“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. The public will clamour for such laws if their personal security is threatened. ” – Joseph Stalin Throughout man-kind, there have been countless situations where individuals have used power to gain control of others. By taking physical actions and using verbal speeches to gain population, people can effortlessly persuade others to fall into their trap. People who gain power of others physically, usually involve fighting, using firearms and armies.
Others, who don’t use physical actions, use verbal power to get into their target’s minds and gain control of them. People who use verbal power mainly use persuasive technique to persuade their target and encourage them. The usage of firearms, bombs, wars and armies have all been used to maintain population or even gain control of a population. An example, Kim Jong Il, who used his armies and weapons to make people follow him and look up to him, used nuclear bombs and threatened other countries to show how powerful he was.
Using this skill, he created wars and gained control of other countries. With Kim Jong Il and his power and army, North Korea was forced to become communists and the North Koreans were to look up to him and rely on him. The North Koreans looked up to Kim Jong Il as a leader for their country because he had power with his enormous army and his explosive weapons. Just like Kim Jong Il using his army and weapons to maintain the Korean society, Napoleon also used terror by using his fierce dogs to protect him and frighten whoever would get in the way of his work.
One of the elder well known leaders, Adolf Hitler, used verbal power to manipulate his country. Using the power of politics, he was commonly associated with the upsurge of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust. The Great Depression in Germany in 1930 provided an opportunity for Hitler to become the leader of Germany. After gaining control of leadership in Germany, he changed the federal republic and parliamentary representative democracy into a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and oppressive philosophy of Nazism.
After that, he was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe. Using his political powers, his foreign and domestic policies had the goal of taking over countries for his German people. Invading other countries like Poland, it led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Under Hitler’s control, the Germans and the European allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa. Although they were in control of the fight, the Allied armies took down the reigning German army.
Hitler’s reaction was to give supremacist and racially motivated policies, which resulted in the systematic murder of eleven million people, which included nearly six million Jews. All around the world there have been occurrences in where power has been used to gain the authority of others. Mentally and physically, people have used these methods to easily gain authority and make the targets look up to them as if they were their leader. The attack in Indonesia, the Bali bombings physically hurt and killed over two hundred people which left people devastated and scared.
It made them traumatised and scared for the rest of their life. Another popular incident, the twin towers terrorist attack, not only physical killed and injured people, but it mentally traumatised people from all around the world to know that things like that can occur unexpectedly and that they will never be ready for it. These happenings teach us that people who use physical and verbal power can easily persuade their audience to gain authority over others. Without knowing, an individual can easily fall in other people’s deceptions.
