The Necromancer

This week I read The Necromancer in the Nicholas Flamel series by Michael Scott.  It is about twins who have the power to save or destroy the world.  They are being trained in the 5 elemental magics and are trying to decide whose side they are on. 

One lesson that I learned from The Necromancer is that there are people in the world who would do anything for power.  They might try to destroy a country, take over a community, or try to eliminate an entire religion.  They would put entire nations at risk and would stop at nothing to get to the top.  In The Necromancer, Dr. John Dee wants power, and to get power, he needs to have the Codex, a book that would tell him how to bring the Dark Elders back and destroy the world.  He will stop at nothing.  This reminded me of a few situations in the real world, one very big, and one very small.

In World War II, Adolph Hitler would stop at nothing to get power.  He wanted to rule the world.  He took over Germany by creating the Nazi Party and brainwashing people to follow him.  Then he began taking over other nearby countries.  Some people were too afraid not to follow him, even though they knew what he was doing wasn’t right. The people that didn’t follow him were usually sent to concentration camps to die, and sometimes their families went with them.  Many of them were tortured.  Because people were so afraid of him, they wouldn’t stand up for what is right, and they just followed along.  He even persecuted the Jews, gypsies, Russians, and many others who didn’t want to do what he said.  Like John Dee, he would stop at nothing to get power.  But eventually, the world realized what was going on, and Hitler was stopped.  He couldn’t stand the thought of not being powerful, so he killed himself.

The other situation that this reminded me of was bullying.  Sometimes bullying isn’t physical where people actually hurt other people, and sometimes bullying happens just because someone wants to be powerful or popular.  In this situation, the person that wants to be popular will do things to make herself look good by making other people look bad. She thinks she looks cool if she is mean to smaller kids or kids that she thinks are less important.  This often makes her friends follow along and be mean to the smaller kids. They think that if they don’t, they might not be in the popular and powerful group.   I think that like John Dee and Adolph Hitler, there are some people who will stand up for what is right in a bullying situation, and that eventually, the person that wants to be popular will either realize that to be really popular, all you have to do is be a nice person, or that other people will figure out that that person isn’t really nice at all and not follow her.  The powerful person, like John Dee and Adolph Hitler, will eventually lose power and not be powerful any more.