Prejudice and Discrimination - Essay Example

Prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination have increased with immigration into different countries. People who originate from developed countries may feel resentful towards the immigrants in their countries and may develop a prejudiced attitude towards them. This results in unequal opportunities and a rigorous struggle on the part of the people who confront discrimination. Several groups who have had to face prejudice and discrimination on the parts of others include the Blacks, Chinese, Hispanic, Muslims, Jews, and many other groups.

There is mutual intolerance amongst the various groups yet only the most powerful group is able to discriminate against the group in minority with less abundant resources. Most of the time, the intolerance and prejudice exist because of misconceptions between the two groups of people and due to lack of understanding of each other’s rights and practices. It also exists because of one group claiming to be the superior race and perceiving the other group as inferior or imperfect. While prejudice and discrimination has existed since the world came into being and it still exists today in many ways, two of the most popular examples of prejudice and intolerance are Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the Kurds (Bankier, 2000).

While both of the events occurred in different time periods and happened for different reasons, they still carry many similarities. In the period during World War 2, Hitler carried out mass persecution of Jews and non-Germans in Nazi Germany. Millions of Jewish women, children, and men died while Hitler made all attempts of completely eliminating the group from German society due to his hatred and intolerance for Jews. This period is known as the “Holocaust” and was a time of extreme prejudice and discrimination as millions of Jews confronted persecution and brought to concentration camps outside Germany.

Many of them were made to work until they died because of hardship or the onset of a disease. Others were brought to execution camps where once they were able to survive the journey there, they were exterminated in gas chambers (Friedlander, 1998). There are various alleged reasons for Hitler’s hatred towards the Jews, which include jealousy, their success in business, Hitler’s own personal childhood encounters, and because of his misconception that they were the cause of Germany’s defeat in World War 1 and because of pursuing their own interests, they were also responsible for the Great Depression.

He did not perceive them as a favorable race and thought that they had no right to live. Hitler was also a great supporter of the “better race” and felt that anyone inferior to the set standards of being a masculine well nourished person did not deserve to live. Hitler was interested in persecution of the weak, sick, and mentally and physically disabled people as he thought the world would be a better place without such useless people that could not contribute positively to society (Bankier, 2000).

Hitler basically carried a misconception of the Jews being a threat to the society and treated them as conspirators against Germany who only looked after their own needs. Instead of claiming to be cruel, he thought he was very much at right to persecute such traitors and an allegedly bad