Dehumanization and demonization do not necessarily go hand in hand. The dehumanized are not also always demonized. Whites enslaving blacks in the American South, and later repressing them with Jim Crow, dehumanized them, deeming them subhumans of diminished intellectual (and moral) capabilities, akin to domesticated semi-wild animals that, when kept in check, were useful but if loose could be dangerous. Whites did not construe their slaves, or freed blacks, as malevolent demons bent upon harming them. Imperialist Europeans held similar attitudes toward Asian, African, and American peoples. The Nazis and many Germans dehumanized the mentally ill and developmentally disabled. Karl Binding, the former president of Germany’s supreme court, together with psychiatry professor Alfred Hoche, in a 1920 book that created a sensation, Permission for the Destruction of Worthless Life, Its Extent and Form, asked rhetorically, giving an affirmative answer: “Are there humans who have lost their human characteristics to such an extent that their continued existence has lost all value both for themselves and for society?” These people, including those described as “incurable lunatics,” were not evil, but in not possessing “human characteristics” were “completely worthless.” 7 Similarly, Japanese, at least until World War II’s end, dehumanized other Asians without demonizing them. Takeuchi Yoshimi, an eminent Japanese scholar and translator of Chinese literature, explained in 1978 that before the war, “when we studied Chinese history and geography we never studied the fact that there were humans there.”8 The Japanese’s racist belief in other Asians’ lesser human status allowed the Japanese to enslave and kill them at will. But they did not conceive of their victims as demonic in their moral values and intentions. Inferior, yes. Enemies, yes. Dangerous, yes. It was part of the natural order of human enmity and threat, of the logic of power and “conquer or be conquered.”
Similarly, not all those demonized are also dehumanized. When asked, Rithy Uong, having spent four years under the Khmer Rouge and coming into contact with an enormous number of them, affirmed that they saw the new people as human beings, “but also they saw us as an enemy also. They wouldn’t trust us. They just see us as different kind of person . . . new people, they believe that brought nothing except trouble to them.”9 Many mass-murdering communists demonized their enemies without dehumanizing them, holding them as bearers of antagonistic class interests or agents of malevolent capitalism, to be in the grip of interests or ideologies making them dangerous. But they did not deem them to lack fundamental human attributes. Communist leaders—while killing millions—chose not to kill a much greater number opposing them, because, informed by Marxism, they believed people are corrigible and set out to reform them, including sometimes in gulags, from which they eventually released many. Some communist leaders, especially in Central Europe, secure in power because of Soviet backing (and sometimes, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia, because they were not pursuing grand social transformation), did not mass murder their own peoples. During the cold war, neither the Soviet leaders nor the rank and file believed Americans or Western Europeans were less than human, but they did demonize the West’s so-called ruling classes as morally corrupt, venal, and seeking to exploit humanity. Conversely, some people, most catastrophically Indonesians, demonized the communists among them, believing that to parry their diabolical challenge they had to eliminate them as a political entity, killing many and compelling so many more to de-demonize themselves by imbibing the prescribed antidote, religious conversion. In general, when facing radical or revolutionary challenges to the socioeconomic and political order, establishments tend to demonize such challengers, sometimes reacting in murderous fury. In many Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s, those in power on the political Right killed many more in their counterinsurgency campaigns than the rebellious Left ever killed. Today, Al Qaeda and other Political Islamists demonize infidels, especially those they deem their enemies, but they do not dehumanize them, because all infidels must do to be redeemed is accept Allah, and their danger passes.
