Power Weekly Article

Power is a responsibility not a privilege. You need to know how to use the power you have or else it can take control of you. Good leaders can handle the power and pressure that they are given. If you are not a good leader, than the power can corrupt you and force you to make terrible decisions. I believe that both sides of these arguments are correct, you just need to look at the different aspects of each of the arguments and compare and contrast them. The person who I am going to use for the side that power does not corrupt is Alexander the Great. The person I am going to use for the side of the power corrupting a person is Adolf Hitler.
Alexander the Great was a great leader of Greece and their army. He conquered half of the known world when he was in his teens. Alexander the Great was a great General who had tactics and strategies that would win wars in just minutes. He took the power that he was given and used it to win battles and to help his country by conquering other civilizations. Alexander the Great was not a mean man. He would give his troops what they would need and he did not kill women or children. When he wanted to go further east and his troops did not want to, he turned around and listened to them. When he walked into Egypt, they made him their king just because they heard what he had done. The Egyptians also made him their king because Alexander the Great hated the Persians and what their actions stood for. When Alexander the Great flanked and beat the Persians in the battle of Issus, he noticed that Derius had been left behind by his troops. When he found this out, Alexander was furious. Alexander the Great went through the trouble of chasing down the person who abandoned him. He went all the way from the river of Issus to Hindu Tush just to chase down Besis. He did this for two reasons. The main reason why he did this was to get the support of the people of Persia by doing the right thing. The second reason Alexander went to chase down Besis was that he felt strongly that it was not humane to leave their General behind in a battle. These are examples of Alexander the Great used his power to the best of his ability without it corrupting him.
Adolf Hitler, however, got corrupted by his power and turned evil because of it. Adolf Hitler has gone down in history as one of the worst leaders of the world. Adolf was born in Austria on April 20 1889. He was a decorated veteran of World War I. Adolf Hitler got power in Germany in 1933. He took this power and did terrible things with it. For no apparent reason he started killing innocent people. The majority of these people were Jews and Romanians. For his twelve years of power he killed and executed seventeen million people, of which six million people were Jewish. Adolf did not just kill innocent people, he tortured them. He put them in concentration camps and would kill them by burning or gassing them. When the war was just about to end, he and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide. They did this because they knew they were going to get captured by the Russians. It is clear by his actions that Adolf Hitler let the power get to him and corrupt him and his decisions.
There are people in the world who can handle a lot of power and those who cannot. This is what decides the leaders and world rulers we pick. If power is used for the good of the people or the world, than this power is being used in the right way. If power is used to hurt people and destroy things, than it would be better if the person with that power would have never gotten it in the first place.

Works Cited
"Adolf Hitler -." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. .

"Alexander the Great -." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. .

"Adolf Hitler -." Wikimedia Commons. Web. 26 Feb. 2010. .