayne believes otherwise; he believes that his captors were themselves captives of a dictator, whose strings were pulled by the puppetmasters in Washington, District of Criminals.