The imputed capacity of rehabilitation or redemption is the critical issue for analyzing whether people are dehumanizing demeaned, hated, or feared others. Do they believe the others, at least in principle, can be reformed? The dehumanized, putatively bereft of fundamental human attributes owing to their biology, cannot be reformed, reeducated, civilized, transformed through any process into full human beings. In many instances, the source of their dehumanized condition is conceived of in racist terms, deriving from their ethnicity, blood, or race (or genes), biological givens and therefore unchangeable. Their children, by dint of their biology, inherit their putatively debased nature, so they too are automatically dehumanized. To be sure, some dehumanized peoples are thought of in seemingly contradictory ways, as less than human and capable as individuals of becoming civilized and as a collectivity of being reformed, but usually only over the long run. Such was the attitude of (some) British colonizers in India, though by no means everywhere else. This kind of dehumanization, having as its source a cultural theory of the group’s nature, is comparatively rare. (Cultural theories, unless they also demonize, do not dehumanize people as much because the condition is not seen as permanent and gradations of human capacities are recognized.)
A simple matrix containing groups that our age’s most omnivorous killers, the Nazis, murdered illustrates the separate dimensions of dehumanization and demonization, and also how the same perpetrators conceive of victim groups differently along these dimensions.
Non-Demonized Demonized
Non-Dehumanized Enemy “hostages” German communists, gay men
Dehumanized Slavs, mentally ill, Sinti and Roma Jews
The Nazis codified their racist understanding of humanity in a formal pseudoscientific race theory, which they made the German educational system’s foundational and unifying theme. This theory defined races according to cranium type, facial features, coloring, height, and other physical features, which also divided the peoples conventionally called “white” or of European descent into various qualitatively distinct races. The Nazis saw different nationalities and ethnic groups as biologically distinct races arrayed on a continuum of human mental capacity and commensurate moral worth. Nordic or Aryan peoples stood at the pinnacle. Slavic peoples stooped below as subhumans, black Africans still further below, hunched down on the cusp between humanity and other primates. A pamphlet titled “The Subhuman,” of which the Germans published almost four million copies in German and translated into fourteen other languages, spells out the historically common though rarely so clearly articulated view of dehumanized people:The subhuman, that biologically seemingly complete similar creation of nature with hands, feet and a kind of brain, with eyes and a mouth, is nevertheless a completely different, dreadful creature. He is only a rough copy of a human being, with human-like facial traits but nonetheless morally and mentally lower than any animal. Within this creature there is a fearful chaos of wild, uninhibited passions, nameless destructiveness, the most primitive desires, the nakedest vulgarity. Subhuman, otherwise nothing. For all that bear a human face are not equal. Woe to him who forgets it.10
For Nazis, the Slavic peoples were not more evil or demonic than a gorilla but, like gorillas, were inherently amoral and dangerous and thus to be kept in check. Slavs were lower beings, fit to be beasts of burden, used as slaves or killed depending on the Germans’ needs. Because the Germans viewed the Slavic peoples as numerous beyond the German empire’s needs, Germans readily killed millions and would have eliminated and killed tens of millions more had they won the war. Similarly, people who were mentally ill, developmentally disabled, or with congenital diseases were dehumanized as individuals, deemed bereft of fundamental human attributes, “lives unworthy of life” in the Nazi argot, useless eaters, a drag on Germany’s economic and biological stock. So they could be and were killed. Many Germans responded to this aspect of their government’s mass murderousness with horror—the regime was killing Germans’ own relatives and community members—and protest
ed with some effect. Yet those Germans who had most internalized the regnant biological determinism—and this included the physicians and nurses murdering these people—considered killing them a praiseworthy act serving the German people’s national health and well-being.
In contrast to these dehumanized groups and individuals, the Nazis demonized political opponents, particularly communists. In the Nazi worldview, the virus of communism (an allegedly Jewish invention) had infected these people, despite their good racial stock, transforming them into demonic enemies, bent upon wreaking havoc in Germany, weakening and decimating the German people, and delivering Germany to Bolshevik Russia. Within Germany, the Nazis incarcerated and killed the communist (and socialist) leadership but they allowed the rank-and-file communists, seen as (relatively easily) deprogrammable, to continue living in German society. Because the source of the communists’ threat was not biological, the Nazis did not need a biological solution. Communist people were not subhuman, so once German communists abandoned their communist practices, the Nazis treated them as good Germans. Ex-communist Roland Freisler rose to be chief of the regime’s People’s Court, presiding over the country’s show trials of those who resisted the regime.
