The Corruption Of Power In Schindler's List

Power, law, and the role of government are necessary and crucial in maintaining justice and promoting growth in a society. But what if the people in power fail to do their role and abuse the given authority for personal interest? Elie Wiesel’s 1956 Holocaust memoir Night documents a dark period in human history where the abuse of power by a few had an irreversible effects on millions of lives. The film ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez also displays the influence of power have on people and their ways of treating others. Although Night is a memoir based on true experience and ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ is a film based on a simulated research experiment, both work expose the truth of unbalanced and misused power within a society and its enormous physical and psychological impacts on individuals of different social status.

Hollywood has the reputation of films encompassing more exaggerated drama than realism; however, the movie Schindler’s List (directed by Steven Spielberg) is exemplified by a mostly accurate portrayal of historical events. Spielberg’s paid homage and use of a man’s story provides a realistic view of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Power corrupts everyone who wields it good or bad. The police would beat and help the Nazis take control over the Jews out of fear that they themselves would meet the same fate if they did not swear allegiance to the Nazis. Just like the police the Jews were scared of the Nazis and would beat other Jews for extra rations or fewer beatings for themselves. Power changes people and even those who are not in power are affected, after one and a half long, harsh, years Wiesel is liberated from the camp by the Russians and looks in a mirror, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me” (115). Power corrupts people by shifting their mental state into an area of off balance, changing their normal actions into violent ones, and being a part of an oppressing system. Someone who has power has the choice to do good or bad, to make a difference, and change things for the better but with power it is easy to become corrupted and take the wrong

The word power sounds like it can be negative or positive depending on who is giving the power or who holds the power role. Most people will agree that Hitler had lots of power, he didn't handle his power well but we can all agree he had power

Imagine, people at your feet, doing everything you ask, raising you higher and better than everyone else. Does it feel good to live a life of luxury? Some would give up everything they have to achieve this fantasy, and the ones who finally have it never let it go. This is what it is like to have power and most abuse it. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, it follows a young boy named Elie, through a tragic event called the holocaust. Through so many traumatizing moments of fear and helplessness gives the ongoing theme of power, or the abuse of power. Power is something that an individual gains by asserting authority over others and can influence what they do or what happens. In this case many people that took part in the holocaust abused their power to accomplish extreme genocide. The abuse of power originated from Hitler, onto the people who ran the concentration camps, and to the people directly looking over the mistreated Jews.

Six million Jewish residents of Eastern Europe were exterminated during the Holocaust of the 1940’s. Families were taken out of their homes and put into ghettos, which were large prison type establishments that housed dozens of people in one small apartment. They were then separated from their families, "men to the left and women to the right", and were placed in concentration camps, where most of them were killed and cremated. In 1993, Steven Spielberg directed a film, Schindler’s List, which depicted the life of one man who risked his life and money to save the few Jewish families he could.

Victor Frankl once said, “Any person, regardless of the circumstances, can decide what shall become of them – mentally and spiritually.” This is true for Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth, who both had very different reactions to World War II. Human goodness is when one sees the truth, accepts it, and makes rational decisions based on the truth. Human evil is irrational decision-making, and when a person sees and understands the truth but choses to defy it. In Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, philosophers Kant and Rahner would agree that Schindler is a representation of human goodness, and Goeth represents human evil.

Power is having the capability or qualification to do something or control something. The idea of power is often analyzed in the Truman Show and Animal farm. In the Truman Show, Peter Weir suggests that power can be bad and that people shouldn’t have power

According to Gregory H. Stanton, President of Genocide Watch there is 8 stages of Genocide and in his opinion Genocide is a progress that is developing in the eight stages and which is predictable and not inexorable. At each stage there are possibilities to stop or at least influence Genocide and Oskar Schindler’s deeds are one example of moral courage and active resistance to the worst Genocide in the history of humankind during the Second World War. The following text will deal with evidences of Stanton’s eight stages of Genocide in Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List” and Schindler’s attempts to stop Genocide in the different stages.

Schindler's List is one of the most powerful movies of all time. It presents the indelible true story of enigmatic German businessman Oskar Schindler who becomes an unlikely saviour of more than 1100 Jews amid the barbaric Nazi reign. A German Catholic war profiteer, Schindler moved to Krakow in 1939 when Germany overran Poland. There he opens an enamelware factory that, on the advice of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern, was staffed by Jews from the nearby forced labour camp at Plaszow. Schindler's factory prospered though his contacts with the Nazi war machine and its local representatives, as well as his deft skill on the black market. Then, somewhere along the way, Schindler's devotion to self-interest was

was a Nazi member who saved over a thousand lives during the Holocaust by employing

Schindler's List The film Schindler's list directed by Steven Spielberg based on Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Arks tells the story of an entrepreneur and womaniser Oscar Schindler. Schindler uses the war to his gain by exploiting cheap Jewish labour to run his factory with dreams of earning "steamer trunks" full of money who with the twist of fate ends up saving the lives of 1100 Jews by bribing the Nazi with all his assets during one of the darkest period of history, the Holocaust. Although the film is based on a true story, it does get pampered with some Hollywood treatment to highlight Schindler's hero

‘Schindler’s List’ is no less a “Jewish story” or a “German story” than it is a human story. And its subject matter applies to every generation.’ [Stephen Spielberg] Discuss.

One way in particular that the authority can ensure that this power over all maintained, is by creating a system of differentiation amongst different groups; giving one group more significance than the other; as a way to gain unifying support from the preferred group. This is what we see with the totalitarian regime of the Nazi party, where the Jews were made out to be the inferior group. By successfully creating an enemy out of the Jews, Germans could now unify themselves in eliminating this common enemy. This according to Hayek is a necessary for a dictator in maintaining his power over the rest, meanwhile the rest are made to believe that their common hatred for Jews was necessary for the good of the whole. According to Hayek, “That the desire to organize social life according to a unitary plan itself springs largely from a desire for power. It is even more the outcome of the fact that, to achieve their end, collectivists must create power-power over men wielded by other men-of a magnitude never before know, and that their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power (165). Essentially, what is seen here is this relationship between unlimited state power over the individual and of

Then he slowly watched the murders progress into an entire extermination. Speilburg showed Oscar Schindler’s final realization that something must be done about these horrible executions after he saw the dead body of the young girl with the read coat in which he had seen earlier on. This triggered Schindler into making a list filled with names of workers for his factory which he would ultimately save from the killings of the concentration camps.