Power Over The People example essay topic

After months of routinely being metal detected and blindly handing over my bags to be searched, I finally stopped to think about it the other day. I realized that all the "security" cameras, metal detectors and guards were merely used to gain power over the people by oppressing the mand forcing their submission; not to protect us. We are all blind to this. We think it's for our own good, but it's all part of a Machiavellianism Plot. Niccolo Machiavelli lived in Italy in the early 1500's. He thought that if one person, namely Lorenzo de " Medici, could be the absolute ruler of all Italy, then order could be restored.

In an effort to gain favor with the powerful Medic e family, he wrote The Prince as an early blueprint of a New World Order justifying the use of any means, no matter how sinister, to gain and keep power. Machiavellianism envisages: the seizure, maintenance, and extension of absolute power by the nicely graduated use of fraud, force and terror; control by the ruler of all avenues of communication, thus facilitating the deliberate molding of public opinion; and the employment of surveillance and terrorist activities of subordinates who can be disowned and liquidated by the ruler, who thus escapes the blame for their atrocities. (In other words, the big political figureheads get their lackeys to do their dirty work and then use them as scapegoats.) Basically, what Machiavelli was trying to say was that if a prince conquered a city, the people would hate him, but if the prince secretly hired terrorists to create an insurrection, then marched into the city to put down the insurrection, the people would praise him. (He would hire his men to act like they were rebelling, and then the leader would act like he was stopping the rebellion and protecting the citizens, thus earning the community's trust.) Either way, he would increase his domain, but it would be better for his popularity if the citizens loved him rather than hated him for doing it.

I see the same things happening today with gun control, censorship and all the other so-called security the government has imposed upon us. These are not isolated incidents. This censorship has occurred throughout history, whether it was censorship of religion, freedom, books or individuality and self expression. The first and most obvious is the case of Jesus and how he was oppressed and persecuted because he expressed his beliefs which didn't agree with the political leaders of the day. These leaders did not want to be disputed or made to look bad, so if someone got in their way, they killed that someone.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "The ultimate form of censorship is assassination". The most notoriousMachiavellianist leader would be Hitler. He not only tried to kill a race of people he didn't agree with, but he gained his country's support in the process. He blamed all of the citizens' problems on the Jews. The citizens were so eager to blame someone else (who isn't?) that they blindly followed Hitler in his destruction.

The same goes for whites in America in the middle of the century who blamed all of their problems on the blacks. The whites believed they were so superior to the blacks, that when an incredibly intelligent Martin Luther King Jr. stepped forward to express his feelings and beliefs, the whites couldn't handle the fact that the blacks might not be inferior, so they did whatever it took to stop him. I think the most interesting case of this oppression of individuality is that of Salman Rushdie who lives under sentence of death by the Iranian government since early 1989 for writing books allegedly blasphemous to Islam. As the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed upon pronouncing his verdict, "It is incumbent on every good Muslim to do everything possible to send Rushdie to Hell".

Khomeini and his government put a United States five million dollar bounty on his head. Salman Rushdie is currently in hiding. Society as a whole, not just the government, is afraid of people expressing themselves in any way because it is intimidating to them. People will do whatever they have to do to get rid of individuality.

This is why many schools put a policy of mandatory school uniforms into effect. Censorship is simply a way for the government to keep people from standing up against them and getting in their way of gaining power when the time for the inevitable New World Order comes around. Television and books are censored so that people won't get any revolutionary or rebellious ideas from them. In the words of Heinrich Heine, "Where they have burned books they will end in burning human beings.".