In Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14, Shin Dong-Hyuk was born and raised inside of a concentration camp where he was stripped of his human qualities, brainwashed to follow orders, and deprived of his human rights. The goal of the guards within the camp is to dehumanize the prisoners by breaking them down physically and psychologically so that they feel less than human and hence, not worthy of humane treatment. It is proven throughout the novel that the process of dehumanizing an individual impacts the social contingency of a given society. Emotion is a natural instinct that gives human beings a sense of morality. In Camp 14, emotion is a feeling that remains obscure. Since birth, it is implemented in the prisoners that they are less than human. Through experiencing constant physical and …show more content…
psychological abuse by the guards, they are deprived of their human qualities, creating a group of individuals that are unaware of their sense of values and morals. In the novel, it is emphasized that the indoctrination and brutality of the camp has the power to obliterate a prisoner's ability to embrace the concepts of family and love. According to Shin, “love and mercy and family were words without meaning” (Harden 3). He is taught that friends and family have no value and they mean nothing as shown through his statement that his affection for his mother is non-existent. Shin views her and the other prisoners in the camp as opponents that he must compete with for food and survival. In addition, the prisoners have no compassion for one another as the only method for survival in the camp is betrayal. Due to the dehumanization tactics employed by guards within the camp, Shin learns to suppress the emotions of sympathy and compassion. He “hate[s] his mother and brother with the savage clarity of a wronged and wounded adolescent” (Harden 68). As a result of his family’s plan to escape, Shin is savagely tortured. He is suspended in mid-air over a charcoal fire while the guards demand that he provide information regarding their plan. The first rule of Camp 14 is that anyone who tries to escape, or anyone who fails to report an escape plan, will be shot immediately. As a result, he did not hesitate to report his families plan to escape from the camp. Shin is fully aware that his family’s escape plan will put his life at risk and therefore, he believes that they deserved to be punished.
It is apparent that the prisoners are raised to see personal redemption in reporting acts of betrayal against the rules of the camp, due to their desperation to survive. For instance, when Shin overhears his mother and brother planning to escape, he instinctively reports them to the authorities in order to increase his chance for survival. Despite the fact that he betrays his family, he has no regrets and “[is] not ashamed on the day of the executions” (Harden 68). Shin discloses that he is responsible for the execution of his mother and brother, and admits he has made this trade-off to obtain more food and to receive an easier job at school. It is also evident that Shin has become so dehumanized that he believes they deserved to die. In addition, Shin and the other children in the society have become so overly programmed to follow the rules of the camp and, as a result, they became disengaged from morality. When a child ran away from work because he was hungry, “without a second thought, Shin joined his classmates in thrashing Ryu” (Harden 32). Like the other prisoners in the camp, Shin accepted the rules and learned to survive within society by betraying
other students. His first instinct was to beat the child with his classmates to avoid being ostracized, shunned, or in worst case scenario, killed. As part of the dehumanization process, many prisoners grew up inside the forced-labour camp with no idea there is better way of living on the far side of the high-voltage, barbed-wire fence. Shin spends his entire childhood enduring in unpaid labour and developing the necessary skills that are vital for a daily existence. Unlike others in the camp, Shin has not been torn away from a civilized society and forced to descend into hell. He is born and raised in the camp and has accepted its values. He called Camp 14 home. Shin believes that being tortured for doing something wrong is a standard procedure. He is constantly tortured and “[has] been trained by guards and teachers to believe that every time he [is] beaten, he deserve[s] it” (Harden 26). Shin and the other prisoners have been taught that the rituals of respect that the guards demand must be maintained, otherwise, they will be forced to suffer the consequences of physical and psychological punishment. He has also been brainwashed to believe that the only way to wash away the treasonous blood he has inherited from his parents is through hard work and labour. As a result of the continuous torture, the prisoners within the camp have become desensitized to violence and desensitized to being treated like animals, as opposed to human beings. The guards have been trained “never to smile and to think of inmates as dogs and pigs” (Harden 36). They strip the prisoners of their belongings, including their clothes. In essence, the prisoners are rendered helpless and powerless within the confinement of Camp 14. Though Shin may have escaped from the physical confinement of the camp, his psychological scars will never heal. The acts of betrayal that he committed against his family and other prisoners, continue to haunt him to this day. Shin is aware that the social contingency within the camp was immoral due to the cruel dehumanization tactics and brainwashing by the guards. Although Shin is now afforded the human rights that he deserves and is attempting to fit into a normal society, he has a long road ahead of him. The lack of trust that he continues to experience towards members of society will likely be a difficult obstacle for him to overcome.
Shin Dong-hyuk was born in a labor camp, more specifically known as Camp 14. In this camp, Shin was considered to be living “below the law” (3) because of his father’s brother’s crimes. In this camp, Shin went through things many people couldn’t even fathom. He survived on his own. His mother would beat him, his father ignored him, and he trusted no one. “Before he learned anything else, Shin learned to survive by snitching on all of them.” (3). In this camp, the word “family” did not exist. All of this sounds horrific to many people living outside of North Korea, but that’s just the beginning of it. His life became increasingly worse when his mother and brother made the decision to try and escape the camp. On April 5, 1996, Shins older brother, He Guen, came home. As He Guen was talking to Shin’s mother, he overheard that “his brother was in trouble a...
