The book ”Night” perfectly tells readers how The Holocaust was. Night holds a message about how easy it is to dehumanize. And sadly, dehumanization is still happening today. There was an experiment done a few decades ago that shows how easy dehumanization happens, called the Zimbardo experiment. Hopefully dehumanization will be eliminated in the future, because it is a huge problem even today.
The message conveyed in Night is something that still happens today. The message in Night is that it is easy to dehumanize people when higher officials approve it. Throughout the book Elie is being dehumanized. At a certain point in the concentration camps, the Jews are given tattoos. “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.”
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A sample of mostly white, liberal Americans were surveyed to find out which racial groups were being dehumanized more than others. The respondents were shown “ascent of man” silhouettes, basically images of the monkey to human evolution process, and asked to point to a silhouette that mostly resembled a certain racial group. The respondents rated European groups and Japanese as equally evolved to themselves. But the racial groups that were near the bottom of the survey were Chinese, South Korean, and Mexican immigrants. At the very bottom of the list were Arabs and Muslims, which were perceived as being the least evolved compared to Americans. One reason to why Arabs and Muslims are being dehumanized is because of 9/11. Nour Sami Kteily, assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University says, “When people feel like their group is coming under attack from another group … it may increase the blatant levels of dehumanization." What he is talking about is the attacks of 9/11. Muslims were to blame for this attack, so now some people think that all Muslims are bad. In reality only a tiny percentage of Muslims are extreme like Al-Qaeda. This current event relates to Wiesel’s message because once again, this is how the Jews were perceived. The Jews in the holocaust were treated as humans that weren't even evolved. The Jew’s are basically the Arabs and Muslims of our current day society. (Although probably treated a lot