Good People Turning Evil
People will assume that the S.S soldiers during Holocaust who killed millions of Jews, babies, children, women, men, elders and committed more horrendous crimes are naturally evil, along with the soldiers who tortured the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison and soldiers who killed almost an entire village in the My Lai Massacre during the vietnam war. But is it really that the soldiers who committed these crimes are naturally evil or they are put into a situation that forced them to be evil and commit war crimes. According to Smores an Iraq Veteran who committed suicide after the war in Iraq, twenty two soldiers commit suicide everyday because of the illegal orders that they were forced to do. In paul Watson’s article he
Authorization leads to routinization and routinization leads to dehumanization that lead these solider to torture the prisoners, and lead the holocaust to happen along with My Lai. Authorization is when the order of tutoring or killing is divided up between the authority figures and not coming from one officer. Routinization is when everyone is responsible for specific thing so it become like a routine and normal activity. For example; during the holocaust one person was responsible for writing the orders that was given and the orders to deport jews, someone else was responsible for shaving the jew’s heads. Dehumanization is when the soldiers view the enemy or the other side as objects and not humans. For example: in vietnam the soldiers called the enemies “slopes” and in Iraq they called the prisoners “towel heads” (Maszak 76). In Abu Ghraib, The prisoners’ faces were covered with hoods and the prison was covered up with walls that made the prison an island where morality were no longer there due to the three traits that the soldier went
It explains how can good people become perpetrators of evil and commit dreadful crimes. In the book, Zimbardo highlighted three psychological truth. First is that the world full with both evil and good, the barrier between the two is absorbent, and angels and devils can switch. Zimbardo claims that the one easily switch from someone good to someone who can hardly recognize himself or herself. He suggest that the one must be watchful and be stronger that the circumstances. In military and especially during war, the have no time to watch himself and see the person that they are turning to because they think that this is their job and it is orders that they can not disobey. Zimbardo utter that when the one is believed that others will be responsible for his or her actions, the one believe that they can act incognito and thinking that they people who are suffering are not as important. According to Zimbardo the conditions of the situation is what influence personal
In the pursuit of safety, acceptance, and the public good, many atrocities have been committed in places such as Abu Ghraib and My Lai, where simple, generally harmless people became the wiling torturers and murderers of innocent people. Many claim to have just been following orders, which illustrates a disturbing trend in both the modern military and modern societies as a whole; when forced into an obedient mindset, many normal and everyday people can become tools of destruction and sorrow, uncaringly inflicting pain and death upon the innocent.
Laws exist to protect life and property; however, they are only as effective as the forces that uphold them. War is a void that exists beyond the grasps of any law enforcing agency and It exemplifies humankind's most desperate situation. It is an ethical wilderness exempt from civilized practices. In all respects, war is a primitive extension of man. Caputo describes the ethical wilderness of Vietnam as a place "lacking restraints, sanctioned to kill, confronted by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, we sank into a brutish state." Without boundaries, there is only a biological moral c...
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...
Comparative Analysis The power of blind obedience taints individuals’ ability to clearly distinguish between right and wrong in terms of obedience, or disobedience, to an unjust superior. In the article “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak discusses the unwarranted murder of innocent individuals due to vague orders that did not survive with certainty. Szegedy-Maszak utilizes the tactics of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization, respectively, to attempt to justify the soldiers’ heinous actions (Szegedy-Maszak 76-77). In addition, “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” by Theodore Dalrymple distinguishes between blind disobedience and blind obedience to authority and stating that neither is superior;
The 1986 during the Vietnam war, the slaughter at My Lai Massacre “is an instance of a class of violent acts that can be described as sanctioned massacres (Kelman, 1973): acts of indiscriminate, ruthless, and often systematic mass violence, carried out by military or paramilitary personnel while engaged in officially
The motion picture A Few Good Men challenges the question of why Marines obey their superiors’ orders without hesitation. The film illustrates a story about two Marines, Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson and Private First Class Louden Downey charged for the murder of Private First Class William T. Santiago. Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, who is known to be lackadaisical and originally considers offering a plea bargain in order to curtail Dawson’s and Downey’s sentence, finds himself fighting for the freedom of the Marines; their argument: they simply followed the orders given for a “Code Red”. The question of why people follow any order given has attracted much speculation from the world of psychology. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted an experiment in which randomly selected students were asked to deliver “shocks” to an unknown subject when he or she answered a question wrong. In his article, “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram concludes anyone will follow an order with the proviso that it is given by an authoritative figure. Two more psychologists that have been attracted to the question of obedience are Herbert C. Kelman, a professor at Harvard University, and V. Lee Hamilton, a professor at the University of Maryland. In their piece, Kelman and Hamilton discuss the possibilities of why the soldiers of Charlie Company slaughtered innocent old men, women, and children. The Marines from the film obeyed the ordered “Code Red” because of how they were trained, the circumstances that were presented in Guantanamo Bay, and they were simply performing their job.