The Nazis had other enemies, including the French, whom they neither dehumanized nor demonized, but saw as old-fashioned enemies to be defeated and controlled brutally. Applying the logic of morally unrestrained warfare, they murdered French by the hundreds after suffering sabotage or other attacks, as retribution and deterrent.
The Nazis’ fantastical ideological view of the Jews construed them as Germany’s most dangerous enemy. The Jews’ unusual place even among the Nazis’ long list of enemy and hated groups was such that the Nazis, and Germans in general, considered Jews to be a breed apart, less than human, indeed not even human, and demonic, powerfully malevolent to the core.
Kurt Möbius, serving in the Chelmno death camp, explained his thinking, the norm among Germans, about the orders to annihilate the Jews: “It did not at all occur to me that these orders could be unjust.” It made sense to him. He, like his countrymen, had been prepared for the exterminationist assault by German society’s powerful elimina-tionist discourse: “I was then of the conviction that the Jews were not innocent but guilty. I believed the propaganda that all Jews were criminals and subhumans and that they were the cause of Germany’s decline after the First World War. The thought that one should disobey or evade the order to participate in the extermination of the Jews did not therefore enter my mind at all.”11 In addition to this man’s clear explanation of how he was prepared to exterminate all Jews because of what he already believed about them, long before he received the killing order, he also succinctly captures and conveys both the dehumanized and demonized view of the Jews that was then Germans’ common sense: All Jews were “criminals,” in other words demonized, and all Jews were “subhumans,” in other words dehumanized.
An octopus with a Star of David over its head has its tentacles encompassing a globe, circa 1938.
According to the Nazis and ordinary Germans alike, Jews were racially (genetically) programmed to undermine, enslave, even destroy humanity, especially its most exalted people, the Germans. They were, in a common formulation Heinrich Himmler employed at a 1938 conference of SS generals, the “primordial matter of everything negative.”12 Adolf Hitler attributed to them unparalleled cosmic malevolence and apocalyptic power, warning all Germans in Mein Kampf, his candid guide to his worldview and political thinking, of the consequences of a victorious Jewry: “And as, in this greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet. If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”13 Nowhere else in prejudice’s annals (certainly in modern times) except against Jews, have people, let alone political leaders, conceived of groups in such cosmologically evil terms. For Germans (and other similar European racist antisemites), the continuum of human races did not include the Jews, conceived of as an anti-race, the Antichrist’s human equivalent, to be not of diminished intellectual and moral capacity (as subhumans almost always are conceived), but highly capable and depraved, dangerous, and determined, a threat that would never end.
Before expanding the discussion of dehumanization and demonization beyond Germany during the Nazi period, we need to recognize that not every demeaned, hated, or feared group can be so easily classified. As with most belief systems, a diversity of views often exists among the people who despise others. Also, whether people initially dehumanize or demonize others, their prejudicial conception sometimes leads them to respond to new developments by grafting the other prejudicial conception onto it. Thus, those dehumanizing others sometimes begin to believe that the putative subhumans are vulnerable to demonic powers or ideologies, such as communism. Similarly, those demonizing an ethnic group can tend to dehumanize it as well, to see the demonic qualities as residing in the group’s biology. Aside from such complexity, the prejudiced and haters are not scholars concerned with category boundaries and expressive clarity, so discerning their views’ real basis can be challenging. Finally, the two dimensions do not capture everything relevant to categorizing prejudice and hatred, which are each internally complex. Two kinds of examples bring out this general complexity.
