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dehumanization
Call Them 'Terrorists' and You Can Kill as Many as You Want
We have to start claiming collective responsibility for the wrongs of our governments, which means confronting the dehumanization they use to justify atrocities.
Mar 10, 2024
First you call them terrorists. Then you say you’re defending yourself. Moral problem solved!
You can kill as many of them as you want.
Well, maybe there will be consequences later (and maybe not), but for the moment you have overcome your own moral barriers and can start doing your job as a soldier: killing people. And in the process, you are making the world – your world, not theirs – safe. War is such a paradox: killing one’s way to peace. But apparently it’s humanity’s primary organizing principle.
Citizens of America, citizens of Israel, citizens of Russia . . . citizens of the world . . . this has to change! Now is the time to end war, by which I mean transcend war: disarm, demilitarize. We’re killing the planet; we’re living on the brink of nuclear suicide. Creating and dehumanizing an “enemy” isn’t going to create peace, but rather, just the opposite. We’re spreading hell across the planet, and not only does war always come home, it continues to create an endless cycle of death and destruction – simply to justify itself.
For instance, Palestinian writer Emad Moussa put it this way recently in the Los Angeles Times: “The general impression among us Palestinians — whether at home or abroad — is that as Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza, what the soldiers saw contradicted their worldview of the inferior, subhuman Palestinian. They had to destroy all and re-create an image of Gaza that matched their imagined worldview. As if to say, dehumanize to facilitate and justify the culling.”
The paradox of dehumanization! When we dehumanize others, we dehumanize ourselves. And as an American, I find it troubling for the nation’s mainstream position on present wars to be free of any self-awareness, any lingering shock and awe, about our own bellicose history.
So I jump back a few decades and a few wars, to Vietnam, specifically to what came to be called the My Lai massacre, where between 350 and 500 unarmed villagers – men, women, children – were shot and killed by U.S. troops in 1968. The deaths were just a small percentage of the war’s total cost in civilian lives (possibly more than 2 million), but the horror of the killings has remained etched in the American, and global, consciousness. It opened us to the moral price of dehumanization.
During the Vietnam war, the good guys were fighting communists, not terrorists, but the terms had essentially the same meaning: bad guys with no moral sanity, who only wanted to impose harm on the world. Seymour Hersh, the journalist who initially wrote about the massacre, exposing it to the world, wrote a New Yorker essay many years later further contextualizing the event. One of the people he spoke to was Paul Meadlo, a participant in the massacre, who said to him: “There was supposed to have been some Vietcong in (My Lai) and we began to make a sweep through it.”
That simple quote reverberates in every direction. Vietcong, Hamas . . . they’re presence (actual or merely alleged) poisons everything: the village, the hospital, the school, the community. Civilians in their midst are now, first and foremost, nothing more than collateral damage.
Hersh’s story continues. The soldiers gathered up the villagers. Then the Charlie Company leader, Lt. Willaim Calley, told the men he wanted them shot. “I started to shoot them,” Meadlo said, “but the other guys wouldn’t do it.” So Calley and Meadlo “went ahead and killed them. We all thought we were doing the right thing.”
But Hersh complicates Meadlo’s account by adding some of the original testimony of other soldiers, one of whom had said Meadlo and a fellow soldier “were actually playing with the kids, telling the people where to sit down and giving the kids candy.” And when Calley and Meadlo started shooting, Meadlo “started to cry.”
Those tears belong to all of us, you might say. We – at least those of us who are not the victims – have to start claiming collective responsibility for these wrongs, which begin with dehumanization. Armed dehumanization, for God’s sake. Why is this where we find ourselves?
In the context of war, peace is just a blank. It’s nothing, or virtually nothing. A quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson puts it this way: “Peace is that brief, glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading.”
In other words, we raise our families, create art and culture, emanate love . . . during ceasefires. But the social structure in which we live with relative safety (or not) is only present because armed authorities have cleared the space for it to exist, temporarily, beyond the forces of evil. This is the belief that allows militarism to endure, sucking up some two trillion dollars from the global economy every year.
