Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Under what circumstances can ordinary people commit horrendous crimes?
During World War II the Nazis ran death camps in Poland to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. Thousands of workers were needed to run such a large operation and yet none of them stood up against the immoral treatment of human beings through the duration of the Holocaust. These soldiers were ordinary people, committing terrible acts in the circumstances they were presented with. A line of human behavior experiments done in the late 1900's gives an idea as to why those people could have been so easily manipulated into participating in a genocide. The Milgram experiment showed the world to what length people will follow orders. When a person doesn't see themselves as the one truly responsible for what they are doing they can be coaxed into just about anything. The Wave experiment demonstrated how people want to be a part of something bigger than them, and how they use self serving bias to convince themselves they are doing what they are doing for good reasons. Dehumanization was also a factor that caused the Nazis to commit acts of terror. By making victims seem like less than people, it was easy for them to see the killings as something that had to be done.
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Mao also used dehumanization to entice the people to eliminate other authority figures.
ReplyDeleteThe Holocaust was a mass murder of approximately 11 million people 6 million being Jews. Hitler's "final solution" was intended to exterminate all the Jewish in Germany and its surroundings. Nazis thought of the Jews as a subhuman group who caused a bad influence on nations. Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass, gave German officers and citizens a "free pass" to do whatever they wanted to do to Jews. This shows how Hitler wouldn't care if anything happened to the Jews and the hatred he had over them was immense.
ReplyDeleteAnother example is that of anonymity. People are more likely to say what they are really thinking when their identity is hidden.
ReplyDeleteits all propaganda, after a certain amount of exposure to propaganda, it gets to you, it changes your morale's, also it is the fear of the government punishing you, for in many cases it was the fear of the government punishing you or viewing you as a bad citizen that prompted you to do bad things. It can be put into simpler terms: monkey see, monkey do. Or if you want it in even simpler terms: peer pressure.
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