A Human Being Died That Night Analysis

“The feeling of guilt is your conscience calling your attention to the higher road, and your heart wishing you had taken it.” The poem “I Can Stand Him no Longer” by Raphael Dumas and “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe are pieces of literature that develop the thematic topic of guilt using literary devices such as metaphors, connotations, similes and etc. Both stories are about a person who commits a deed that he is later guilty of doing. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a man commits a murder of an old neighbor and tries to hide the crime. However, he later finds himself guilty of doing so and accepts his crime in front of the police. Comparingly, the poem “I Can Stand Him No Longer” is about a man who hates another person. He pretends as

The explanation of why upright people execute wrongful actions can be interpreted in multiple ways. In "The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience," Herbert C. Kelman, a professor of social ethics, and V. Lee Hamilton, a sociologist, discuss how the use of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization can be used to carry out unethical actions like in the My Lai Massacre. The American Law assumes that subordinates should be obeying orders, and when linked to obeying superiors, moral principles become inoperative. Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst and the author of "Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem," explains how the different types of mind set and authority can be noticeably effective in whether one is obedient. Humanistic

Since 1945, many victims of the Holocaust have documented their horrific experiences. Some recorded their experiences solely to stay sane, but most survivors feared that the world would forget the atrocities of the Second World War. Since the late 1940s, thousands of different Holocaust memoirs have been published. Undoubtedly, what binds most of these authors is the fact that they have all faced severe loss, questioned the existence of God, and felt the desperate need for hope. Their awareness, understanding and judgement were also severely put to the test. According to Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan, these three mental abilities define the human spirit. Thus, the Nazis brutally challenged the very humanity of the Holocaust writers.

Whether working with a co-worker, learning with a classmate or hanging out with a friend, the thought of any of them having the potential to be evil does not cross the mind. Everyday people are not typically evil beings, but if people are not evil beings then why do they commit actions like torture, killing and genocide? Could it be that the certain people committing the acts are just monsters deep inside, or could the actions be mere products of circumstance? In his article "The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror", Crispin Sartwell, a journalist and philosopher, advises his audience to take a look at the heinous acts people have committed throughout history as a way to show us how anyone could commit evil acts, including ourselves. Marianne Szegedy-Maszak,

Night, fire and death are things that occur many times throughout the book, death being a very big one. Death stands out the most because it happens so much in the book and people are so used to it, they act as if it 's a normal thing. For example, "Babies! Yes, I see this, with my own eyes... children thrown into the flames" (Wiesel 32). This shows how casually that SS officer murdered the children and how surprised Elie was when they did it.

In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when the ss officers were transporting all the prisoners from buna to another camp and whenever somebody couldn’t keep running the ss officers shoot them. “They had orders to shoot anyone who couldn’t sustain the peace”(Wiesel 85). The ss officers cruelty to the prisoners led them to give up, they stopped trying. If someone stopped and the officers didn’t noticed, he would probably die under the feet of all the people behind them. As the author describes his experiences, many other examples of inhumanity are revealed. Two significant themes related to inhumanity discussed in the book Night by Elie Wiesel are loss of faith and disbelief.

When placed in particular situations, humans rank which cultural or personal values they found the most essential. Consequently, certain ideals are not considered. During the infamous incident known as the Holocaust, this occurred frequently. As a result, the people that underwent these horrible situations nominated particular personal or cultural values over others. This selection determined the difference between life and death for several individuals. One instance of this is a Jewish survivor known as Elie Wiesel. His first person narrative Nigh publishes his horrific experiences during the Holocaust. The memoir discusses the impressions the event had on him. Upon analyzing Night for the personal or cultural principles that were prioritized during the Holocaust, Wiesel utilizes literary devices to reveal that humans begin to lose faith, hope, and morality when subjected to circumstances of injustice.

Mahatma Gandhi often mentioned fear in his teachings: defining it, recognizing it, and overcoming it. He identifies fear saying, “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.” (Gandhi). Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night which is the story of Elie’s life in the Concentration Camps during the Holocaust reflects this statement. The people that experienced these camps lived in unimaginable fear every minute. When we look at such utter hatred and terror it is easy to see hatred as the enemy, but both Elie and Gandhi reflect the same message, that fear is powerful. Fear is the strongest human emotion, because it has the power to change people’s entire view of life and reality.