Ray Acheson, addressing the Ukraine war two years ago, wrote: “The abolition of nuclear weapons, of war, of borders, of all the structures of state violence that we can see clearly at play in this conflict is at the core of the demand for real, lasting, paradigm-shifting change that we need in the world. It can feel like vast, overwhelming, and inconceivable. But most change is inconceivable until we achieve it.”
Conflict among people will never go away. Our fear of the unknown – of people, say, who don’t speak our language, who don’t look like us, who possess something we want (such as land) – will never go away. We can dehumanize those we fear, attempt to kill them, and stay in hell. Or we can attempt to understand them.
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The Only Way to End the Inhumanity Is to Humanize Palestinians
Where are the stories in mainstream media of Palestinian lives lost? Not just in the latest Israeli war on Gaza but in all the wars that preceded it?
Nov 04, 2023
We live in an era where, in theory, we have accepted that all human beings are deserving of equal treatment—that skin color, national origin, language, accent, clothing, and other markers of ethnicity are secondary to the fact that we all deserve dignity.
In theory.
In practice, the otherizing of human beings remains central to the grim calculus by which we justify violence against one another and even accept it as virtuous. This violence, inflicted by states or by vigilantes, is everywhere we look.
In the United States, it’s in the way Black communities are over-policed, Indigenous communities are neglected, migrants are warehoused, and asylum seekers are kept out.
Internationally, it’s in the way our society dismisses the targets of Western wars and capitalism.
Most prominently today, it’s in the dehumanization of Palestinians during what, by many accounts, is an unfolding Israeli genocide against the people of Gaza.
The only way to end the inhumanity is to humanize the victims of war in pursuit of justice.
Dehumanization Lays the Groundwork for Genocide
Israeli diplomat Ron Prosor explained in an October 2023 podcast interview that his nation’s war on Gaza was about “civilization against barbarity,” and “good against bad.” Such language reinforces the equations of Israeli apartheid: Israelis equal “civilized” and “good,” whereas Palestinians equal “barbaric” and “bad.”
Prosor added that the targets of Israel’s military might were “people who basically act as animals and do not have any, any respect for children, women.”
His remarks came soon after Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals.” (There’s no shortage of irony in such language given how European antisemitic tropes routinely dehumanized Jewish people.)
Apologists for Israel’s war take pains to say there is a distinction between Hamas—the ostensible “barbarians” who perpetrated the October 7 attacks—and Palestinian civilians. But Israel’s bombing campaign against Gaza is so devastating that even the routinely pro-Israel New York Times calls it “one of the most intense of the 21st century, prompting growing global scrutiny of its scale, purpose, and cost to human life.” The distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians means little within a scenario of mass indiscriminate bombing.
Recall when the U.S. waged wars on Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s and claimed to be striking al-Qaeda “terrorists,” while dismissing the predictable, resulting mass civilian casualties as “collateral damage.” The “war on terror” quickly became a “war of terror.”
A decade earlier, analyst Norman Solomon pointed out in a 1991 op-ed against the first Gulf War how Time Magazine defined “collateral damage” as “a term meaning dead or wounded civilians who should have picked a safer neighborhood.” That descriptor can easily be applied today to Gaza, a minuscule and densely populated strip of land subjected to a savage bombing campaign akin to shooting fish in a barrel.
As the 1994 Rwandan genocide so aptly demonstrated, the first wave of weaponry in any pogrom is the use of dehumanizing language. Next comes extermination. If Palestinians are not people, their deaths are easier to stomach. If they are merely human animals, barbarians, and collateral damage, they can be killed with impunity.
When Context Is Forbidden
It’s not enough to employ dehumanizing language against Palestinians. Israel’s apologists have waged a long and effective narrative war on any and all critiques of Israel as well as any and all defenses of Palestinians. From academic exile, as in the 2014 case of University of Illinois professor Steven Salaita, to media censure, as inflicted on CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill in 2018, Israel’s defenders have routinely canceled critics of apartheid.
Most recently, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is facing calls for resignation merely for pointing out that Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israeli settlements “did not happen in a vacuum.”
Contextualizing acts of terrorism even while condemning them is verboten, and not just for high-level diplomats. A science journal editor named Michael Eisen was recently fired for sharing an article by the satirical paper The Onion on his private social media account titled “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” Eisen happens to be Jewish American.