The first is the British conception of the Kikuyu supporting the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule in Kenya starting in the mid-1950s. The British colonial administration and settlers, numbering fifty thousand, conceived of the Kikuyu in dehumanized terms. Comporting with Europeans’ general racism toward Africans, the British believed Kikuyu to be of diminished human capacity—as Paul Mahehu, a survivor who had served with the British for years, first in Burma during World War II and then afterward in Africa, attests, the British thought them to be more like monkeys than human beings.14 Befitting their putative nature, the Kikuyu were fit to be ruled and exploited. John Nottingham, a former British district officer in Kenya during the Mau Mau period, while agreeing with this animalistic analogy, also articulated this fundamental racism in other terms: “The general view was that they [Africans and Kenyans] were limited in the responsibilities that could be given to them. That they were limited in their education abilities, that they were people who were in some ways children even though grown up in most other ways. So there was a general attitude of paternalism, patronizing, and a lack of belief in their total honesty.”15 The British believed that this putatively diminished capacity made the Kikuyu prone to accepting poisonous ideas endangering the British (and other Africans). Those Kikuyu taking the Mau Mau oath of allegiance turned themselves, in the British colonialists’ minds, into demonic creatures who had to be eliminated. The British grafted a profound demonization of the members of an African liberation movement on top of a classically racist European conception of the colonized Africans.
Britons’ deeply rooted dehumanization of the Kikuyu as subhumans had begun decades earlier. Their demonization of them, though of recent vintage, was easily incorporated by the British into their conception of the dehumanized masses, whom the British now saw as inherently unstable, “mad,” and prey to becoming possessed by the Mau Mau devil. A Briton, Ronald Sherbrooke-Walker, visiting friends in Kenya in early 1953, toward the beginning of Mau Mau, reported:What do the settlers say? They know the primitive East African mentality and that “black brother” is a thousand years behind the European in outlook, and the “Kuke” [Kikuyu], who are causing the present trouble, are much inferior to the other Kenya tribes in moral qualities. If Europeans were to abandon the country voluntarily, or be squeezed out politically, without the Pax Britannica it would revert to blood-thirsty barbarism.16
Classifying and analyzing the various attitudes toward the targeted Kikuyu is further complicated in that man
y Kikuyu loyalists, organized into the Home Guard, helped the British fight the Mau Mau rebellion and conduct their eliminationist assault against actual or suspected Mau Mau supporters. We know little of Kikuyu loyalists’ views. Some might have imbibed the British hierarchical view of humanity and of the white man’s racial superiority, but they could hardly have deemed rebellious Kikuyu subhuman in racist terms because it also would have applied to them. Their demonization of Mau Mau supporters as “scum,” “filthy pigs,” and “savage animals” to be wiped out resembles the classical demonization of people beholden to threatening ideologies, such as communism, though here cast in the British eliminationist idiom. For the Kikuyu loyalists and their British overlords, the Mau Mau oath, namely their ideology, was the principal problem. They saw Mau Mau as a contagious “mind-destroying disease.” Even according to Thomas Askwith, the colonial administrator most hoping to “rehabilitate” (as opposed to destroying) the Mau Mau, the “oath represented everything evil in Mau Mau.” Caroline Elkins, having plumbed the British eliminationist assault on the Kikuyu’s real character, explains: “It was the distinctive quality of Mau Mau oathing rituals, and methods of killing, that transformed the virulent racism that had been the cornerstone of settler racial attitudes for over half a decade into something even more lethal. Settlers and colonial officials alike were repelled by the Kikuyu oaths, which used powerful symbols like goats’ blood and eyeballs, and ram intestines and scrotums.”17 Believing this putatively demonic oath had led the Kikuyu astray, the British and their Kikuyu supporters, following on this logic, considered Kikuyu who took an anti-Mau Mau oath, repudiating the Mau Mau ideology and movement, as de-demonized and rehabilitated. Getting Kikuyu to take an anti-Mau Mau oath became a principal British policy goal, even though strong sentiment, put into much practice, always existed that the British would probably have to violently eliminate the Kikuyu.
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