Recognition of human features is a natural process and it affects thinking and how others perceive the world. By removing these human features, the brain cannot process what usually stops one from treating others with dehumanizing disrespect. In 1961, Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist, conducted the Milgram experiment which was a test based on dehumanization and the rates of obedience and was a very important experiment with extremely troubling results. In these tests, there was a teacher and learner where the teacher inflicted pain upon the learner if they did not get an answer right. Obedience was tested and showed how far one would go to dehumanize another just to follow the rules. A scientist was the authority figure who pressured the teacher to shock the learner. Similar to the scientist, Hitler, and the Shah were two prominent figures of authority who were able to manipulate thousands to follow their steps in dehumanization through propaganda techniques and the removal of identity. Elie Wiesels memoir, Night, and Marjane Satrapis Memoir, Persepolis, connect to this experiment and show just two of the dozens of occurrences where this manipulation occurred. These memoirs follow two young adults
both suffering in their ways. Night follows Elie Wiesel, a Jew living in Sight, who was taken to a concentration camp where his dreams and happiness were shattered before his own eyes. Nazis continue to take control of him and he just waits to be picked up and tortured like the Teacher and the Learner in the Milgram Experiment. As he was dehumanized to the point of a corpse, he learned to sacrifice, and survive on nothing, and he was truly alone in a group that looked the same. Similarly, in Persepolis, Marji fits in a group without special characteristics. Persepolis describes Marji Satrapi, a young girl who lived during the Iranian Revolution. During this Revolution, the propaganda and enforcement of living the same life as others change her. She learns how she is alone in the world and that she will never be the same. Both of these adolescents question and later answer what led them to this hopelessness and how their lives were controlled as if they were puppets on a string. Wiesel and Satrapi suggest that during a time of crisis, the removal of individuality was necessary alongside propaganda for the acceleration of dehumanization faced by the victims, leading to some seeing themselves as superior to others.