It is a testament to the extent of censorship in reference to Israeli apartheid that The Onion is bolder than most mainstream media outlets for pointing out the absurdity of limiting discourse. The outlet (perhaps in response to Eisen’s firing?) filed another story titled “Share This Image Of Smiling Netanyahu To Get Your Job Back.”
When Some Lives Are More Equal Than Others
Israel understands how significant the use of narrative is to the maintenance of its occupation and control of Palestinian territories. To underscore the idea that they are responding to inhuman terrorists, the Israel Defense Forces released gruesome photos and footage of Hamas’ October 7 attacks as justification for bombing Gaza indiscriminately. Such imagery, when presented without any historical context of occupation and oppression, offers a sympathetic portrayal of Israeli civilians as the victims of unexplained and unprovoked barbarism. Any mention of broader context is strictly forbidden.
Indeed, when we see the faces and learn the names of the dead, it is unfathomable to justify the violence that ended their lives. Bringing up the context of Israel’s occupation sounds jarring when juxtaposed against the heartbreaking story of how Shlomi and Shachar Matias were gunned down by Hamas fighters as they protected their son from bullets. The surviving boy told the press that his parents “wanted to us to be happy, to be whimsical… They wanted us to be joyful. They wanted us to be in peace.”
Commercial media outlets have been flooded with such stories, centering the Israeli victims and survivors of Hamas’ assault. Israeli humanity reigns supreme. It is civilized and good.
Where are the stories in mainstream media of Palestinian lives lost? Not just in the latest Israeli war on Gaza but in all the wars that preceded it? And what about the stories of the decades of traumatic land loss and unjust imprisonment and displacement Palestinians have faced?
Winning the Narrative War
In Israel’s previous wars of retaliation against Hamas in Gaza, the same pattern played out as we are seeing today: Palestinian civilians are many times more likely to be killed by Israel than Israeli civilians are by Hamas. This is utterly unsurprising given Israel’s military might and the unwavering U.S. diplomatic and military aid to Israel.
It’s not just Gaza either. In 2022 Israel killed five times as many Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem than it did the year before, as per an independent monitoring group. The bizarre justification was that armed Israeli soldiers were defending themselves against civilians.
Arrayed against such forces, one of the only ways Palestinians can assert their humanity is through storytelling. But this is a challenge given the one-sidedness of mainstream U.S. news, the chilling effect on speaking out in academia, and even alleged censorship on social media.
Still, stories are trickling out. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in 2014 marked the 50th year of Israeli occupation by publishing short stories about dozens of Palestinian men, women, and children. Arab-centric and independent media outlets such Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye routinely showcase such stories, in sharp contrast to mainstream U.S. media outlets.
Take Awni Eldous, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza. We know his name and his story not because he was profiled in The New York Times or on CNN—he was not—but because he was a YouTube star with a huge following as an online gamer, and because independent media and the Arab press covered his killing.
Bringing up the context of Hamas’ October 7 attack to justify Eldous’ killing sounds jarring. And so it’s easier not to bring up Eldous and other Palestinian victims at all, as evidenced by the deafening silence of Western media outlets on his death and the deaths of countless others.
The long-term work of sharing historical context about Israel’s brutal occupation that began with the Nakba must continue. But the short-term work of stopping the unfolding genocide must happen immediately. To curb Israel’s disproportionate and brutal violence, there must be an unequivocal call for a ceasefire in the name of Palestinian humanity.
It is a sad state of affairs that the world has to be convinced that Palestinians are human beings too. As of this writing, Israel has killed at least 3,900 children in Gaza by some accounts, and the total death toll has surpassed 9,400, nearly five times the number of Israelis killed by Hamas.
How many Palestinian lives is a single Israeli life worth? If the ratio is not 1 to 1, what is it?
Editor's note: This repost has been edited with updated casualty figures.
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Where the 'Just War' Theory Has Delivered Us
War is both just and unjust simultaneously, and it will never end.
Nov 03, 2023
We—by which I mean most of humanity—are still playing with the so-called “just war theory,” the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.
You know, violence is morally neutral—and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers. Make the world a better place.
