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dehumanization
By Dehumanizing Others, Trump Makes Sure We Remain Our Own Worst Enemies
If Americans hate most of the planet beyond their borders—and go to war with it—they are creating the very reality they fear.a
Jan 24, 2025
And now Trump consciousness purports to claim—or reclaim—control over America: the land of white Christian nationalists and no one else, damnit!
But of course that level of selfishness—mine, mine, mine!—is only possible to maintain with a huge helping of fear alongside it: fear of the enemy. Fear of “them.”
Thus Alexandra Villarreal, writing in The Guardian about Trump 2.0’s first day in office (on Martin Luther King Day), noted, “He immediately involved the military, ordering the armed forces to ‘seal’ the U.S.’s borders ‘by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration.’
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The belief that love is for white people only belittles love as a transformative concept: as the means to push beyond what, or who, we know, and continue evolving.
She goes on, “This new system at the border—replete with intense militarization and explicit violations of human rights—comes straight from the imagination of the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, which pushes the racist idea that non-white immigrants are ‘invading’ predominantly white nations and ‘replacing’ white culture.’”
Governance is so much simpler when you can conjure up a wicked enemy for your followers to fear, but the cost of doing so can be monstrous—and not simply for those dehumanized as the enemy, who are usually not in positions of power and therefore easily exploited. Those pulled into us-vs.-them consciousness have also seriously minimized their own lives. For instance, Andrea Mazzarino, writing about U.S. President Donald Trump’s “divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them ‘vermin’ who are ‘poisoning the blood of this country,’” stirred up an old childhood truth in me: Takes one to know one!
You can’t dehumanize others without belittling your own soul.
And this begins to get at what makes the Trump 2.0 phenomenon so painful, at least to that part of the nation that sees beyond him. It’s not just because “they” (i.e., MAGA) won. Hate rhetoric—hate consciousness—is once again expanding its claim on who we are as a nation. But it’s not like this is new. Most of our history is inextricably linked with the exploitation, dehumanization, and, often enough, the murder—of... uh, non-white people of one sort of another.
When the MAGA-hat wearers cry “Make America great again,” they mean make America deaf again, Make America unaccountable again. Turn Uncle Stam into Jim Crow again.
The belief that love is for white people only belittles love as a transformative concept: as the means to push beyond what, or who, we know, and continue evolving. Consider this quote of Martin Luther King Jr. (which I don’t believe wound up being quoted during the Trump inauguration): “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
This is the faith we need to honor right now, as the second Trump era begins. We find ourselves reaching for a handhold as we step into the darkness: That handhold is love. But what does that mean?
In her Guardian piece, Villarreal pointed out that the mass deportations Trump is planning will be relying on defense—that is to say, military—resources as well as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which could include the use of military aircraft to transport people back across the border. And suddenly I thought about Woody Guthrie’s iconic song, “Deportee,” which he wrote in 1948, in the wake of a plane crash in California that killed all 32 people on board. Mostly the dead were Mexican farmworkers, being sent back across the border—which meant, according to the media coverage, that they had no names... and didn’t matter.
. . . The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees.”
Woody’s song didn’t bring anyone back to life, but it entered the soul of American consciousness and brought anguish, shock, and empathy into the public—the political—arena. It expanded the public sense of humanity; which remains expanded.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”
Trump is claiming the power and authority to dehumanize whom he wants, e.g., the country’s 11 million “illegals,” whom he wants to turn into deportees. In the process, he is making sure that we remain our own worst enemies. If Americans hate most of the planet beyond their borders—and go to war with it—they are creating the very reality they fear. They are creating, or continuing to create, hell on Earth. Those who see the irony in this—linking, for instance, “Christian” with “white” and “nationalist”—must once again take that first step, beyond the worst of who we are, into a future that values all of us.
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Walls of Fear Create a World of War
How do we connect with one another, especially those we fear?
Dec 08, 2024
War, war and more war.
It’s only possible for one reason: the belief that only some people are fully human. Those who aren’t . . . well, they can be killed when necessary. My inner scream at this false reality we feed ourselves — via the media, via mainstream politics — keeps getting louder and louder. Is there a way to get things to change?
To put it another way: Is there a way to transcend the abstract view of Planet Earth in which global politics operates? We have religion. We have values: Be kind, be loving, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — but they don’t seem to manifest collectively. At the collective, that is to say, the political, level, only so much kindness can be tolerated. In terms of security, kindness is weakness.
I quoted these words of Kamala Harris, delivered last August at the DNC as she accepted her nomination to be the Dems’ presidential candidate, in a previous column, but they still strike me as relevant, even though she lost the election:
“So, fellow Americans. Fellow Americans. I — I love our country with all my heart. Everywhere I go — everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America.”
She added that this is “an America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”
Wow, sounds great. Unfortunately, as I noted at the time, the love and empathy of which she spoke stopped at the border. In essence, she was expressing love for an abstraction, a swath of land defined by random lines on a map, created via several centuries of brutal land theft.
Nonetheless, I understand that love is specific. It has limits. We love our partner. We love our surroundings, our community. The problem, as Harris quickly went on to illustrate, is that “love” at the national level — a.k.a., nationalism — doesn’t actually exist unless there’s also an enemy: someone to fear. Our empathy stops at the border. And beyond the border . . .
Harris continued: “And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
Oh, how wonderful! The great lie manifests: We need that trillion-dollar annual military budget, America! How else can we remain secure? And our allies also have to remain secure: Israel has the right to defend itself (some love, apparently, does not stop at the border). And it’s not as though Harris’s opponent — what was his name again? — in any way challenged this basic context, nor did the prevailing media: There’s always a “them” out there, who hates us, who wants to steal what we have (what goes around comes around, I guess) . . . who wants to kill us.
So we’ve got to be prepared to kill him first — which means, dehumanize! And here’s where my internal — and, at least in this moment, external — scream begins. I don’t want to be led by a “commander in chief.” I want humanity’s understanding of itself to begin with the awareness of our collective, and planetary, unity. The time for this is now, for an endless number of reasons, all of which are related to the “security” our leaders claim to be so obsessed with.
The most obvious reason, I guess, is that nobody wants nuclear war — yet Russia and the West are playing with this possibility now, as the good guys and the bad guys fight it out in Ukraine. War is the only answer — defeat the enemy, bomb Russia! And Russia responds with “inflammatory nuclear rhetoric,” denounced by the West as, gosh, inappropriate. At some point this game could blow up in everyone’s face. Yet in the current political dialogue, our security requires playing with global suicide. Any questions?
And, of course, even if “mutually assured destruction” holds tight and humanity avoids nuclear Armageddon, the unaddressed climate crisis is something else that could explode in our faces. Shockingly, “climate” doesn’t recognize the borders we’ve worked so hard to create.
What I’m trying to say is that we — all of us — need to turn evolution into a conscious process. How do we connect with one another, especially those we fear? How do we expand our sense of community and shatter the hatred we now allow to swell unabated toward our declared enemies, especially those beyond our borders? How do we shatter the divide between spiritual and political values? How do we bring, let us say, the wisdom of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin into the political realm?
One of his most well-known quotes is this; “Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
How do we explain — to the ones in power, to the ones who write about and bow to power — that, by “discovering fire for the second time,” Teilhard didn’t mean developing nuclear weapons? How do we explain it to ourselves?
Perhaps the place to begin is by removing the “national” border from our minds and hearts.
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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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