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Ordinary men book review essay
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The thesis of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men is that men anywhere can become killers/mass murderers in an extreme circumstance(s) as Reserve Police Battalion 101 did. But it is also about the fact that we all have a choice, responsibility as humans as to how we act, our decisions.
A strength of Browning’s thesis is that it can be tested. In his book, Browning shows and tells us this when he explains the numerous tests performed by psychologists on participants, specifically Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiment (171-172). Not only does Browning show and tell us, but this has happened before – there has been more than one account of genocide and atrocities performed by humans onto other humans because of their race. Humans are able to repeat a behavior likes this and that says something about human nature and the conditioning of them. Again, as we read from Browning about the different testing’s and studies of people like Theodor Adorno, Zygmunt Bauman, John Steiner and his “ ‘ . . . sleeper . . . ’ ” theory, and Ervin Staub (165-167). In these certain situations, when humans are suddenly “tested” in a personal and authoritive way, it seems atrocities will happen or are highly possible.
However, a weakness is the behavior of humans, like the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101, is circumstantial. Not all is clear and/or precise. The testimony of the men is not conclusive as Browning kept referring to the idea that the men did not know they participated in the killings, but only knew that they happened (40, 59). As Browning even states himself; after reading Ordinary Men it should make the reader feel uneasy since nothing about these men is certain or absolute (188). Browning also states “Human resp...
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...men” of their nature. But as the killings proceeded and the pressure and need to perform to their higher authority, brutalization was an effect and does coexist with killing – as there is nothing “pretty” about killing innocent people (Browning 184). Just as Browning’s theses coexist in this situation, killing and the idea of brutalization coexist. Being brutalized like the men were led them to an in-difference and killing became the routine.
We cannot say what any one of us would do in these men’s positions, as Browning makes it perfectly clear, but this book provides insight into how people do lose their humanity as well as their rationality and embodiment in a situation like this (188). One thing we can conclude from Ordinary Men that is certain is, humans are capable of the destruction of other humans and anyone can do it – although, we always have a choice.
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
Good and Evil is present in many stories, although you may not see it all of the time, it may be represented by symbols. In the story "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne there are many symbols of good and evil. The pink ribbons on Faiths cap are mentioned often in the story and are a major symbol in the story. The "woods" and "the staff" are also mentioned throughout the story, and they also have another meaning. Symbols are a prominent part of nearly every story, they help improve the story by branching out on the main idea with other meanings in the story.
Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” does a marvelous job of highlighting the violent nature of mankind. The underlying cause of this violent nature can be analyzed from three perspectives, the first being where the occurrence of violence takes place, the second man’s need to be led and the way their leader leads them, and lastly whether violence is truly an innate and inherent characteristic in man.
During the course of our class we have encountered plenty of important topics and vital information that is essential to the field of the Criminal Justice system. Such as; Crime and justice including laws, Victimization and Criminal behavior, Laws, Police officers and Law enforcement and the criminal justice system in itself. These topics are daily situations yet individuals are oblivious to what's going on and that in it can be a major problem to the community. On that note this paper will express the ignorance and selfish values of twelve individuals by fully explaining the movie "Twelve Angry Men"
The major focus of the book focuses on reconstruction of the events this group of men participated in. According to Browning, the men of Police Battalion 101 were just that—ordinary. They were five hundred middle-aged, working-class men of German descent. A majority of these men were neither Nazi party members nor members of the S.S. They were also from Hamburg, which was a town that was one of the least occupied Nazi areas of Germany and, thus, were not as exposed to the Nazi regime. These men were not self-selected to be part of the order police, nor were they specially selected because of violent characteristics. These men were plucked from their normal lives, put into squads, and given the mission to kill Jews because they were the only people available for the task. “Even in the face of death the Jewish mothers did not separate from their children. Thus we tolerated the mothers taking their children to the ma...
