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 edit
orial 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 as just 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.
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STEPS TOWARD A THEORY OF DEHUMANIZATION
It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp that other people are as real as you.
—IAN MCEWAN, ATONEMENT: A NOVEL
THE WORD DEHUMANIZATION ENTERED the English lexicon early in the nineteenth century. From the outset, it had many meanings, and it still does today. Articles in both the popular press and in scholarly journals tell us that automatic ticketing machines in airports dehumanize customers by “turning them into cattle,” that pornography dehumanizes women, that triathlons dehumanize athletes, that technology dehumanizes education, and that the treatment of prisoners dehumanizes them. This is just a small selection of the wide variety of ways that the word dehumanization is used.1
This unruly tangle of meanings poses a problem for anyone wanting to study dehumanization. To talk meaningfully about dehumanization, we need to pin it down. In this book, I use the term to refer to the act of conceiving of people as subhuman creatures rather than as human beings. This definition has two components: When we dehumanize people we don’t just think of them in terms of what they lack, we also think of them as creatures that are less than human.
To make this clear, it’s useful to contrast my concept of dehumanization with its most common alternatives.
It’s sometimes said that people are dehumanized when they’re not recognized as individuals. This happens when they are treated as numbers, mere statistics, cogs in a bureaucratic machine, or exemplars of racial, national, or ethnic stereotypes, rather than as unique individuals. This isn’t what I mean by dehumanization. Taking away a person’s individuality isn’t the same as obliterating their humanity. An anonymous human is still human.
In other contexts, dehumanization is equated with objectification. This is the topic of feminist philosopher Linda LeMoncheck’s book Dehumanizing Women, revealingly subtitled Treating Persons as Sex Objects.2 The feminist notion of objectification comes to us from the writings of the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant via late twentieth-century feminist theory as developed by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Here’s how Dworkin defines it:
Objectification occurs when a human being, through social means, is made less than human, turned into a thing or commodity, bought and sold. When objectification occurs, a person is depersonalized, so that no individuality or integrity is available socially or in what is an extremely circumscribed privacy. Objectification is an injury right at the heart of discrimination: those who can be used as if they are not fully human are no longer fully human in social terms; their humanity is hurt by being diminished.3
When women are objectified, their humanity is disregarded. They are treated as instruments of sexual pleasure rather than as human subjects. However, treating someone as only a means to a sexual end is not the same as regarding them as subhuman, for one can fail to acknowledge a person’s subjectivity without denying the existence of that subjectivity, just as one might not believe that it is raining without believing that it is not raining. This isn’t just a word game. A surgeon disregards the humanity of the person lying on the operating table. He is interested in the patient as a flesh-and-blood machine in need of repair, not as a human subject, but in doing so he doesn’t think of his patient as less than human.
At times it’s said that we dehumanize people by taking a derogatory attitude toward them. But denigrating others falls short of denying their humanity. Often, it involves judging them to be inferior human beings rather than subhuman animals. An inferior human is still human.
Finally, dehumanization is sometimes equated with cruel or degrading treatment. It’s said, for instance, that torturing a person, or systematically disrespecting them, is t
antamount to dehumanizing them. This puts the cart before the horse. Doing violence to people doesn’t make them subhuman, but conceiving of people as subhuman often makes them objects of violence and victims of degradation. The important thing to keep in mind is that dehumanization is something psychological. It occurs in people’s heads. It’s an attitude—a way of thinking about people—whereas harming them is a form of behavior, a kind of doing rather than a kind of thinking.
To dehumanize a person is to regard them as subhuman. This is how Abraham Lincoln used the word in his final debate with Stephen Douglas. The Lincoln/Douglas debates revolved around the issue of slavery. Douglas asserted that the Founding Fathers did not have “inferior or degraded” races in mind when they spoke of the equality of men.4 Lincoln responded that Douglas displayed “the tendency to dishumanize the man” (or, in some reports, “dishumanize the negro”) and thereby “take away from him all right to be supposed or considered as human.” When the New York Tribune published his speech, the editors changed his awkward “dishumanize” to the more elegant “dehumanize.”5
Dehumanization, as I have defined it, raises a multitude of questions, three of which are especially important. First, it invites us to consider what it really means to think of someone as a human being. Clearly, being human can’t be the same as looking human, for if that were the case then Stephen Douglas would have acknowledged that African Americans are fully human. This implies that humanity runs deeper than meets the eye. If being human isn’t the same as looking human, there must be something more subtle and less tangible at issue. This invites us to ponder the question of what exactly it is that dehumanized people are supposed to lack. Finally, we need to address the question of precisely what sort of creatures dehumanized others are supposed to be.
Less Than Human Page 3