blog assignment 3

The Wave, by Morton Rhue

The book “The Wave” by the author Todd Strasser, alias Morton Rhue, published in the year 1981, is based on a true story which took place in the autumn of 1968 at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto, California.

The history class of Ben Ross, a young and driven history teacher, deals with the National Socialism and its consequences in history, when the question arises about how all this could happened and why no one raised their voice against it. He therefore decides to launch an experiment introducing rules and regulations of behaviour and appearance and group mottos like “strengh through discipline, strengh through community, strengh through power” for all his students, which have to be taken serious; and the project, in the end, nearly got out of control.

This experiment shows that by one person in authority giving a strong feeling of equality and community, adolescents or people in general can be easily led and follow the rules given. Through this phenomenon such occurrences can also grow into fascism.

Fascism is a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy and liberalism). Under a fascist regime, one has to obey the rules, the mindsets, and the believes of the leaders and nothing else will be accepted. Every member of such a group or party is equal to the other members of the community and if one member steps out of line, any other member is legitimated to use violence. In the book, the members are under constant control and it really seems that they have stopped thinking about being controlled. Moreover the pupils, and especially their teacher, stopped thinking about the consequences of the whole experiment.

I really can’t imagine that feelings of community or of equality can lead to losing individuality and to the ceasation of being independent-minded to such an extent. For some people, which we can call mavericks or social incompetents, these feelings could be completely new and may give them power and a kind of self- confidence.

In the book, the class nerd, Robert Billings, becomes a commendable and prestigious member of “The Wave” and in the end he is one of the most affected people because of the inevitable return to his old and discontented life.
The survival of the fittest or strongest is also a motto or a directive of fascism that moreover can lead to violence and crime. Another problem that usually goes hand in hand with fascim is racism and anti-Semitism.

The main goal we should reach is to remove such mindsets from the heads of all those people. The problem is that the majority of the members, in other words the clueless and innocent followers, do not even know what meanings of fascism, racism or anti-Semitism are. They just follow the words of their leader without knowing what is going on, and most important, why they are acting or thinking in these specific ways. All this doesn’t matter; all they want is honor from their leader and most of them like to show that he can trust in them, that they want to do everything that is asked of them, even committing a crime. But that doesn’t count due to the fact that violence is legitimatized and commonly accepted in these communities.

With the implementation of the experiment “The Wave” one can see that fascism is not only a historic event, especially one that took place during the Second World War, but also an event that could happen nowadays as well. We have to prevent this from happening as much as possible, making sure that it will never happen again.