Venice Shakespeare Writes Reply Post To Classmat

Min 150 words

First of all, I want to recognize how hard this module was to go through, but this information is necessary to spread awareness about the horrors and the victims of the war. Also I think it is important to recognize that events like this are still occuring in the world and cannot be ignored!

Every war that we know about carried a lot of consequences and a lot of crimes against humanity. World War II was one of the worst wars in history that had up to seventy-five million casualties, 6 million of these people were victims of Holocaust. People of non Aryan background, people with noticeable physical and mental disabilities, homosexuals, and Bolsheviks were persecuted and killed. The biggest group that suffered tremendous amounts of deaths were people of Jewish background. Although we have not talked much about Jewish history in this course and it might seem like these events were very spontaneous and out of character, but in Anti-Semitism in Europe goes back to the centuries before World War One or World War Two have occured. Although term Anti-Semitism was not coined until the end of 1800s, Jewish people have been mistreated and undermined since the Babylonian times. This can be seen even in the popular culture. In “Merchant of Venice”, Shakespeare writes about Jewish character as “greedy” and mistreated by others: Christian characters. This kind of treatment of Jews was a normality during the Middle Ages, they were segregated and later on expunged fully from Germany, France, and Portugal. In fact, what is known as Poland now, was the only territory that allowed Jews to have freedom to express their religious beliefs.

Knowing all this information, I still believe in humanity and do not think that expulsion of Jews was the ultimate goal from the beginning of times, but I think it took a right person to make others believe in that. Hitler and other anti-semitic believers made it an ultimate goal and executed it. This execution was very efficient and tactical, and I believe this plan was planned out for years before it was put in place. This kind of institutions that were build for executions could not have been built in days or months, it had to take years to plan and years to actually build it.

The War Crimes of WWII were specifically motivated by the ideas of Social-Darwinism and Eugenics. Hitler wanted to create a perfect race and was wiping out anyone who does not fit the standards. Even ideas of pseudoscience were similarly used to identify the “perfection” of a race. Japanese though, did not try to create a better race, but they did undermine Chinese and Slavs and used them as their own human “guinea pigs”. Ideas of Social Darwinism and Eugenics have been evolving through times and it seems like during WW2 these ideas have reached its ultimate peak.