Night and Hotel Rwanda Similarities Essay

The Holocaust was the systematic killing and extermination of millions of Jews and other Europeans by the German Nazi state between 1939 and 1945. Innocent Europeans were forced from their homes into concentration camps, executed violently, and used for medical experiments. The Nazis believed their acts against this innocent society were justified when hate was the motivating factor. The Holocaust illustrates the consequences of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on a society. It forces societies to examine the responsibility and role of citizenship, in addition to approaching the powerful ramifications of indifference and inaction. (Holden Congressional Record). Despite the adverse treatment of the Jews, there are lessons that can be learned from the Holocaust: The Nazi’s rise to power could have been prevented, the act of genocide was influenced by hate, and the remembrance of the Holocaust is of the utmost importance for humanity.

For the past 300 years, the world’s society has displayed lots of unbelievable human cruelty. For example, slavery in the 18th and 19th century, African Americans were forced into harsh work labor because of their skin color. Then in the 20th century, a determined dictator, Adolf Hitler, murdered and tortured eleven million lives. This horrifying event was called the Holocaust, it occurred in 1933 but ended in 1945. Adolf Hitler was angered about the result of World War 1, so he blamed Jewish people, the disabled, and other groups. During the holocaust, the eleven million lives were forced into harsh work labors or was put into gas chambers and was killed instantly. People described the Holocaust as inhumane act, and the people that survived it, could really say it was a scarring memory.

Elie and his family were packed into cattle cars and taken to Auschwitz. As the train arrived, they saw smoke rising from chimneys and were assailed by the horrific smell of burning flesh (Wiesel, 2008).

The Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide were both sparked by hatred toward a segregated group of people. In the Holocaust, people who identified as Jewish, gay, disabled or “undesirable”

Throughout human history, mass killings have occurred on groups of people purely based on false stereotypes or rumors, built up aggression, power dominance, or physical attributions such as race. In the past 150 years, there has been a spike in the number of genocides, despite the culture that the killing takes place in. Therefore, it is impossible whether to deem these monstrous acts are of natural human, cultural, or sociological nature. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the causes, processes, and effects of the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide in terms of reification when comparing and contrasting the two horrific events. Additionally, elements of the logic of illogic and a doctrine of false concreteness will be discussed in an in-depth effort to uncover the mindset of these horrific atrocities.

Night, by Elie Wiesel, is a memoir that recounts his horrific experience of life during the Holocaust. Wiesel is only fifteen when German soldiers invade his home town of Sighet, Transylvania. Before long, the Jews of Sighet are forced into cramped ghettos until they are all sent to concentration camps. For over a year, Wiesel suffers various forms of inhumane treatment as he moves between different concentration camps, eventually ending up in Buchenwald where he is freed along with the rest of the prisoners by the Americans in 1945. Throughout Wiesel’s telling of this story, similes and metaphors really emphasize the dehumanization that Jews and Wiesel himself faced at the hands of their German captors by creating a correlation between the Jewish prisoners and animals.

At the beginning and ending of the story Elie recounted the times spent on the trains traveling from the concentration camps. On his first ride there the cattle cars were so packed that, “lying down was not an option, nor could we [Elie’s people] all sit down.”(23). All of these people were kept in areas animals were usually placed which is an act of dehumanization. Towards the end of their last journey on the cattle cars a german worker “took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into the wagon,”(100) The workers

The Holocaust is the undisputed genocide of all genocides, and it has been contended energetically by numerous students of history that no other dim period in mankind's history very thinks about to it. Albeit subjectively valid in a few perspectives, current students of history no longer need to depend on shades of obscurity keeping in mind the end goal to break down genocide.

The Holocaust is something that we must never forget. Its occurrence relied only “upon the indifference of bystanders in every land” (Zukier). Even today we stand by while innocent lives are taken. The recent conflicts in Rwanda or Bosnia, or past conflicts in Cambodia, are merely three examples. Wherever genocide occurs one thing is sure to happen– individual lives become lost in massive numbers and the tolls are so large

Throughout history, the world has seen many horrible acts committed against its people, but of all these acts none are as horrendous as the Holocaust. This event led to the prosecution and execution of millions of people just because those from the Nazi Regime felt they were superior. The Nazis invaded Poland because of this assumed superiority over the Jewish population, and since Nazis thought that the Jews were beneath them they sent them to concentration camps to be worked like animals and to die. The entire world saw this as inhumane, but unlike the Polish and German Jews, the entire world did not experience this great atrocity first hand.

“The sweetly sickening odor of decomposing bodies hung over many parts of Rwanda in July 1994: . . . at Nyarubuye in eastern Rwanda, where the cadaver of a little girl, otherwise intact, had been flattened by passing vehicles to the thinness of cardboard in front of the church steps,” (Deforges 6). The normalcy of horrible images like this one had cast a depressing gloom over Rwanda during the genocide, a time when an extreme divide caused mass killings of Tutsi by the Hutu. Many tactics such as physical assault or hate propaganda are well known and often used during times of war. Sexual assault and rape, however, during times of war is an unspoken secret – it is well known that rape occurs within combat zones and occupied territories, but

Genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, ethnic, political, or cultural group”. In Rwanda for example, the Hutu-led government embraced a new program that called for the country’s Hutu people to murder anyone that was a Tutsi (Gourevitch, 6). This new policy of one ethnic group (Hutu) that was called upon to murder another ethnic group (Tutsi) occurred during April through June of 1994 and resulted in the genocide of approximately 800,000 innocent people that even included women and children of all ages. In this paper I will first analyze the origins/historical context regarding the discontent amongst the Hutu and Tutsi people as well as the historical context as to why major players in the international

On the lines of many movies subjected on ethnic discrimination and massacre, Hotel Rwanda focuses on Paul Rusesabagina and his family in Rwanda during the genocide of the Tutsis by the ruling Hutu tribe in 1994. The movie incorporates many aspects its subject in a thrilling and sentimental fashion. New York Times critic Stephan Holding’s problem is that the portrayal of violence and sentiments are not accurate. Considering the fact that this movie is meant cover a wide range of audience and its subject, the proportions of violence and sentiment are not balanced for the purpose of creating the most impact and arouse its viewers to the

A group of Rwandan people known as the Hutu want to eliminate another Rwandan group, the Tutsi, and they get very close to succeeding. About one million Tutsi people were murdered in the Rwandan Genocide in a time span of 100 days. Hotel Rwanda is a movie about a hotel manger, Paul, that saves a thousand Tutsi people by keeping them in his hotel. He saves the refugees, mostly, by giving the Hutu rebels his money and alcohol in return for leaving the Tutsi people alone. The movie is trying to send the message that helping others is equally important as helping one’s family.

The movie starts with a radio announcer saying that Tutsis took Hutu land, and they are cockroaches and murderers. He states that Hutus are the majority, and that the infestation of Tutsi traitors and invaders will be squashed.