Allie Murphy
Genocide
College Reading
9/30/13
Genocide: Good vs
Evil
The systematic and widespread extermination or
attempted extermination of an entire national, racial, religious, or ethnic
group. Night, This Killing Fields, Elie/Oraph interview,
and TED they all tell different stories about genocide and how good and evil
challenge each other in each story. All four of them are examples of evil but
in every story there is good also.
What I have
learned from watching/reading: The Killing Fields, Elie/Oprah interview,
reading the book Night, and watching TED is that it can go both ways with evil
outweighs good or good outweighs evil. On the TED show, a person is asked
questions, and for every question they get wrong, a voltage of electricity
shocks them. The person that controls the amount of voltage that shocks the
person is told that no matter how high the voltage and the outcome of the
shocking, they will not be held accountable for what happens to the victim.
They could be hurt really bad or end up dead without getting into trouble for
causing it.
In one scenario on the TED Show, evil
overweighs good because a person could end up killing an innocent citizen
without having to feel guilty, because they know that there are no consequences
for their actions. In a different scenario, a man falls onto the tracks of a
subway as it is headed his way. A man that sees him has his children with him.
He puts them to the side and goes to lay on top of the man in the middle of the
tracks, preventing him from being hit. The good overweighs the bad in this case
because the man risked his life for another person, even though his children
were there waiting for him and watching this happen.
Elie Wiesel
wrote a personal novel, Night. In
this book he talks about his journey in life living through the holocaust, and
the many struggles between good and evil that he was faced with. At Buna, a
concentration work camp, Elie witnessed a boy getting hung for disgracing the
SS officers. At this point Elie started to lose his faith. “ For God’s sake,
where is God? Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows…That
night, the soup tasted of corpses.” Elie used to be a strong believer in God
and faith, but he let the evil outweigh the good and lost all hope in any
higher power. To Elie it seemed that there would never be a chance for good to
find and rescue him.
Even though
Elie’s journey was filled with evil and hardships, he started out with a strong
religious foundation. He had a lot of faith and a good outlook on life. He
believed that God would give him the strength to make it through each day. “I
pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions”. Elie
listens to God for directions on where to go and to guide him through life.
Good outweighs bad because Elie has hope and is optimistic about the life ahead
of him, even though he did not know at the time what he would be facing.
Last year Elie did an interview
with Oprah at the main gates of one the concentration camps, Auschwitz, in
Germany. At Auschwitz Elie and Oprah looked at a room in the museum that had
children’s clothes and suitcases. Oprah asked if many of the babies lived and
Elie replied, “ They had no chance. No”. This shows that Evil took over because
the women and babies in Auschwitz didn’t survive at all. Babies were killed and
since many women never left the sides of their children, they too were
murdered.
In the movie The Killing Fields,
The Khmer Rouge people were formed to be the leaders of Cambodia. They turned
on their own people and turned fields into places where they made their people
slaves for working. If they didn’t work, they were shot, killed, and dumped in
ditches within the fields where millions of other innocent Cambodians were
gathered. Since Cambodia was bombed, the Khmer Rouge thought they were headed
down an endless path and took over the country. They evacuated over 2 million
people in the country and forced them to walk to the country-side where they
were forced to work and killed.
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