Mass Hysteria In The Crucible

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Mass hysteria is a problem that has been occurring throughout the world for centuries. Mass hysteria is the common term used to describe a situation in which various people all suffer from similar hysterical symptoms. Whether it is from a phantom illness or an inexplicable event. This occurred before the colonies were created during the Salem Witch Trials, explained through the story The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller. Other time periods, such as in the late 1950’s during the Second Red Scare, when people worried about the spread of communism through America, and between 1933-1945 during The Holocaust, when concentration camps were made to contain Jewish people. Miller’s message in the story The Crucible is saying that if we do not address…show more content…
The Holocaust occurred from January 30, 1933 until May 8, 1945. The Holocaust was an attempted genocide of the Jewish race. A genocide is a plan to completely eliminate every member of a specific race or ethnic group. The mass hysteria that occurred during this time period was mainly aimed at the Jewish race. Adolf Hitler had convinced the German/Nazi people that it was the Jewish people’s fault that Germany was in such a poor economic state. Although the Jewish people were not the only people targeted, they were the main target of Hitler and his Nazi army. What Hitler thought of as “undesirables” were killed as well. Over half a million Gypsies were killed along with many homosexuals, disabled people and mentally ill people were murdered or used for experimentation. The main fear from this tragic event that ties to the idea of paranoia or mass hysteria, is not from the Jewish people being put in these camps, it was the fear of one man's insecurities and the way he was able to manipulate an entire society or country into believing his beliefs. Throughout the years of the Holocaust, Hitler's ideas expanded. Not only did he not want the Jewish people alive, he wanted anyone that wasn’t the “Aryan Race” as he called it, eliminated. This relates to Arthur Miller’s story The Crucible because in the story it started with a few teenage girls dancing in the woods and grew to panic of witchcraft. Survivors also wrote books about their terrible experiences in these camps. Some of the more famous survivors are people such as Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. “For the dead and the living, me must bear witness,”(Elie Wiesel, Goodreads.com). in this quote Elie is saying that the Jewish people need to always acknowledge this event as does Anne Frank in this quote. “If we bear all this suffering and if

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