LESS THAN HUMAN:WHY WE DEMEAN, ENSLAVE, AND EXTERMINATE OTHERS

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LESS THAN HUMAN:

WHY WE DEMEAN, ENSLAVE, AND EXTERMINATE OTHERS

by David Livingstone Smith

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The Montréal Review, September 2012

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"Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others" by David Livingstone Smith (St. Martin's Griffin, 2012)

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WINNER OF ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD, 2012

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Less Than Human is a book about dehumanization. It is widely recognized that dehumanization plays an important role facilitating acts of violence in genocide, war, and other forms of atrocity. Given this it is surprising to learn that scant attention has been paid to it in the scholarly literature. Scholarly literature on dehumanization is shockingly thin on the ground. I wrote Less Than Human to set this right, and to urge others to take the investigation of dehumanization seriously.

When we dehumanize others, we conceive of them as subhuman animals. One widely-held misconception is that dehumanization is merely metaphorical. But the immense destructive force of dehumanization-its power to incite men and women to perpetrate the most extreme forms of violence and cruelty against one another-is a consequence of the fact that it is meant literally rather than metaphorically. Dehumanization isn't just name-calling. The Nazis really considered Jews to be less than human. It is also how Japanese invaders conceived of their Chinese victim during the Nanjing Massacre (they referred to their victims as chancorro, which means "subhuman"), and how Hutu genocidaires regarded their Tutsi compatriots during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. This list could be extended indefinitely.

I wrote Less Than Human in two stages. In the first, I combed through the literatures of anthropology, history, psychology, archeology, philosophy, and even primatology collecting nuggets information about dehumanization, and then stitched these pieces of information together into a narrative describing the crucial role that it has played in war, genocide, and slavery, from ancient times to the present. In the second stage, I set myself the task of theorizing dehumanization. Once one grasps that dehumanization is primarily a way of thinking rather than merely a way of talking, one is confronted with a formidable explanatory puzzle. What is it about the human mind that makes it possible for one group of people to think of another group as subhuman animals? When the Nazis consigned their victims to the ovens of Auschwitz they were, for the most part, slaughtering people who were physically indistinguishable from themselves. In fact, the ease with which many Jews could "pass" as Aryans evoked anxieties similar to those that haunted the minds of American racists when confronted with the possibility of blacks "passing" as white, and inspired costly and fruitless efforts to identify reliable physical markers of Jewishness.

So, dehumanization isn't premised on how people look and how they behave. When we dehumanize others, something else is going on. What is it? The story that I present in Less Than Human proceeds along the following lines.

Dehumanization is the upshot of two deep features of our psychology. The first is our penchant for essentialism. Psychologists have shown that even very young children carve up the natural world into kinds of things (philosophers call these categories "natural kinds"). Each of these kinds is imagined to possess an essence that is unique to it: a mysterious inner "something" that only and all members of the kind possess. According to this intuitive folk-taxonomy, to be human is to possess a human essence (or 'soul'), and this is what sets us apart from every other creature.

Psychological essentialism opens up a gap between what a thing appears to be and what it really is. If you are an essentialist-as all of us are, deep down-then you will have no difficulty accepting that a being might outwardly appear to be one kind of thing while inwardly possessing the essence of another. This is how essentialism makes room for dehumanization. If essence and appearance can come apart in this way, it follows that a being might have a human appearance without a possessing a human essence. Such a being might look and behave exactly like human beings do without really being human. This way of thinking is a staple of horror and science-fiction plots involving creatures that have a human appearance but aren't human. The fact that we find this literary/cinematic trope congenial-or even intelligible-speaks volumes about our psychology.

Psychological essentialism explains how it is possible for us to conceive of human beings as non-human animals. But what is it that accounts for conceiving of them as sub human?

To explain this, we need to address an aspect of our moral psychology that has not been given the attention in the scholarly literature that it deserves. It is a psychological fact about human beings that we operate with the idea of intrinsic value. We believe that certain kinds of things have value in and of themselves, whereas other kinds of things have merely instrumental value. Of course, we do not think of everything with intrinsic value as having it to the same degree. Some kinds of things are thought to have much greater value than others. We tend to see intrinsic value as an objective feature of the items that possess it-to consider it a fact (for example) that human lives are worth more than the lives of mosquitoes. Now, judgments of intrinsic value come with moral obligations attached. The greater the value of a being, the more weighty the moral obligations that we feel we owe it. So, the moral obligations that we feel towards mosquitoes are at best minimal, whereas those that we feel toward our fellow human beings are immense.

It follows from all of this that we are inclined to order natural kinds on a hierarchy of value. Those with the greatest intrinsic value are situated near the top of the hierarchy, and those with the least value languish near the bottom. Every other kind located at some intermediate rank. The lower the rank occupied by a natural kind, the less moral consideration owed to members of that kind.

This scheme was formalized during the Middle Ages as the Great Chain of Being or scala naturae (although the idea of a cosmic hierarchy is vastly more ancient and widespread than many intellectual historians would have us believe). Traditionally, God was placed at the apex of the hierarchy, with humans a little further down, just below the angels. All the other kinds of creatures occupied ranks below that of human beings, arranged from what we still call the "higher" animals to the "lower" ones. These, in turn were ranked above the plants, as plants were ranked above minerals. In the most elaborate versions, each rank was subdivided into sub-ranks, which were in turn divided into sub-sub-ranks. For example, during the 18th century, the rank of the human was divided into races, with white Europeans modestly situating themselves at the very top and relegating sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans to the bottom, just a hair's breadth above the great apes.

The notion of a hierarchy of intrinsic value is required to make sense of the notion of subhumanity. To be subhuman is to be a member of a natural kind that is ranked below the human on the Great Chain of Being.

Although the idea that the universe is hierarchically organized is a relic of a prescientific age, and is fundamentally at odds with a Darwinian picture of the biosphere, it remains stubbornly entrenched in our psychology. Moral creatures that we are, we simply can't get away from the idea of a hierarchy of value. Morality would probably be inconceivable without it.

When we dehumanize others we conceive of them as having human appearance but the essence of a creature occupying a sub-human rank on the hierarchy of value. With this in mind it is easy to understand how dehumanization fulfills its function of disinhibiting violence. Recognizing another being as human entails having moral obligations towards that being. But if that person is seen as essentially subhuman, he or she can be killed, abused, or enslaved with impunity. Dehumanization thus enables us to reap the advantages of doing violence to our neighbors-advantages such as robbing them of their resources and exploiting their labor without compensation-without being burdened by moral reservations.

At present, there is no research center anywhere in the world that is specifically concerned with investigating dehumanization and developing strategies for preventing it. If we want to fashion a future for humanity that is less hideous than its past, this has got to change. We need to make sure that the study of dehumanization is granted a prominent place on the research agenda, and that governments, non-governmental organizations, and universities devote serious resources to it. In the absence of such efforts, resolutions like "Never again!" are likely to be little more than empty talk.

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Dr. David Livingstone Smith is a professor of philosophy and founding director of The Human Nature Project at the University of New England. He is the author of  Why We Lie, The Most Dangerous Animal, and  Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. Visit his blog at realhumannature.com

http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Less-Than-Human-Why-We-Demean-Enslave-and-Exterminate-Others.php

A Philosophy of Genocide’s Roots

By DAVID BERREBY

Published: March 4, 2011

Consider, as Americans are so wont to do these days, the zombie. Once, he was a person, just like you or me, but then he changed. Now, despite his outward resemblance to a human being, he is a different thing altogether. He cannot disguise himself. He cannot change back. Another minus: He yearns to sink his zombie-plague-spreading teeth into your brain.

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Illustration by Jennifer Daniel

LESS THAN HUMAN

Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others

By David Livingstone Smith

326 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $24.99.

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Excerpt: ‘Less Than Human’ (macmillan.com)

But no cloud lacks a silver lining: He is a convenient image for people you despise — as in the Tucson gunman Jared Loughner’s “zombie grin,” as in the “zombie children” whom Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mother” philosophy supposedly produces, as in the “climate zombies,” right-wingers who question the science of global warming. In “Less Than Human,” the philosopher David Livingstone Smith explains why this sort of talk is not superficial metaphor-slinging. Dehumanization — representing people to be lesser, non­human creatures, as when police officers label crimes against criminals as “N.H.I.” (“No Humans Involved”), or when Muammar el-Qaddafi calls his critics “stray dogs” — isn’t just shabby rhetoric. Dehumanization is a mind-set, as Smith writes, that “decommissions” our “moral inhibitions” about mistreating fellow human beings. Encased in law and custom, this psychological process has often licensed slavery, genocide and countless other cruelties.

And it is, Smith writes in this stalwart attempt to tame the mystery with philosophy, a moral and cognitive problem as old as history. He quotes Amenemhet, a pharaoh who ruled nearly 4,000 years ago, describing his conquests: “I subdued lions, I captured crocodiles. . . . I made the Asiatics do the dog walk.” Slave­holders from ancient Greece to 19th-century America spoke of their human property as livestock, Smith reminds us. George Washington wrote in a letter that both wolves and Indians were “beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.” Nazis described the Jews as germs, rats and leeches, and Stalin’s murderers called kulaks (affluent peasant farmers) snakes and vermin. The Tutsis during Rwanda’s genocide were referred to as cockroaches and rats, and the janjaweed of Sudan called the victims of their massacres dogs, donkeys and monkeys.

From that record, Smith reasonably argues that dehumanization is rooted in human nature, not culture. He offers a rigorous philosophical theory to explain it, informed by his discipline’s precision, and by certain well-founded suppositions about the mind. That makes for an interesting and unusually lucid book about an under-studied subject. It also makes for a theory that doesn’t work.

Dehumanization is possible, Smith argues, because of “our cognitive architecture — the evolved design of the human psyche.” Our innate predispositions incline us to divide living things into species, he argues, and, with the same mental equipment, to divide humans into ethnic groups. And just as we do not believe that superficial resemblance means bats and birds belong together, neither do we trust that surface appearances determine who belongs where on the ethnic map.

In other words, in Smith’s account of the research, we are — for better or more often for worse — predisposed to believe that racial or ethnic identity is immutable. That’s because our instincts tell us it is based on an unchanging “essence” at each person’s core, rather than on changeable appearances. Philosophical experiments have shown, for example, that while most people feel sure that a 98-pound weakling can become a strongman, they also intuit that a black person can’t become white, no matter what physical characteristics he changes.

Smith clearly explains why many cognitive scientists believe this tendency is innate and then links it to another predisposition that seems “built in” to the human mind: our inclination to see living things in hierarchies, as in the “great chain of being” of medieval European Christians, with God at its perfect top, human beings above “higher” animals, and so on down to worms and plants. Because we feel that living things are defined by their essence, and because we feel that each creature has its rank in the world, Smith argues, dehumanization comes easily to the human mind: we accept that someone can look human but have a sub­human essence, and we accept that what is not human must be inferior. “When we dehumanize people,” he writes, “we think of them as counterfeit human beings.”

Bringing philosophy to bear on this issue has its benefits, even if philosophy’s methods — the strict definitions of concepts, the search for inconsistencies, the application of logic to language — don’t seem an easy fit with kulak parasites and Tutsi cockroaches. “Although searching for the necessary and sufficient conditions that define everyday concepts is ultimately quixotic,” Smith argues, “it’s still a worthwhile ideal, because the closer we can come to them the more precise and nuanced our understanding will become.”

This is true, but this approach also has a flaw: it assumes people’s thoughts and behaviors are consistent and coherent enough for rigorous analysis. Smith’s ethnic “essences” are those of a philosopher — they’re based on logical definitions (this is human, that is not) and, being eternal essences, they’re forever. “Subhumanity,” he writes, “is typically thought to be a permanent condition. Subhumans can’t become humans any more than frogs can become princes.”

These requirements leave much of the reality of dehumanization outside Smith’s tent. For example, he writes of the immense guilt of soldiers who have dehumanized their enemy in combat, but then, back in peacetime, recognize their victims as actual people, just like the folks at home. Shrewdly, he notes how military training and rituals aim to undermine this feeling that the enemy is human. But he seems not to recognize that this sort of soldier — who sees his enemy as human, then subhuman, then human again — cannot exist if dehumanization depends on a stable belief in permanent essences.

Similarly, in Smith’s account of slavery, the ancient Romans viewed their slaves as nonhuman frogs that could never turn into human princes. But for centuries, Romans were accustomed to former slaves re-entering society and rising to responsible and even powerful positions.

Then too, because essences must be consistent and well defined, Smith is forced to claim that all dehumanization makes its targets seem, as his title says, “less than human.” But many forms of dehumanization work by making their targets out to be more than human — to be ageless vampires, for instance, or world-spanning conspirators who control the United Nations and the Federal Reserve.

All these troubles arise because Smith’s insistence on immutable essences is only half right: people do categorize themselves and others using essences, but there’s nothing immutable about them. If, like trained philosophers, we could settle for good who is essentially human and who is a zombie vampire squid, we wouldn’t have, or need, this drama of dehumanization, rehumanization, then more dehumanization, and so on. Instead, the who-is-and-isn’t-human question is never truly settled. In fact, it is the dynamic, even mercurial nature of “real human” status that makes this mystery of our psychology so fascinating. What Amenemhet wants us to remember isn’t that he thought Asiatics were dogs, but that he made them act like dogs.

“We don’t humiliate vermin,” Adam Gopnik has observed, “or put them through show trials, or make them watch their fellow-vermin die first.” Right: we do that to people. Because we readily see others as human, we need reminding that our enemies are supposedly different. Which often works, because we also readily see others as not human. Smith has explored the nature of those conceptual boxes “human” and “not human.” But what really needs explaining is the constant, restless travel that the mind makes between them.

David Berreby is the author of “Us and Them: The Science of Identity.” He writes the Mind Matters blog for Big Think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/books/review/Berreby-t.html?pagewanted=all

EXCERPT

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LESS THAN HUMAN
 
Palestine is our country.
The Jews our dogs.
—PALESTINIAN NURSERY RHYME
Arabs are the same as animals. There is no animal worse than them.
—RABBI OVADIA YOSEF, HAARETZ 1
“COME ON DOGS. Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Son of a bitch! Son of a whore! Your mother’s cunt!” Degrading taunts in Arabic rang out from behind the fence that divided the Palestinian side of the Khan Younis refugee camp from the Israeli side. Located near the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, just outside the ancient town of Khan Younis, the camp was established to house 35,000 of the nearly one million Arabs who had been displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. By the beginning of the twenty-first century its population had swelled to over 60,000 souls housed in thirteen squalid cement blocks.
The torrent of invective did not come from the mouth of an angry Muslim; it was broadcast from a loudspeaker mounted on an armored Israeli Jeep. New York Times journalist Chris Hedges was in the camp that day, and watched as Palestinian boys began to lob stones at the Jeep in a futile gesture of defiance. Hedges recounts:
There was the boom of a percussion grenade. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running clumsily through the heavy sand. They descended out of sight behind the dune in front of me. There were no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shot with silencers. The bullets from M-16 rifles, unseen by me, tumbled end-over-end through their slight bodies. I would see the destruction, the way their stomachs were ripped out, the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, later in the hospital.2
Four children were shot. Only three survived. One of them, a boy named Ahmed, explained to Hedges what had happened. “Over the loudspeakers the soldiers told us to come to the fence to get chocolate and money,” he said. “Then they cursed us. Then they fired a grenade. We started to run. They shot Ali in the back.”3
Khan Younis had long been a stronghold of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, and when the Israeli troops pulled out of the Gaza Strip in the fall of 2005, the bright green banners of Hamas fluttered from the asbestos rooftops of the camp. Hamas was founded in 1987 to end the Israeli presence in the region and to establish an Islamic state with Jerusalem as its capital. Although Hamas is devoted mainly to supporting schools, hospitals, and cultural activities, it is best known for its violence—its abductions, assassinations, suicide bombings, and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. Osama Alfarra, the mayor of Khan Younis and a member of Hamas, was one of the many Palestinians who rejoiced when Israel relinquished control of the Gaza strip. “Gaza was a beginning,” he told a reporter from the British Guardian newspaper. “You know how you hunt foxes? You dig them out of their holes. The fox is gone from Gaza to the West Bank. The resistance will dig him out of his hole there.”4
Osama Alfarra and the anonymous soldiers in the Jeep stood on opposite sides of a single conflict. And yet, their attitudes were uncannily alike. Each portrayed the other as a nonhuman animal. The soldier represented Ali and his companions as dogs, unclean animals in both Jewish and Islamic lore. Likewise, Osama Alfarra’s depiction of Israel as a fox represents a whole nation as vermin, fit to be hunted down and destroyed. The sly fox, an amalgam of greed and guile, has much in common with the traditional derogatory stereotype of the Jew, as exemplified by thirteenth-century Muslim writer Al-Jaubari’s characterization of the Jewish people in The Chosen One’s Unmasking of Divine Mysteries:
Know that these people are the most cunning creatures, the vilest, most unbelieving and hypocritical. While ostensibly the most humble and miserable, they are in fact the most vicious of men. This is the very essence of rascality and accursedness.… Look at this cunning and craft and vileness; how they take other people’s moneys, ruin their lives.…
And more recently, the remarks of Imam Yousif al-Zahar, a member of Hamas, conveyed the same idea. “Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” he remarked. “They have been traitors to all agreements—go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing.”5
The soldier in the Israeli military Jeep dehumanized his Palestinian targets, and Osama Alfarra and his comrades dehumanized their Israeli enemies. In both examples—and in many, many more that I will describe in this book—a whole group of people is represented as less than human, as a prelude and accompaniment to extreme violence. It’s tempting to see reference to the subaltern other as mere talk, as nothing more than degrading metaphor. I will argue that this view is sorely misguided. Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable. In the pages and chapters to follow, I will do my best to explain what this form of thinking consists in, how it works, and why we so readily slip into it.
Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for its importance. So, to get the ball rolling, I’ll briefly discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single most destructive event in human history: the Second World War. More than 70 million people died in the war, most of them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in the end, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible.
Let’s begin at the end. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors’ trial was the first of twelve military tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Germany and Japan. Twenty doctors and three administrators—twenty-two men and a single woman—stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They had participated in Hitler’s euthanasia program, in which around 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped people deemed unfit to live were gassed to death, and they performed fiendish medical experiments on thousands of Jewish, Russian, Roma, and Polish prisoners.
Principal prosecutor Telford Taylor began his opening statement with these somber words:
The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected.… To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.6
He went on to describe the experiments in detail. Some of these human guinea pigs were deprived of oxygen to simulate high-altitude parachute jumps. Others were frozen, infested with malaria, or exposed to mustard gas. Doctors made incisions in their flesh to simulate wounds, inserted pieces of broken glass or wood shavings into them, and then, tying off the blood vessels, introduced bacteria to induce gangrene. Taylor described how men and women were made to drink seawater, were infected with typhus and other deadly diseases, were poisoned and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel conscientiously recorded their agonized screams and violent convulsions.
The descriptions in Taylor’s narrative are so horrifying that it’s easy to overlook what might seem like an insignificant rhetorical flourish: his comment that “these wretched people were … treated worse than animals.” But this comment raises a question of deep and fundamental importance. What is it that enables one group of human beings to treat another group as though they were subhuman creatures?
A rough answer isn’t hard to come by. Thinking sets the agenda for action, and thinking of humans as less than human paves the way for atrocity. The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen—subhumans—and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It’s wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies, and the others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats.
Jews were the main victims of this genocidal project. From the beginning, Adolf Hitler and his followers were convinced that the Jewish people posed a deadly threat to all that was noble in humanity. In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these putative enemies of civilization were represented as parasitic organisms—as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion. “Today,” Hitler proclaimed in 1943, “international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It will remain that way as long as peoples do not find the strength to get rid of the virus.” Both the death camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe following in the wake of the advancing German army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.7
Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war against German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander in chief of the German army, issued an order to inflict a “severe but just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements” (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of “international Jewry,” and were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirm‎s that, “soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews as ‘animals’… that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis’ new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter.”8
The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And yet, focusing on it can be strangely comforting. It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.
When we think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the Holocaust, but it wasn’t only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Final Solution were busy implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin’s Red Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric. They spoke of “the smell of Germany’s animal breath,” and described Germans as “two-legged animals who have mastered the technique of war”—“ersatz men” who ought to be annihilated.9 “The Germans are not human beings,” Ehrenburg wrote, “… If you kill one German, kill another—there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses.”
Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill the German—this is your old mother’s prayer. Kill the German—this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German—this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.”10
This wasn’t idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. “They were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists,” writes journalist Giles McDonough:
East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army.… In the course of a single night the Red Army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified.… A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.11
Meanwhile, halfway across the world, a war was raging in Asia. Like their German allies, the Japanese believed that they were the highest form of human life, and considered their enemies inferior at best and subhuman at worst. American and British leaders were depicted with horns sprouting from their temples, and sporting tails, claws, or fangs. The Japanese labeled their enemies as demons (oni), devils (kichiku), evil spirits (akki and akuma), monsters (kaibutsu), and “hairy, twisted-nosed savages.” Americans were Mei-ri-ken, a double entendre translated as “misguided dog.”12
Japan pursued its military goals with extravagant and unapologetic savagery. Consider the systematic atrocities following the capture of the Chinese city of Nanjing in December 1937, where—for six weeks—soldiers killed, mutilated, raped, and tortured thousands of Chinese civilians. The details are set out Honda Katsuichi’s book The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame. Katsuichi reports that one former staff sergeant told him, “of soldiers disembowling pregnant women and stuffing hand grenades up women’s vaginas and then detonating them.” Another sergeant confessed that, because a crying infant disturbed him while he was raping the child’s mother, he “took a living human child … an innocent baby that was just beginning to talk, and threw it into boiling water.”13 It’s hard for the mind to encompass such horror. How can ordinary men (and they were ordinary men) do such things? Yoshio Tshuchiya, another Japanese veteran, tells us the answer. “We called the Chinese ‘chancorro’… that meant below human, like bugs or animals.… The Chinese didn’t belong to the human race. That was the way we looked at it.”14 Tshuchiya describes how he was ordered to bayonet unarmed Chinese civilians, and what it was that enabled him to comply with this order. “If I’d thought of them as human beings I couldn’t have done it,” he observed. “But … I thought of them as animals or below human beings.” Shiro Azuma, who participated in the atrocities at Nanjing, told an interviewer that when the women were raped they were thought of as human, but when they were killed they were nothing but pigs.15
What about the Americans and their English-speaking allies? We were the good guys, weren’t we? Allied personnel also dehumanized their enemies (as one soldier wrote in a letter home, “It is very wrong to kill people, but a damn Nazi is not human, he is more like a dog”) but on the whole dehumanized the Germans less than they did the Japanese. Germans, after all, were fellow Anglo-Saxons—strapping blue-eyed boys who might just as well have grown up on farms in Oklahoma. But the Japanese were another story. A poll of U.S. servicemen indicated that 44 percent would like to kill a Japanese soldier while only 6 percent felt the same way about Germans.16
The “Japs” were considered animals, and were often portrayed as monkeys, apes, or rodents, and sometimes as insects (in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Muntiny, they are described as “large armed ants”). In a typical example of xenophobic zeal, Australian general Sir Thomas Blamey told his troops in the Pacific theater, “Your enemy is a curious race—a cross between a human being and an ape.… You know that we have to exterminate these vermin if we and our families are to live.…” Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle, whose folksy dispatches were published in hundreds of newspapers, confirmed that this attitude was not limited to commanding offers, but was common among ordinary grunts as well. Pyle reported that “the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive, like cockroaches or mice.” Ordinary citizens far away from the sharp edge of battle participated, too. The theme of the most popular float in an all-day parade in New York City in 1942 was bombs falling on a pack of yellow rats. It was named “Tokyo, We Are Coming.”17
Viewing the Japanese as subhuman may have contributed to the practice of mutilating their corpses and taking their body parts from them as trophies. Charles Lindbergh recorded in his wartime diary that U.S. servicemen carved penholders and paper knives out of the thigh bones of fallen Japanese soldiers, dug up their decaying corpses to extract gold teeth, and collected ears, noses, teeth, and even skulls as wartime mementos. Taking human body parts as trophies was rare in the European theater. As military historian John Dower points out, if Allied troops had similarly mutilated German or Italian corpses this would have provoked an uproar.18
The dead weren’t the only targets. Surrendering soldiers and prisoners were frequently killed and sometimes tortured. The philosopher and World War II veteran J. Glenn Gray recounts a revealing anecdote in this connection.
An intelligent veteran of the war in the Pacific told a class of mine … how his unit had unexpectedly “flushed” a Japanese soldier from his hiding place well behind the combat area.… The unit, made up of relatively green troops, was resting and joking, expecting to be sent forward to combat areas. The appearance of this single enemy soldier did not frighten them.… But they seized their rifles and began using him as a life target while he dashed frantically around the clearing in search of safety. The soldiers found his movements uproariously funny and were prevented by their laughter from making an early end of the unfortunate man. Finally, however, they succeeded in killing him, and the incident cheered the whole platoon, giving them something to joke and talk about for days afterwards.
To this Gray adds:
In relating this story to the class, the veteran emphasized the similarity of the enemy soldier to an animal. None of the American soldiers apparently even considered that he may have had human feelings of fear and wished to be spared.19
One of the most unsettling examples of dehumanization of the Japanese by Americans appeared in the U.S. Marine Corps’ Leatherneck magazine. It’s a brief piece, apparently intended to be humorous. Emblazoned across the top of the page is an illustration of a repulsive animal with a caterpillar-like body and a grotesque, stereotypically Japanese face, labeled Louseus japanicus. The text below it explains that the “giant task” of exterminating these creatures will only be complete when “the origin of the plague, the breeding grounds around the Tokyo area” are completely annihilated. The article was published in March 1945, the same month that U.S. aircraft rained incendiary bombs on Tokyo, burning up to 100,000 civilians alive. Over the next five months, around half a million noncombatants—men, women, and children—were, in the words of Major General Curtis LeMay, “scorched and boiled and baked to death” as sixty-seven Japanese cities were incinerated by fire bombs. And then, in August, nuclear weapons flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with massive civilian casualties.20
DEHUMANIZATION IN THE MEDIA
I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right … I saw SSG Frederick walking toward me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.”
—U.S. ARMY SPECIALIST MATTHEW WILSON, TESTIMONY REGARDING ABU GHRAIB21
Dehumanization is aroused, exacerbated, and exploited by propaganda. It’s common knowledge that, prior to and during the 1994 genocide, government radio broadcasts characterized Rwandan Tutsis as cockroaches, and that Nazi Germany had a propaganda apparatus devoted to painting horrifying pictures of Jews and other supposed enemies of the Volk. Russian political art from the 1930s and ’40s portrayed German and Italian fascists and their allies as a veritable menagerie, including rats, snakes, pigs, dogs, and apes. And when fascists were depicted in human form, they were endowed with subhuman attributes, like pointed ears, fangs, or a nonhuman complexion. But apart from notorious examples like these, there is little awareness of the extent to which the mass media are instrumental for propagating dehumanizing stereotypes.22
Journalists have always had an important role to play in disseminating falsehoods to mold public opinion, and this often involves dehumanizing military and political opponents. In a speech delivered at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1936, against the background of the gathering storm of fascism in Europe, Aldous Huxley argued that dehumanization is the primary function of propaganda.
Most people would hesitate to torture or kill a human being like themselves. But when that human being is spoken of as though he were not a human being, but as the representative of some wicked principle, we lose our scruples.… All political and nationalist propaganda aims at only one thing; to persuade one set of people that another set of people are not really human and that it is therefore legitimate to rob, swindle, bully, and even murder them.23
Collections of twentieth-century political posters confirm‎ that visual propaganda from the United States, Germany, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Korea, and elsewhere have often portrayed “the enemy” as a menacing nonhuman creature.24 But you don’t need to sift through historical archives to find examples of dehumanization in the popular media. All that you need to do is open a newspaper or turn on the radio.
On September 4, 2007, the Columbus Dispatch published a cartoon portraying Iran as a sewer with a swarm of cockroaches pouring out of it. The subtext wasn’t subtle, and readers quickly got the message. “I find it extremely troubling that your paper would behave like Rwandan Hutu papers that also published cartoons depicting human beings … as cockroaches,” one reader wrote, “calling for them to be stamped out—leading to genocide.” Another wrote, “Depicting Iranians as cockroaches spewing out of a sewer was a vile slur on the Iranian people.… Cartoons like this only cause the neoconservative drums of war sounding for a disastrous military attack against Iran to beat louder.”25
Three years earlier, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq became public, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio broadcaster in the United States, whose syndicated radio show has, at last count, 13 million listeners—described the prisoners who had been killed, raped, tortured, and humiliated by or at the behest of U.S. military personnel, as less than human. “They are the ones who are sick,” fumed Limbaugh.
They are the ones who are perverted. They are the ones who are dangerous. They are the ones who are subhuman. They are the ones who are human debris, not the United States of America and not our soldiers and not our prison guards.26
Limbaugh’s view of the detainees was shared by members of the U.S. military establishment, including, presumably, their persecutors. The commander of Abu Ghraib, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, subsequently disclosed that Major General Geoffrey Miller had told her to make sure that the prisoners were treated like animals. “He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you have lost control of them,” she said. (Miller had earlier “reformed” military interrogation techniques in Iraq along the lines used at Guantanamo Bay, and became deputy commanding general for detainee operations in Iraq after Karpinski’s removal.)27
Michael Savage (the pseudonym of Michael Alan Weiner) is another popular radio host whose syndicated radio program is followed by 8 to 10 million listeners. Like Limbaugh, Savage derided the detainees as “subhuman” and “vermin,” and suggested that forcible conversion to Christianity is “probably the only thing that can turn them into human beings.” And in words uncannily reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s diatribes against the Jews, radio broadcaster Neal Boortz characterized Islam as a “deadly virus spreading through Europe and the West,” adding, “We’re going to wait far too long to develop a vaccine to find a way to fight this.”28
Limbaugh, Boortz, and Savage play to the xenophobic gallery, so it’s not surprising that they indulge in dehumanizing rhetoric from time to time. But this sort of talk is not confined to right-wing populists; it is well represented in mainstream media by journalists of all political stripes. Pulitzer prize–winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in a 2003 editorial that Muslim terrorists are “replicating and coming at us like cockroaches.”29
Dehumanization makes strange bedfellows.
Newspaper headlines are a prime source of dehumanizing rhetoric. They’re designed to catch the eye and to motivate you to read further. Describing human beings as bloodthirsty animals or dangerous parasites gets us to look because it plays on some of our deepest fears. Techniques like these arouse terror and close minds. If international conflicts are explained by the fact that our enemies are evil subhuman creatures, then no further analysis is needed.
Propaganda researchers Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills point out:
The symbolic lexicon used by news media since 9-11 demonstrates a clear pattern. Suspected terrorists, enemy military and political leaders, and ultimately entire populations are metaphorically linked to animals, particularly to prey. This holds true both nationally and internationally: headlines of newspapers of many political affiliations across the US, Europe, and Australia generate, with remarkable consistency, this journalistic framing of the enemy as hunted animal.…30
Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions (“As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away”; “Terror hunt snares twenty-five”; and “Net closes around Bin Laden”) with enemy bases as animal nests (“Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama”; “Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked”) from which the prey must be driven out (“Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out”; “America’s new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves”). We need to trap the animal (“Trap may net Taliban chief”; “FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders”) and lock it in a cage (“Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger”). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator (“Chained beast—shackled Saddam dragged to court”), or a monster (“The terrorism monster”; “Of monsters and Muslims”), while at other times he is a pesky rodent (“Americans cleared out rat’s nest in Afghanistan”; “Hussein’s rat hole”), a venomous snake (“The viper awaits”; “Former Arab power is ‘poisonous snake’”), an insect (“Iraqi forces find ‘hornet’s nest’ in Fallujah”; “Operation desert pest”; “Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark”), or even a disease organism (“Al Qaeda mutating like a virus”; “Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism”). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate (“Iraq breeding suicide killers”; “Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam”).31
Do you think that I’m making too much of these examples? Perhaps they’re only metaphors—just colorful ways of speaking and writing that shouldn’t be taken to imply that anyone is regarded as subhuman. You may have noticed that even Steuter and Wills explicitly describe them as metaphors. True, sometimes this sort of language is metaphorical—but it’s foolish to think of it asjust metaphorical. Describing human beings as rats or cockroaches is a symptom of something more powerful and more dangerous—something that’s vitally important for us to understand. It reflects how one thinks about them, and thinking of a person as subhuman isn’t the same as calling them names. Calling people names is an effort to hurt or humiliate them. It’s the use of language as a weapon. But dehumanizing a person involves judging them to be less than human. It’s intended as a description rather than as an attack, and as such is a departure from reality—a form of self-deception. Whatever one’s opinion of one’s nation’s enemies, the fact remains that they are human beings, not subhuman animals.
So far, most of my examples have been plucked from recent history. But dehumanization is far more widespread than that. It is found across a far-flung spectrum of cultures and appears to have persisted through the full span of human history, and perhaps into prehistory as well. It appears in the East and in the West, among sophisticates of the developed world and among remote Amazonian tribes. Its traces are inscribed on ancient cuneiform tablets and scream across the headlines of today’s newspaper. Dehumanization is not the exclusive preserve of Nazis, communists, terrorists, Jews, Palestinians, or any other monster of the moment. We are all potential dehumanizers, just as we are all potential objects of dehumanization. The problem of dehumanization is everyone’s problem. My task is to explain why.


 
Copyright © 2011 by David Livingstone Smith

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