Milgram complies with a follow-up questionnaire of a subject. In the follow-up, the man was appalled by the way he was able to be obedient throughout the experiment and states that his wife referred to him as Eichmann, a WWII Nazi official who maintained an alibi of merely following orders (Milgram 84). Complying with Szegedy-Maszak and Milgram, Robert Hoyk, a doctor of psychology, found similar results in the work office. In his article “Roots of Unethical Behavior,” he found that bosses can direct employees to do unethical actions which the employees morally question. But due to fear of losing their job, the employees perform these acts (Hoyk). Milgram would agree with Hoyk and add that for his experiment, the “experimenter” was simply a man in a lab coat and did not threaten with any form of consequence. How does that relate to Szegedy-Maszak and the Abu Ghraib scandal? In the article “Military Orders: To Obey or Not to Obey?” written by Rod Powers, the oath in which all military personnel must swear to is written. The oath states, “. . . and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice” (Powers). As mentioned by Powers, these recruits are instilled with the practice of obeying immediately and without question (Powers). In fact, if military personnel do not obey their superior officers, it is considered a crime by Articles 90, 91, and 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. According to the same site, such acts are punishable by death (www.usmilitary.about.com). Szegedy-Maszak might conclude that this could be a possible reason as to why those American troops found that they were
The guards began mistreating the prisoners, not physically, but emotionally and psychologically, taking advantage of the power and authority appointed to them by the experimenter (Zimbardo 109). Crimes of obedience and mistreatment of other human beings are not only found in Milgrim’s and Zimbardo’s experiments. In 1968, U.S. troops massacred over 500 villagers in My Lai.
Through the analysis of characters and their actions, the novel Grendel suggests society has adopted good and evil’s unequal relationship for meaningfulness in life. The modern society is built on the opposite forces of nature and that evil must be challenged although good prevails it. However, evil and good is subjective which makes the true struggle between good and evil. Moreover, our every day actions are differentiated between good and evil acts. Unfortunately, while this occurs, good and evil will never be a black and white concept.
People will do some of the craziest things when any level of force is placed upon them. People will succumb to the pressure of doing things they had never imagined they could do. Just recently people can look at the events of the revolts in Northern Africa and the extremes the people did to over throw their governments, events at Abu Ghraib, and the recent riots in Missouri. When mass hysteria or force from others is involved people will succumb to the situation and may do things they would normally deem immoral.
In Harry Mulisch’s novel The Assault, the author not only informs society of the variance in perception of good and evil, but also provides evidence on how important it is for an innocent person experiencing guilt to come to terms with their personal past. First, Mulisch uses the characters Takes, Coster, and Ploeg to express the differences in perspective on the night of the assault. Then he uses Anton to express how one cannot hide from the past because of their guilt. Both of these lessons are important to Mulisch and worth sharing with his readers.
During war, this became apparent with the countless war crimes committed by soldiers; they were trained to not have any apprehension in regards to killing the Vietnamese, because they were “gooks” and of lesser form than a human. These violent events have scarred and traumatized some soldiers for the rest of their lives. Some soldiers have developed mental illnesses, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. Some veterans will always live their lives damaged and in fear. Some have already taken their own lives because the burden of knowing and reliving what they went through during the Vietnam War was too much to bear.
He concerns himself not with the process of murder, but with the impact murder leaves on the psychology of the criminal, suggesting that actual imprisonment counts, so little and much less terrible than the stress, doubt, fear, despair and anxiety of trying to avoid punishment. The working of Raskolnikov mind after the killing, the intense guilt and half-delirium state in which guilt throws him, enables the reader to understand this character as an embodiment of beliefs and characteristics that impels him to commit his crime, and provides a clear picture of the character within the context of the events that took place in the novel
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.
In this essay the main character from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevski, Rodion Raskolnikov, is broken apart to show how Psychoanalysis and Cognitive therapy deal with narcissistic clients. Cognitive therapy focuses on how the client categorizes experiences in his/her head leading them to have a unique set of ideals relating to the world.. This type of thinking will allows us to better understand why Raskolnikov, the main character of Crime and Punishment, views the people around him to be inferior in intellect. Psychoanalysis therapy’s main goal is to insure that patients become aware of themselves and their surroundings by digging deep into their unconscious mind. Both therapies work on making the client change their way of thinking by showing them how to think differently. These two therapies will be used to find a way to understand why Raskolnikov acts in impulsive ways causing others around him trouble.