These two men, both coming from different backgrounds, joined together and carried out a terrible choice that rendered consequences far worse than they imagined. Living under abuse, Perry Smith never obtained the necessary integrity to be able to pause and consider how his actions might affect other people. He matured into a man who acts before he thinks, all due to the suffering he endured as a child. Exposed to a violent father who did not instill basic teachings of life, Smith knew nothing but anger and misconduct as a means of responding to the world. He knew no other life. Without exposure to proper behavior or responsible conduct, he turned into a monster capable of killing an entire family without a blink of remorse. In the heat of the moment, Perry Smith slaughtered the Clutter family and barely stopped to take a breath. What could drive a man to do this in such cold blood? The answer lies within his upbringing, and how his childhood experiences shaped him to become the murderer of a small family in Holcomb, Kansas. ¨The hypothesis of unconscious motivation explains why the murderers perceived innocuous and relatively unknown victims as provocative and thereby suitable targets for aggression.¨ (Capote 191). ¨But it is Dr. Statten´s contention that only the first murder matters psychologically, and that when
...test, it is hard not to draw some parallels. Milgram noticed that if people did not have direct contact with the people they were inflicting pain on, two-thirds of the subjects inflicted what was considered extreme pain. If they had visual and voice feedback, only forty percent obeyed orders. The number fell to thirty percent if they were in direct contact with the person they were shocking. Browning also points out that the social pressures of conformity were quite apparent. "Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets the moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?" (Browning, 189) In closing, these men, who appeared to be quite ordinary, became extraordinary in their brutality and killing, no matter what the reason. Decidedly, their contribution to the genocide was quite significant. It is a shame that many received little, or no punishment for the slaughter they participated in.
Christopher Browning, a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University, wrote a book focusing on the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and named it Ordinary Men. Browning states the historical problems he hopes to solve with his book "the fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men- shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions - under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history". Browning starts out with the approach of recognizing the background and organization of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. This gives the reader to allow time to build up knowledge without making any biased decision just yet to answer the problem given. The author then focuses on the development of brutality amongst the departments of the Order Police and provides the aftermath of the war and to what he believes to be the answer to the historical problem.
In his book, “Ordinary men,” Browning examines the police me who committed, or performed the killing. First he explain to the readers that this men just ordinary people, but coming to think of it, what made this ordinary people perform the first massacred. Browning explain to us that this men were not chosen individual, nor were they chosen because of a particular reason. The reserve police battalion were first assigned to massacre the Jews, but after that, they were assigned to clear the Jews ghettos and drive the residents onto trains that they would be transported to the extermination camps. But he made us understand that the police battalion who committed this massacre had the opportunity not to do it when Trapp, their commander said, “If any of you older men among them did not feel up to th...
William Golding believes that society, laws, and morals keep the evil of human beings restrained. Experiencing World War II, Goldin...
It is only natural to dismiss the idea of our own personal flaws, for who with a healthy sense of self wanders in thoughts of their own insufficiency? The idea of hypocrisy is one that strikes a sensitive nerve to most, and being labeled a hypocrite is something we all strive to avoid. Philip Meyer takes this emotion to the extreme by examining a study done by a social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, involving the effects of discipline. In the essay, "If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably", Meyer takes a look at Milgram's study that mimics the execution of the Jews (among others) during World War II by placing a series of subjects under similar conditions of stress, authority, and obedience. The main theme of this experiment is giving subjects the impression that they are shocking an individual for incorrectly answering a list of questions, but perhaps more interesting is the results that occur from both ends of the research. Meyer's skill in this essay is using both the logical appeal of facts and statistics as well as the pathetic appeal to emotion to get inside the reader's mind in order to inform and dissuade us about our own unscrupulous actions.
In Night, he informs his reader of many examples on how a myriad of good people turn into brutes. They see horrific actions, therefore, they cannot help by becoming a brute. They experience their innocent family members being burned alive, innocent people dieing from starvation due to a minuscule proportion of food, and innocent people going to take a shower and not coming out because truly, it is a gas chamber and all f...
Sayres, William G. “Compounding the Crime: Ingratitude and the Murder Conviction of Justine Moritz in Frankenstein.” Sayres, "Compounding the Crime", knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/sayres.html.
Knowing a victim of an unforgettable and unforgivable crime will cause a person to lose a type on innocence. However, witnessing the heinous violation of the victim is much stronger. After the witness sees and hears the exact event, it is nearly impossible to disregard his or her memory. This is true in the short story “In the Shadow of War.” The protagonist of the literary work, a young boy named Omovo, witnesses the killing of a woman.
“Sexual violence was a part of a system where violence reigned almost as a matter of course for no apparent reason [in our eyes]; children were beaten by adults, women by men or by other women, servants by their masters. Sometimes the aggressor broke his stick or his sword on his victim’s back, sometimes he killed him. It would have seemed highly artificial, in such circumstances, to isolate sexual crime from the other forms of aggression that were constantly present, or latent, in ...