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The Most Important Factor that Contributes to Evil Doing Essay

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Factors that Contribute to Evil Doing

In your view, what is the most important factor that contributes to evil doing and why? What examples from the readings can you find to support your views? Use at least four of the following authors: Arendt, Brecht, Conrad, Engels, Foucault, Freud, Lewis, Orwell, or Sontag.

Throughout the history of humanity, humans have committed inconceivable and unthinkable acts of cruelty towards one another. From the brutal wars during the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the modern area of ethnic cleansing and genocide one cannot help but wonder what is the root cause of this evil. Unthinkable numbers of human life has been lost in every corner of the world from the genocides in Armenia and …show more content…

Using the arguments of both Arendt and Orwell I will focus on how the state perpetuated the commission of evil in the imperialist structures. Next I will examine Foucault’s arguments about biopolitics and show how the role of the state in the Eugenics and biopolitics movements of the early 20th century was essential to the commission of evil. Finally I will focus on the Abu Ghraib prison abuses and how the state not only encouraged, but also legalized the torture of prisoners using the writings of both Sontag and Lewis.

Before the world witnessed the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps in the mid 1940’s an evil known only as imperialism wrecked havoc upon the “uncivilized” corners of the world. Imperialism in the most basic sense can be characterized as a policy of extending the control of a nation over foreign territory. The practice of the acquisition of foreign lands “was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion” (Arendt 126). In order to stave off the looming economic crisis that consisted of the massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few Western powers were forced to acquire foreign colonies as a way of expanding markets and providing the bourgeoisie a place to spend their massively accumulated wealth. Unlike the previous conquests by monarchs in Europe seeking out the largest and most powerful empire, imperialism was

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