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Religion in cultural identity
Treatment of jewish people during wwii
Treatment of jewish people during wwii
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Recommended: Religion in cultural identity
The author was good about including the definition of dehumanization because most Americans will participate in certain activities without really understanding what they are doing. For example, college students in this generation will listen to music from a specific genre without knowing the message that the song is trying to get across. The article raises the point that Germans saw their discriminatory action towards the Jews as “reasonable.” This was being emphasized to school children who most likely did not understand what these negative connotations meant. Hearing this made me reflect on why society feels the need to shut out their peers based on skin color, religion, etc. “Superior” group assumed that Jews were individuals that could
The atrocities that swept through Europe during World War II brought with them the cultivation of a horrific contagion: dehumanization. The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel exemplifies the spread of this disease by following Wiesel’s journey through the concentration camps of the 1940s. At the time, the stories may have seemed unimaginable, but today, historians cannot deny what happened during that dark time before liberation. Wiesel’s memoir can be used as evidence. Through their inevitable acceptance and continuation of the dehumanization displayed by the Nazis, prisoners of the WWII concentration camps were doomed to slow and painful deaths.
“Dehumanization is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. This can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide” (beyond). Dehumanization is something that has been occurring in the world for centuries and has never truly gone away. In Elie Wiesel’s book Night, due to all the abuse and dehumanization that these people endured their mindsets began to change and they began losing sight of who they really were.
George Orwell's 1984 is predicting problems that are occurring today. The most pressing matter in the book seen also in the present is dehumanization. Dehumanization is the deprivation of one’s human qualities or attributes, removing individuality. Today this is happening due to the fact that people are losing their freedoms of privacy, speech, and thought. If changes are not made America will become a mindless, easily controlled society.
Why do humans dehumanize each other? Because it makes it easier to impose suffering and punishment to none humans. It is that simple, governments come up with terms such as collateral damage to describe the innocent civilian lives that are taken during warfare. Terms like “Illegal Aliens” to describe undocumented human being immigrants so that they can strip away all humanity out of that community and make them appear to be out of this world, savages, and prove that they are not worthy to have the chance of seeking survival. Or, as history tells, the use of pigmentation, assigning colors to groups of people and claiming one to be superior over the rest. All these terms are design and executed with the objective to take the humanity out of people.
“’What a cruel thing war is…to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors,’” (“Robert”). This quote by the famed Confederate General Robert E. Lee expresses in short the myth of war. This myth brings with it many lies and dark secrets. From the destruction of culture, to the desensitizing of one’s moral compass, the things brought forth by the myth of war have a profound effect on all those actively involved with it whether they realize it or not. The darkest of these lies however is the dehumanization of one’s opponents, the “bad guys” in the war. Did the soldiers that fought in the civil war face this phenomenon during their great war? The answer put simply is yes, the civil war soldiers faced the dehumanization of their enemies. This dehumanization drove them to commit atrocities not seen since the American Revolution almost a century before; war against their own families and nation.
In the second world war, the Nazi and Jewish populations went through a great deal of things. One of these things being relentless dehumanization; for the Jews it was by the Nazis and for the Nazis it was more so mentally, being brainwashed and forced to believe the Jews were enemies. The differences between these two was dire in the sense of how it happened. These two are very relevant in the book Night by Elie Wiesel and in Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg.
To begin with, public executions is not an outmoded subject that has caused disputable opinions. Executions that can be viewed by the public was once a legal practice and a part of history in the United States. Surprisingly, public executions can be viewed as the norm in some countries around the world. In fact, lynching was a popular form in America to dehumanize the offender and to use him or her as a lesson for the community to beware of the consequences. Displaying the executed in a public area would desensitize society to eventually adapt to the bizarre laws. The dehumanization of an offender is an effective strategy for society to feel no remorse over a criminal. By all means, the public would rather celebrate and be relieved that a criminal
The act of deindividuation and dehumanization can drive us to do some really despicable and evil acts towards other human beings. There are examples in history where humans have committed deindividuating and dehumanizing acts towards others human beings that were despicable and evil.
In 1984, George Orwell presents an overly controlled society that is run by Big Brother. The protagonist, Winston, attempts to “stay human” in the face of a dehumanizing, totalitarian regime. Big Brother possesses so much control over these people that even the most natural thoughts such as love and sex are considered taboo and are punishable. Big Brother has taken this society and turned each individual against one another. Parents distrust their own offspring, husband and wife turn on one another, and some people turn on their own selves entirely. The people of Oceania become brainwashed by Big Brother. Punishment for any uprising rebellions is punishable harshly.
Deviant, meaning to stray away from the accepted standards or norms. Being Latino in the United States already makes you a marker of what it means to be deviant, especially if you are a Latino male. The United States constantly undervalues the lives and labor of Latina/os and other racial minorities (Cacho, 183). In this process the determination of whose lives are viewed as acceptable and whose life is deemed worthless is a hierarchy that one cannot escape. In order for someone who is a racial minority to gain “worthiness” one must assimilate to the United States norms (Anzaldua, 1987). Your worth becomes determined based on your productivity and contribution to reproduction and capitalization. Based on your race and ethnicity the world determines whether your acts should be punishable by a “deserving death,” punishment by the law, or placed into the prison industrial complex. The criminalization and
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich focuses on totalitarian oppression and camp survival. The Gulag was a correct labor camp and settlement which almost entirely stripped the prisoners’ identity and dignity. The food rations were scarce among the prisoners, and the inadequate clothing and uninsulated housing were barbarous acts committed by this system. Various efforts to completely dehumanize the prisoners are articulated in this novel. While most of the prisoners were victims of dehumanization, Shukov and Alyosha were still able to preserve their identity, dignity, and humanity.
World War II (1939-1945) was the biggest armed conflict in history. Covering over six continents and all the oceans in the world, the battle caused 50 million military and private deaths. Overall in scale and in its repercussions, World War II established a new world at home and abroad. Among its crucial results were the creation of the nuclear era, increased burden to decolonize the Third World, and the arrival of the Cold War. The war also ended America's relative confinement from the rest of the world and resulted in the establishment of the United Nations. Domestically, the war ended the Great Depression as hundreds of thousands of people, many of them were women, went into the defense industries. At the same time, African Americans made
In the years between 1920-1940, during the Nazi-controlled time, the Nazi's had brought daunting social, economic and communal changes to the German-Jewish community. They believed that Germans were ‘racially superior’ and that all the other races were inferior, especially the Jews. Along the Jews, the Nazis targeted Polish people, Slavic people, Communists and Gypsies or any other people who did not belong to the Aryan race.
The movie Gattaca and the novel Never Let Me Go, both display a form of dehumanization and the relationship between those who have been dehumanized and those who are brought up in a more ‘ideal’ way. Gattaca and Never Let Me Go, try and show an alternative future based on the advancement of genetics and how they affect our world in a possible future. They do this by genetically cloning individuals for organ harvesting and attempting to create a perfect world by creating “perfect” humans.
Race is a prevalent issue within the United States that frames or categorizes an individual or identity because of their physical appearance. In fact, their social, economical, and political standpoints have also influenced people’s perception on placing themselves within these categories. Guest has defined race as a “ Flawed system of classification, created, and re-created overtime that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population…”(197). As a result, race has created different types of patterns that have cause inequality. Moreover, like the United States, many countries have succumbed to classifying people based on race. As mentioned, anthropologists’ purpose when studying culture is to explore numerous ways in which race has been constructed in numerous places.