Feedback January 5-9 _Political cartoon evaluation

The political cartoon on the left includes men and a bear, shaking hands with each other. Except for a girl standing in the left corner and no one's trying to shake hands with her. This political cartoon shows the treaties made between countries in the 18th century. Each one of the characters in the cartoon represents a powerful country at that time. Some of the men have a lot of allies while some only have a few. But as everyone start to make more treaties with each other, the treaties become more entangled.

This cartoon relates to the Great Powers Game where people were divided into each countries and had to make the countries stronger. We could also make treaties with other countries to make sure that the other countries would not attack you. But making alliance never gave you profit because the other countries could break the alliance whenever they wanted to and attack you. The powerful countries would not care about the alliances they had made and just start a war to gain more profit. So no one could trust each other completely.

The cartoonist is trying to tell the reader that making alliances just for the sake of making more would not help you later on. The alliances would be so tangled up that it gets confusing and make everything more difficult.


Some evidences in the cartoon that supports my opinion about the cartoonist's feelings are the fact that the cartoon is intectionally made difficult to uderstand which is connected to which and who is against whom.

To make this cartoon more effective, the cartoonist could have made it more entangled up and clear about who is who. And to make this cartoon more persuasive, the cartoonist could have made the hands more entangled because that is what the cartoonist is trying to show.

As you can see, the cartoon relates to the Great Powers game, in a way. In the game, we were allowed to make alliances with the countries that we did not wanted to fight with. However, the alliances got all mixed up between the countries and at the end, the alliances did not matter. No matter you had made alliance with a powerful country, it wouldn't help your country if it did not want to and it could attack you at any moment.