User blog comment:JERealize/What lies beyond Panem?/@comment-5152101-20120531025932

Firstly, I want to point this out: Of course the outside world was never mentioned in "Hunger Games." It's important to remember just how severely biased the whole series is because the story is being told from the perspective of a teenager in one of the poorest districts. If you want to learn what the world is like, then don't ask a young person who lives in one of the poorest places in a given area. Of course they'll tell you the world is horrible and everyone is poor--because that's pretty much all they know. It's not that this person would be lying. But it's more like this person doesn't have enough of a perspective on things to get some idea of what the overall picture is. You'd have to ask a lot of people what things are like to get a better sense of what the big picture is like--although that might be a very tall order in Panem, where censorship and blocking of the truth are two standard things that the government does to solve problems.

Given this, I believe that of course, the rest of the world exists. It's changed and has had to deal with calamties and disasters, too, but for the most part, the international community dealt with it a lot better than Panem did. Compared to the rest of the global community, Panem has taken North Korea's place as a joke of a dictatorship--one where the government rattles some sabers but has no real firepower that proves its bite is worse than its bark. The rest of the world looks down on Panem with contempt, the way we get snarky with North Korea nowadays when they launch a rocket or make up such bizarre stories about, say...the birds crying and nature itself mourning because Kim Jong-Il has died. The international community laughs at Panem because when they hear that name, they think of a junkyard full of degenerate, savage people who do who-knows-what to each other and are just so pathetically backwards. I don't think the rest of the world knows exactly what has gone on in Panem because the Red Cross, or some equivalent of it, wasn't allowed into the country to make sure the people were being treated well. But they might have some idea because they can come up with all kinds of stories about what happens within Panem's borders.

I bet that the government of Panem took a few more pages out of the Nazi playbook at some point in its short history and made a fake settlement of some kind, a la Theresienstadt concentration camp, and showed footage of "regular" Panem citizens going about their daily lives. Given how bizarre those kooks running the Capitol are, I wouldn't be surprised if there actually was a studio dedicated to depicting what life is like for "normal" Panem citizens for international TV audiences. If the Nazis could do it to fake out the Red Cross and the international community at large, then the government of Panem surely has done the same thing. Just as the government of Panem lied to its own people about the existence and status of District 13, I'm sure Panem's government has also lied to its people about the existence of the outside world. And Panem's government has likewise lied to the international community about the condition and treatment of its citizens.

I think the more interesting questions to ask are, does the world outside of Panem know about the Hunger Games? Have any outside countries ever tried to stop them from happening, if they did? If so or if not, why? (And personally, I think the really interesting question to ask with this is, what if the international community really did try to stop the Hunger Games, and they did manage to do something at some point in Panem's history, but the people of Panem never knew about it because the government was so thorough with blocking and censoring what had happened?) What would the global community think of the post-Hunger Games world, with President Snow being dead? What would they think of District 13? Would they ever try to lend assistance to Panem in the future? Would they try to come in and try to make the government more democratic, sorta like what's been done with Iraq or Russia?