Bosnia.
Sudan.
Germany.
Iraq.
Darfur.
It Can't Happen Here
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It Can't Happen Here is a satirical political novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1935. It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who was modeled either on Gerald B. Winrod, an evangelist who held far-right political points of view earning him the nickname "The Jayhawk Nazi", or on Huey Long. It serves as a warning that political movements akin to Fascism or Nazism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders. It is thought to have inspired both Philip K. Dick's SF novel The Man in the High Castle and Philip Roth's recent The Plot Against America.
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The Wave (book)
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The Wave is a young adult novel by Todd Strasser (under the pen name "Morton Rhue"). It is a fictionalized account of the "Third Wave" teaching experiment that took place in a Cubberley High School history class in Palo Alto, California.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_%28book%29The Third Wave
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The Third Wave was the name given by history teacher Ron Jones to his unanticipated and unprecedented recreation of Nazi Germany.
The experiment took place at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California during 1967. Jones, unable to explain to his students why the German youth allowed the Nazi Party to exterminate millions of Jews, decided to show them instead. Starting with simple things like classroom discipline, Jones managed to meld his history class into a group with a supreme sense of purpose and no small amount of cliquishness. Jones named the movement "The Third Wave," after the common wisdom that the third in a series of ocean waves is always the strongest, and claimed its members would revolutionize the world. The experiment took on a life of its own, with students from all over the school joining in; Jones agonized over the outcome of the exercise before bringing it to a halt by claiming that the movement had a world-wide leader, and then displaying a film clip of him: Adolf Hitler.
Despite the clear implications of this study on the malleability of young minds (of particular interest to both psychologists seeking to understand and prevent it, and would-be world dictators attempting to recreate it), little has surfaced on the subject; Todd Strasser, under the pen name Morton Rhue, wrote a young-adult novel on the subject (entitled The Wave), which was later made into a movie and a play; later, Jones himself came forward with his own material. Researchers of the experiment have had some trouble in eliciting reports from any of the students involved.
There exists some doubt that the experiment took the full form described by Jones. The Catamount, the school newspaper at Cubberley, reported details that conflicted with Jones' published account.
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Stanford prison experiment
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The Stanford prison experiment, was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners and lived in a mock prison. However, the experiment quickly got out of hand and was ended early.
Ethical concerns surrounding the famous experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1963 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo's former high school friend.
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Milgram experiment
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The Milgram experiment (Obedience to Authority Study) was a famous scientific experiment of social psychology. The experiment was first described by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University in an article titled Behavioral Study of Obedience published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963, and later discussed at book length in his 1974 Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It was intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant's personal conscience.
The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974)
Milgram summed up in the article "The Perils of Obedience" (Milgram 1974), writing:
"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects'
strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment