Resisting dehumanization

PART ONE

“Why should anyone care about dehumanization? Dehumanization fuels the worst brutalities that human beings perpetrate against one another. It’s not just a problem of the modern, industrialized world: it’s haunted humanity for millennia.”  David Livingstone Smith

“Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.”   Paulo Freire

Today’s post is about David Livingstone Smith’s book, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, but I will begin with an extract from the book I referred to in the previous post. In this essay I only draw on the plenty historical events and examples mentioned in the book, except for one reference to the Greek genocide by the Turks in the 20^th century.

Bruce Perry writes:“Humankind is the most complex of species. And puzzling. We protect, nurture and enrich our young – and we exploit, humiliate and torture our young.  We can be selfless and selfish – sometimes the same person who gives you life, cares for and feeds you also abandons you. Or worse.  We invent, create, build – and then we destroy.  The history of humankind is a profound ebb and flow between these magnificent and shameful characteristics.  Over the centuries we have struggled to understand and act on these multi-dimensional and dualistic qualities of the nature and nurture of humankind.  And in these efforts we have invented new ways to live together – new models for scientific discovery, governance, transportation, economy, education and child rearing.  Overall, the trajectory seems to be positive. Social justice, creativity and productivity, on whole, have increased over the ages and hate, brutality and violence have decreased.  Yet we often lose our way – and struggle as families, communities and societies to get back on a healthier “developmental” trajectory, always hopeful that we can make the world better for our children and grandchildren.”I think that Smith ends his book on a similar note. He writes: “Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” That’s only half the story, because it only bends toward justice if we push it very hard to bend it that way.”

Smith is a writer, professor and philosopher and in this book he takes an unflinching look at the both mechanisms of our psychology that make it possible for us to see other people as less than human, and how politicians, governments and certain groups exploit our survival fears and this innate propensity through manipulation and spreading of narratives that serve their own agendas. The book focuses more on the darker side of our human experience and some of the darkest pages of human history. The writer sheds light on this in an attempt to help readers understand and then resist dehumanization of other human beings. He draws on and refers to many historical and contemporary events like the Holocaust, genocides in Rwanda, America Armenia, Myanmar, Cambodia, and elsewhere, the persecution of the Roma people or Gypsies across time and place, various war atrocities, colonial oppression and inhumane practices, the lynching of African Americans and the slave trade, and other well known episodes of violence in history.

He also expands on the relationship between racism and dehumanization, how false beliefs are often the precursors of dehumanization and the many atrocities and injustices that often follow it. He draws on politics, psychology, history and other fields to assist our understanding of dehumanization and the ways we might resist it in small and bigger ways. Finally. the book manages to alert us not only to the horrors already committed, but also, to the current resurgence of political authoritarianism, hate crimes against people and minority groups, and racist rhetoric, as well as, current and potential future refugee crises due to wars, environmental destruction and climate changes.

Smith’s deep interest and exploration of dehumanization in all its complexities seems to have also stemmed from personal experiences of oppression. On the one hand, his Jewish maternal grandparents had fled to the USA to escape the pogroms in Europe, and on the other hand, his paternal grandfather had participated in a genocidal explosion of the Cherokee people from Georgia. He mentions that these stories influenced him to study the darker and more troubling sides of being human—deception, violence, racism, and dehumanization. He also grew up in the American South, where apart from the discriminatory policies and laws, racial hierarchy was also deeply entrenched in people’s beliefs and attitudes. He writes: “…the Jim Crow era was organized around the idea that Whites deserved power, privilege, and any resources they demanded, while anyone else, especially Blacks, were born to a life sentence of inferiority. This was the world in which I grew up.”

Smith doesn’t recoil from providing explicit descriptions of the horrors that can follow dehumanization. By doing this he brings the reality and the danger of dehumanization to the foreground of our awareness. One example he returns to is the lynching of thousands of African Americans documented between 1877 and 1950s. Many people outside the USA, myself included, may not have a clear picture of the depth of inhumanity and cruelty involved in those events, and certain parts of the book are certainly not easy to read. Lynchings, he writes, were referred to as “barbecues” and viewed as festive events appropriate for the whole family, young children included. They were not extrajudicial executions, but they involved unbelievable torture and mutilation of bodily parts that were often kept as souvenirs by the spectators. Actually, we read that the practice of keeping severed body parts as souvenirs has taken place in the Vietnam war and many other occurrences of genocide and conflict. Smith asks and explores the question of what made these acts psychologically possible. He writes that the many thousands, who perpetrated these crimes, were ordinary people, not sociopaths. Many were family men, churchgoers, pillars of their communities, and also, the grotesque spectacles of lynching and execution were enjoyed by their wives and children. He asks: “What was it, psychologically speaking, that empowered them to do these things and the spectators to relish them? Part of the answer lies in dehumanizing beliefs that many Whites held about Black people…”

Defining dehumanization

Smith refers to different theories that exist about dehumanization, which I will not go into here, and the large gaps that exist between different conceptions of dehumanization, which he believes can make discussions confusing. He sees dehumanization as a kind of attitude—a way of thinking about others, and believes that to dehumanize another person is to conceive of them as a subhuman animal.  For instance, German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s toxic political slogan was: “Not every being with a human face is human.” Also, images appeared in the press depicting Jews as pigs or rats, He asserts that we’ve got to be able to distinguish it from racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and other forms of prejudice and oppression because to dehumanize others is to think of them not merely as inferior human beings, but as subhuman creatures.

