Authority Essay free essay sample

Authority is the person with higher ability. Thus, he/she has the power and responsibility to enforce laws, exact obedience and lead the path of building a harmonious society. People expect authority figures to always stand on the side of justice and use positive and beneficial means to lead the people and the society forward. No matter what happened, authority should never use the power and trust that people give him to do something immoral or lead a negative and harmful trend in society. However, authority can be easily abused. Kim Jong Il, the chairman of the People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea, abuses his authority. There are a lot of reports of torture, public executions, slave labor, and forced abortions and infanticides in prison camps published by the human rights investigation group of the United Nations. Besides, the North Korean government makes it very difficult for foreigners to enter the country and strictly monitors their activities. We will write a custom essay sample on Authority Essay or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page In addition, North Korea citizens can not leave the country easily. What’s more, aid workers have to undergo considerable scrutiny and are excluded from places and regions the government does not want them to enter. The North Korea government is like the Big Brother in the book â€Å"1984†, monitoring all the aspects of life and abusing the power of authority to make his people’s life a great misery. Like the society of â€Å"1984†, in North Korea, citizens don’t have the freedom of speech and the government detains those who criticize the regime. The government operated all the radio, television and news organization, thus, controlled the media to only publicize the kind of things that the government wants it to say. The abuse of authority does not only happen in North Korea, but also in Chile. Gen Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile, ordered many of the purges that, according to the government report, resulted in more than 3,000 supporters of the Allende regime killed, 29,000 people tortured, and many thousands more forced into exile. He abused the power given him as an authority and launched a period of severe hardship for the working and peasant classes. The poem â€Å"Two Women† has vividly described the feeling of the lower class, â€Å"It was hardly a relief to have survived. † This demonstrates how the peasants felt after surviving all the chaos made by the authority, Gen Pinochet. Under Gen’s leadership, the lower class people got murdered, women got raped, and the children were starving. Gen Augusto Pinochet abused his power as an authority and made such a suffering time for his people. Likewise, during World War II, the German police and Gestapo also abused their authority. As it is showed in Maus, the Germans forced the Jewish soldiers to work without enough food and even without a warm place to live in. Also, the Germans forced the Jews to put a star on their clothes, showing the â€Å"natural difference† between the higher German authority and the lower Jews. In addition, when Vladek and the other Jews got caught and transported to the concentration camp, the German registered them and put their number on their wrists. This insulting mark will remain on those people’s skin forever. Those prisoners lost their dignity and they lost the basic human rights. Panic was around them every second they stayed there. The authority figures were so brutal that, as it is indicated in the book, they treated the Jewish people as filthy and worthless mice and didn’t care about them at all. All those examples above clearly show that authority can be easily abused and cause harmful effects to the people.