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.
There are many emotions that Antonio Beaver had to bring out while he was in prison. Antonio said he had many emotions such as being Angry, Sad, Confused, and Depressed. The cell he stayed in was described as Dark, Lonely, and very tight space. The only time he got to talk to family, Friends, was once a month for 5 minutes. Most of Antonio time was in his cell were he could only have 1 hour of outside time a day. Antonio Beaver said even to this day said that it made him so angry how they picked himn and didn’t even go far into his information to prove it was him.
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.
Throughout humanity, human beings have been faced with ethnic hardships, conflict, and exclusion because of the battle for authority. Hence, in human nature, greed, and overall power consumes the mind of some people. Groups throughout the world yearn for the ability to be the mightiest one. These types of conflicts include ethnic shaming, racial exclusion, physical and verbal abuse, enslavement, imprisonment, and even death. Some of these conflicts were faced in all parts of Europe and the Pacific Region during World War II. During this dark time in history, people like Miss.Breed from Dear Miss Breed took initial action in what she thought was right, and gave hope to Japanese Internment Camp children by supplying books and
The process of dehumanization is a process which has been repeated throughout history. Dehumanization takes place in the book Night, in which the author of the memoir, Elie Wiesel, is exposed to its effects. He is taken from his family and home, sent to a concentration camp in which he first comes in contact with people who have gone through the process of dehumanization. Most mistake the noun “dehumanization” as the verb “to dehumanize.” Dehumanization is a process, a twisted art; while to dehumanize someone is to persecute in one’s mind and actions whilst the subject being dehumanized still acts and thinks humanly. In a basic summary, to dehumanize is just a step in the process of dehumanization. Dehumanization is a process in which the subject/s are prosecuted (dehumanized), thieved of their family needs, and then stripped of their physiological needs.
How can inhumanity be used to make one suffer? The book Night by Elie Wiesel is about a young Jewish boy named Elie who struggles to survive in Auschwitz, a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Throughout the memoir, there are many instances where inhumanity is portrayed. The theme seen in this novel is inhumanity through discrimination, fear, and survival.
Dehumanization Through Elie Wiesel Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations.
Through segregation, loss of identity, and abuse, Wiesel and the prisoners around him devolve from civilized human beings into savage animals. The yellow stars begin separation from society, followed by ghettos and transports. Nakedness and haircuts, then new names, remove each prisoner’s identity, and physical abuse in the form of malnourishment, night marches, and physical beatings wear down prisoners. By the end of Night, the prisoners are ferocious from the experiences under German rule and, as Avni puts it, “a living dead, unfit for life” (Avni 129). Prisoners not only revert to animal instincts, but experience such mental trauma that normal life with other people may be years away.
...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.
We see that the author’s purpose is to allow the readers to understand that the prisoners were not treated humanly, and allows us to see the negative attitudes the authority had towards the prisoners.
We know that people react differently than others, like the man who left early compared to all of the other men. Though the experiment only lasted less than a weeks’ time, it showed us that we cannot perform these kind of studies without someone on the outside looking in. It was a tough environment for all of the people involved. From Zimbardo right down to the prisoners, it was a tough time. They hadn’t even started to see the changes in themselves being so wrapped up in the study. People will react to certain situations how they seem fit, even when they don’t realize that they are hurting the people around them at the time. I don’t think that any of the guards made it their intention to hurt anyone, they just hadn’t realized it at the time that what they were doing was wrong. We cannot treat each other as less than human beings. Thanks to Christina Maslach, the project was ended early. Without her having seen what she had, who knows how much worse it would have been for everyone involved. We are all human, and no one deserves to be treated as anything less than so; prisoner or
Viktor Frankl's concept regarding survival and fully living was developed through his observations and experiences in the concentration camps. He used his psychiatric training to discern the meanings of observations and to help himself become a better person. He uses analysis to develop his own concepts and describes them in steps throughout the book. When the prisoners first arrived at the camp most of them thought they would be spared at the last moment. The prisoners believed they had a chance of surviving, but this belief was eventually eliminated and it was at this time when the prisoners began to learn how to survive by using their internal strength. A sense of humor had emerged among the prisoners. This humor helped to get through some difficult situations they faced. Viktor also observed how much a person could really endure and still live. Even though the prisoners could not clean their teeth and were deprived of warmth and vitamins, they still were able to survive. The sores and abrasions on their hands did not suppurate despite the dirt that gathered on them from the hard labor. The challenge of staying alive under these wretched conditions was to have and maintain strong internal strength. During the time he spent in the camps, Viktor learned what was needed to survive and how to keep his internal strength despite his weakening external strength. During the second stage of Viktor's psychological reaction, prisoners lost their sense of feeling and emotion toward events that would be emotional to people outside the camps. This was a result of the violent environment, which consisted of beatings of prisoners and the death of many others. The prisoners could no longer feel any disgust or horr...
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.
The Holocaust attested that morality is adaptable in severe conditions. Traditional morality stopped being contained by the barbed wires of the concentration camps. Inside the camps, prisoners were not treated like humans and thus adapted to animal-like behavior needed to survive. The “ordinary moral world” (86) Primo Levi refers to in his autobiographical novel Se questo è un uomo (