Smith describes how: “During the lead-up to the genocide in Rwanda, and also while it was unfolding, Hutu propaganda characterized the Tutsi as cockroaches and snakes. Was this mere derogatory name calling? The testimony of some killers suggests otherwise. “We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps,” He clarifies that dehumanizers are not just slinging animalistic metaphors at a vulnerable group, they aren’t just pretending, they sincerely believe that those whom they persecute are less than human.  For instance, in the SS booklet entitled The Subhuman, the Jews were presented as less-than-human creatures and it was suggested that even though Jews looked human, they weren’t really human:  “Although it [the Jew] has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him that forgets it!” (Extract from the The Subhuman).

Smith recognizes that underpinning dehumanization and racism is a speciesist logic, which he critiques saying that “the Darwinian revolution should have demolished the idea that nature is arranged as a hierarchy” and one reason to why this theory stubbornly exists is the fact that we depend on other species, both animals and plants, to survive. He also suggests that a good theory of dehumanization should be consistent with those episodes in human history that are uncontestably examples of dehumanization, one, of course, being the Holocaust.  He finally, states that once we begin to learn about the mechanics, history, and uncanny destructive power of dehumanization, we see it everywhere and can more clearly see the urgency of opposing it.

Genocide

Thea Halo, regarding genocide, emphasizes the four D’s of genocide: dehumanization, demonization, destruction, and denial.

Genocide is the most disturbing example of dehumanization’s destructive power. According to Smith, the dominant majority first singles out an ethnic or racial minority as a threat and they label them as criminals, parasites, animals or monsters. Dehumanized people, he says “are beaten, raped, castrated, sterilized, incarcerated, enslaved, subjected to discriminatory laws, and denied ordinary rights and privileges. Dehumanized people are avoided: they are segregated, expelled, neglected, or herded into ghettos, prisons, or concentration camps that separate them and make them invisible to the dominant majority. Dehumanized people are labeled; time after time, dehumanized people are described as dangerous and dirty. They’re given derogatory names and sometimes required to display certain forms of identification or distinctive forms of dress…” They are impoverished, rendered unemployed, robbed and humiliated. In 1938, for instance, Austrian Jews were brought to their knees to scrub the pavements in front of jeering crowds.  Finally, the dehumanizing  group no longer see or treat the victims as human beings, but as filthy, subhuman creatures that must be eradicated and hunted down, or civilized, tamed, abused and exploited.

Smith returns to the Holocaust, and certain other historical events, that he considers prime examples of dehumanization throughout the book. He writes: “It would be strange, to say the least, to adopt a view of what dehumanization is that doesn’t apply to the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka.” He claims that to date the Holocaust represents the most explicit and thoroughly documented example of the dehumanization of a whole people, and that much of what we can learn from the Holocaust can be applied to other cases of dehumanization too, because dehumanization always conforms to more or less the same pattern, even though there are individual variations; for instance, “the dehumanization of Black people by Whites is not the same as the dehumanization of Tutsis by Hutus, which is not the same as the dehumanization of Armenians by Turks.”

Greece has had its own flavour of genocide in its relatively recent history. The Greek genocide perpetrated by the Turks, as part of what many scholars recognized as a broader genocidal policy, was the systematic brutal killing of the hundreds of thousands of the Greek population, which was carried out mainly during 1914–1922. The genocide included massacres,  rape, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, summary executions, the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments, and confiscation of property. By late 1922, most of the Greek population of Asia Minor that had been there prior to the Ottoman late medieval conquest of Asia Minor, at least since the Late Bronze Age (1450 BC), had either fled or had been killed.

Dehumanization isn’t only a factor in genocide, but also influences how we think of enemies during wartime. Smith writes that wartime propaganda often zeros in on the dehumanizing mindset because for most people, killing others isn’t easy to do, and there are massive psychological barriers that must be overcome before one can pull a lethal trigger.  Several examples of dehumanizing propaganda, from World War II and Vietnam and other conflicts are provided in the book.  He tells us, for instance, that through seemingly innocuous, lighthearted cartoons soldiers were being urged to consider the enemy as other, not as people whose children and families and homes would be destroyed, but as a different, lesser, repulsive class of creature that deserved to be wiped off the earth.

Another example of this kind of war propaganda mentioned in the book relates to Sir Thomas Blamey. Smith quotes him: “We are not dealing with humans as we know them . . . We are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin.” The article included a drawing of an insect-like body and a grotesquely caricatured Japanese face and it appeared during the very month that over 16,000 tons of incendiary bombs turned a densely populated area of Tokyo into an inferno. And this was just the beginning of a massive bombing campaign, which culminated in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. Dehumanization was also rampant during the war in Vietnam, where soldiers were made to think of the Vietnamese as subhuman animals. Smith writes:  “As Vietnam War veteran Stan Groff notes, dehumanization of the enemy helps in the gruesome business of killing. Discussing his combat experiences, he says, “we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. . . .”

However, dehumanization isn’t always in the service of killing, but as the author of the book suggests “it’s also the handmaid of oppression.” He helps us understand this through exploring slavery. He writes “it was common for North American slaveholders to think of the human beings whom they enslaved as belonging to a lower species of animal—a notion of racial hierarchy that was part of a more encompassing, hierarchical vision of the cosmos…” Because Black people were seen as subhuman, this made it acceptable for their owners to treat them as their livestock. And this made it possible for Black people, in particular Black men, to be depicted as primitive or beasts, which then fueled the mass atrocity of lynching,

Continued……

In PART TWO the focus is on the concept and theory of race, the difference between racism and dehumanization, how dehumanization helps dissolve our natural human inhibitions to kill another human being, understanding  dehumanizing beliefs as ideological beliefs, and what we need to do to resist dehumanization.