Shianne Buie Compare and Contrast Chap 17 Both the Essays - Racism

Shianne Buie Compare and Contrast Chap 17 Both the Essays - Racism Shianne Buie Compare and Contrast Chap 17 Both the Jewish people and Native Americans were discriminated and targeted by political leaders, F hrer Adolf Hitler and President Andrew Jackson . Both men subjected these cultural groups to terribly devastating treatment and will forever be known as monsters for their actions. Even worse is the fact that these people were simply subjected to so much torture simply because of their different race s and religio n. The Holocaust and The Trail of Tears showcase the real horrors these cultural groups had to endure at the hands of these men. After Jackson issued the Indian Removal Act of 1830, numerous Native American tribes were gathered up by US soldiers to be taken to a reservation the government had set up for them. These people were forced out of their homes and told that if they didn't cooperate, they would be killed. They were then shuffled, on foot, by the army from their Southeastern US territ ories all the way to the Mississippi River. The Jews were also treated inhumanly by the Nazi army, they were dragged out of their homes in the night and forced into rundown Ghettos. Then they were all crowded into cattle cars and shipped off to Concentration Camps,also set up by the government, where they faced truly unspeakable horrors. Along the Trail of Tears many lives were lost by means of starvation, exhaustion, disease and even freezing to death. There was no regard not burial given for the dead, soldiers merely threw blankets over their bodies and pushed the others on their way. The way the Jews died was pretty much the same, there was also no type of proper burial for the deceased. It is said that there were actually mass graves that the Nazi ' s dumped the countless bodies of the dead in. Even after a century it seems men still hadn ' t learned how to act like human beings, in fact they seemed to have gotten worse. There were also a fair number a differences between these horrific events, one being the final death counts. From 1831 to 1838 nearly fifty-thousand Indians had walked the Trail of Tears, resulting in the deaths of 6,000. While during 1941 to 1945, nearly six million Jews, out of the 9.5 million that had populated Europe, had been killed. While they shared some of the main causes of death with the Native Americans on the Trail of Tears, the Jews also had to face gas chambers, being burned alive, exhaustion from overworking and even fatal medical experiments. Another difference between the two is the fact that the Trail of Tears was more of a periodic occurrence, only happening five times in a seven year period. While the Jewish victims were at the mercy of German soldiers for the entirely of the Holocaust period. The reasoning for these disasters is also different, t he Jews were targeted because Hitler managed to convince everyone that they were to blame for the failure of the economy in G ermany . As for the Indians, it was just a matter of white farmers wanting their land and needing a way to get them off it. Both causes were completely despicable all the same. While reading about the Trail of Tears in this chapter, I happened to recall a presentation my friend gave in high school about political leaders who had committed terrible crimes. Hitler was obviously on the list, but when she mentioned Jackson a lot of people were surprised, one guy even said and I quote, " But he was an American president. " My friend had responded that it didn't matter who the heck he was, because treating people like he did was absolutely repulsive and horrifying. I agreed with her reasoning and thought the presentation itself was really interesting, so I figured comparing and contrasting these two events would prove even more informative to me, as it certainly did.