David’s claim that the Holocaust occurred because the Germans became unusually cruel is false based on the fundamental attribution error and Milgram’s experiments. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to internal factors, instead of accounting for situational factors. David committed this error when stating that Germans, as a whole, were “sadistic people with abnormal and twisted personalities”. David did not account for the immense pressure that the German public felt from Hitler during World War II. Although many atrocities were being committed, the Germans feared for their lives if they stood up for the Jews and disobeyed Hitler’s rule. David would be correct if he said that some Germans became systematically cruel, but the fundamental attribution error is introduced when David says that all Germans became systematically cruel.

In the book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, the story is told from the perspective of Olympic-track-star-turned-WWII-airman Louis Zamperini. Zamperini was the youngest of four children, born from Italian immigrants Anthony and Louise Zamperini. He was a very definition of a delinquent. From the time Louis could walk, he could not be controlled. “The instant Louise thumped him into a chair and told him to be still, he vanished. If she didn’t have her squirming boy clutched in her hands, she usually had no idea where he was.”(Hillenbrand 5). These little acts of terror turned into full-blown teenage defiance. This defiance would help him many years later as a POW.

The Holocaust is still a heavily reviewed subject and is debatably one of the worst if not the worst atrocity that has happened on this Planet up to date. To think that the Nazi’s were able to kill millions of people it has made us question what kind of people they were and if they were anything similar to us. It is hard to think of a perpetrator to be a normal human being. The Holocaust has made us question if the Nazi’s had any sense of moral sensibility when killing innocent and defenseless Jewish men and women. In the book Ordinary Men, Author Christopher Browning argues that these Nazi’s especially referring to the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were normal people who had instructions given by Hitler and their government to follow through with by devaluing all Jewish life. Although these Nazi’s were placed outside of their regular comfort zone, the mass murder that underwent during the Holocaust was more of an act for the soldiers to continue out with to avoid any sort of alienation from their own country.

When talking about war, there are many books with few answers to what war truly is. Barbara Ehrenreich brings forth not only the possibilities towards understanding war but also the passion people from history have had towards it. One key issue she brings to light is humanities love for war, so much so that people would use excuses like holy wars to justify their need to fight in a war. She declares that war is as muddled as the issue of diseases and where diseases came from around 200 years ago. More so than that she even goes further on to state that these rituals that date back to prehistoric times are the cause of human nature during times of war rather than human instinct. Ehrenreich brings up the idea that war is human kinds natural high. She sails us down a road of self-doubt in humanity and makes society re-question the idea of antiwar acts all the

It is hard to understand the struggle of another person that is forced to live in a society where they are seen as inferior to the societal norm due to uncontrollable circumstances. How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon is a story about a young African American male that is shot by a white American male. The story is made up a multiple accounts of the people connected to the lives of Tariq Johnson and Jack Franklin. These are real life accounts of the person 's emotions and their point of view on the incident. The big question of the entire incident is whether Tariq was armed or not, and the more we are exposed to multiple stories the further we are from the truth. In How It Went Down, Kekla Magoon strives to find a way to present the strength of a minority community through exposing their daily obstacles of living in a struggling

Otto Adolf Eichmann was one of the most important members of the Nazi Party who was accused of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity during World War 2. After the war, he went to Argentina to escape prosecution but was captured there by Israeli agents and was transferred to Israel to be judged. During the trial, Eichmann’s defense was based on Kant’s duty-based ethical theory and categorical Imperative since he overstated many times that he was only following orders. By enouncing Kantian ethical theory, Eichmann acquitted himself from moral guilt.

The movie “Blood Diamond” is a very revealing tale that easily shows the underlying morals and ethics of many people in this world. During this movie, one can see the absence of conscience, respect for “the other” as well as the pure dedication people have to the direction in life that they have chosen. All of these morals, or lack thereof, are presented by many various groups and characters throughout the movie and in their own way affect and change the ethical dilemma that is the blood diamonds during the movie.