Just war theory makes the world numb to human slaughter. Dead children, and all other innocent victims, become abstractions, collateral damage. It’s almost as though the role of lone-nut mass murderers—killers who clearly have no moral justification to walk into a shopping mall or school classroom or bowling alley and start shooting—is to remind the world that lives are precious and murders equal hell. Thus the recent mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine (apparently the 565th mass shooting in the U.S. this year) generated painful eulogies of the victims in the media, cutting open the national soul. Yes, their deaths are unspeakable tragedies!
But the thousands of dead in Gaza and every other war don’t get such public eulogies—because, of course, there are far too many of them to write about, but also . . . well, because the war may be just (and the U.S. is either waging it or supplying the weapons) and humanizing the collateral damage could make the good guys look bad.
Is the winner of a violent conflict, ipso facto, the one who’s right? Humanity is stuck with an enormous paradox.
So war is neutral. Killing children (and/or their parents) is neutral and sometimes necessary, for self-defense and other God-sanctioned reasons that make the world a better place. I can see St. Augustine’s point. The defense of what we value is necessary, and defense means fighting back.
But as I wrote a year ago: A serious, unaddressed problem comes along with this. “What if we value . . . oh, let’s say, whiteness? And along comes a nonwhite teenager who (allegedly) looks inappropriately at a white lady. Shouldn’t we lynch him? What’s to stop us? Violence is morally neutral.”
In other words, the neutrality of violence can be used by anyone in a position of power. Is the winner of a violent conflict, ipso facto, the one who’s right? Humanity is stuck with an enormous paradox. If war is morally neutral, anyone, including those whose values are morally questionable (or simply wrong), can resort to it. Thus we must never stop preparing for it. War is both just and unjust simultaneously, and it will never end.
And here’s the thing. War is not just. Indeed, it’s humanity’s cancer. It can’t happen without first obliterating our primary value: the sanctity of life. As Kelly Denton-Borhaug points out, citing the research of John Dower: “Dehumanization always precedes and paves the way for the horrors of war. Human beings won’t kill other humans if they truly believe their lives are as worthy as their own.”
Or as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared last month, as Israel’s “just war” got underway: “We are fighting human animals.”
And that makes any and every action possible. Denton-Borhaug goes on to note that “dehumanization does more than just enable war. It also generates an annihilating energy all its own through which the atrocity-laden destruction of war multiplies exponentially.”
Believing in the just-war theory means believing in—valuing—dehumanization.
In other words, during the course of war, the violence keeps intensifying. Why shouldn’t it? War’s entire point is winning, and when the enemy refuses to give up, the violence must increase. But her point transcends mere strategic necessity. The limitless expansion of violence takes on a life of its own. As she points out, during World War II, when the Japanese turned to kamikaze fighting, “the Americans abandoned precision bombing and initiated the full-scale firebombing of Japanese cities. The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 burned to death more than 100,000 civilians in a single night. More than 60 cities were similarly targeted, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese in a final paroxysm of violence.”
And then, of course, came Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And this is where the human race now finds itself. Just war theory, after several millennia of justified dehumanization, has led us to the brink of Armageddon. And we’re geopolitically fine with that! Powerful nations not only possess nukes, they — at least some of them, such as the U.S.—continue to modernize them, as though . . . my God, I can’t even complete this sentence. We’re living on a planet with two possibilities: no future without nuclear weapons, or no future at all.
Believing in the just-war theory means believing in—valuing—dehumanization. Not of all of us, as the defenders say. Only some of us. But to dehumanize part of the human race, part of who we are — so much so that we are prepared to turn them into ashes and dust — has consequences far beyond the simplistic mindset of winning or losing. This is poison. War will always come home, whether as loners with AK-47s or as nuclear winter.
Indeed, war doesn’t simply “come home,” a metaphor that implies a separated humanity—separated by invisible lines called national borders. Yes, conflict is part of who we are; we are a complex entity. But war drives a spike into our collective soul. We are one. When we prepare for and ultimately wage war, rather than reach for understanding, we are killing ourselves: our precious children, our fragile planet.
And we know this — every time we look into a child’s eyes. This is where our future pulsates.
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