Man’s inhumanity to man is everywhere. I firmly believe that people on this earth should be treated and respected equally. People are all unique. They come from different backgrounds, have different beliefs and ideas, but treating others in such an inhuman way, as the Jewish were in the concentration camps is cruel and should have never happened. I believe that the killing of several million people during the Holocaust could have been prevented by the means of more involvement from the other countries. When German gained great power, many of the countries did not pay attention.
Germany started World War II and countries like England and France, knowing quite well the rise in Germany’s power could cause mass destruction wouldn’t do anything about it until it was too late. Countries should have bonded together and stop the horrible torture and killings. Why didn’t the more powerful countries stop Germany sooner? Some countries just didn’t want to get involved until later. Experiencing a slow economy and lack of funds, they didn’t want to get into a costly war, but this lack of quick involvement resulted in tragedy.
Preventing this genocide and anti-Semitism, I think would take a lot of work and effort for many of the countries but it would spare so many lives. The other countries should have recognized the threat Germany posed when Germany broke the Treaty of Versailles agreement. Quick action could have saved more than six million lives by stopping Hitler and the Nazi party. After the Holocaust, the people who survived the concentration camps should have received their properties back. Germany should have given the survivors some money so they wouldn’t have to start from ground zero.
Why did the people living in Germany allow this to happen? Hitler blamed the Jewish people for the cause of Germany’s problems and the people believed him, electing a government who was trying to destroy an entire race. Germans who were against anti-Semitism should have gathered a political party to fight for the Jews. Some of their friends and neighbors were taken from their homes and forced into a concentration camp. If they had at least tried, they might not live their lives with regret thinking what if they had done something different, and then maybe; just maybe the Jews might not have died.
It was not just Hitler and the Nazi’s that treated man inhumanely. It is happening all around the world with cults such as the Ku Klux Klan who killed because of the dislike of another race. The Tiananmen Square Massacre, which ended with hundreds of student’s lives lost because of protest on their beliefs for change. When is it going to stop? It starts off on a small scale where kids calling other kids names and sometimes hit them because they are different, but it ends in millions of people killed with bullets, starved or burned to death.
The world doesn’t all have to get a long, but there should be respect for other people’s lives and beliefs. With better communication, and a better understanding of the truth rather than the lies, our world could be better. Life is not fair. “Life”… will be fair when people allow it to be so. Life is fair. Life is a wonderful thing. People are not fair. It is only human beings that make life unfair. It is only when we are in contact with the “other”, that life becomes cruel and “evil”. We make it this way, quite unaware that we are doing so, and in some case well aware.
It is my point that we only contact true evil in our dealings with other people and their dysfunction. Further that it is only at these times that the majority of us people recognize any mishap as a form of evil. We do so from a self centered point of view when we suffer and begin another phase of self-evaluation. It is also true that we individually suffer from our very own internal evils and seldom, if ever, recognize them at all. This is because of the way we have formed our constructs of the world around us. Our actions and reactions to stimulate become embedded in our personalities as normal and comfortable for us to use.
We act this way because of the compilation of our life experiences. In such a sense, we fail to recognize the evil within ourselves, our dysfunction, and use it to compare our selves with others and their values. In short, we use denial as a weapon of defense, thereby causing some of our own pain. We also use this same inability to reason to consciously inflict pain on others, all the while telling ourselves that “they deserved it”, or other such nonsense. This becomes somewhat normal as we see that since so many other people act this way, then surely it must be acceptable.
These are the lies we tell ourselves to relieve the burden of guilt, possibly. Is it not true that it always seems to boil down to how we “think” or “feel” about something that guides us in our actions and reactions? But, if the measuring instrument is uncalibrated, the measurement is inaccurate. For the purpose of this essay let the definition of Evil be “any actions or events that cause humans pain and suffering emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically, that we inflict on one another either with or without intent or design”.
We are speaking here of how we treat one another, not about natural disasters. Yet evil is not possible without individual human evil of dysfunction. To conclude, I believe that such repulsive incidents should never happen again. We now live in a society based on law and respect. We should not say that one race is more superior to the others. Everybody should be treated equal. We should learn from our past and prevent from repeating it in the future.
