Russian dissident journalist Vasily Grossman portrayed the fate of the Kulaks in his mordant novel, Forever Flowing. In it, Anna Sergeyevna, a former state-employed killer, recounts:
They would threaten people with guns, as if they were under a spell, calling small children “kulak bastards,” screaming “bloodsuckers!”… They had sold themselves on the idea that the so-called “kulaks” were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. They would not sit down at a “parasite’s table”; the “kulak” child was loathsome, the young “kulak” girl was lower than a louse. They looked upon the so-called “kulaks” as cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive: they had no souls; they stank; they all had venereal diseases … they were not human beings.38
And in another passage, a former Stalinist killer recalls:
What I said to myself at the time was “They are not human beings, they are kulaks”.… In order to massacre them it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Lenin and Stalin proclaim, kulaks are not human beings.39
Next is the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, engineered and implemented by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge (Communist Party of Kampuchea). The party seized power in the spring of 1975, after five years of bloody civil war. Once in control, they instituted a massive program of ethnic cleansing that wiped out around a fifth of the population of Cambodia.
The Khmer Rouge instituted sweeping reforms, modeled on Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward.” Similarly, their “purification” of Cambodia resonated with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.40 The Great Leap Forward was a disastrous attempt to collectivize and modernize Chinese agriculture and industry that resulted in the death of up to 43 million people, mainly from starvation. Its failure led to Mao’s resignation as chairman of the People’s Republic of China, and a swing to the right in the Chinese communist party. Then, beginning in 1966, Mao mobilized the populace to purge the party of these “bourgeois” elements in a mass movement called the Cultural Revolution. Those suspected of being class enemies were described as undesirable animals: cow ghosts and snake spirits (in Chinese folklore, evil supernatural beings that disguise themselves in human form), monsters and demons, parasites and, of course, vermin. The Red Guard—student militias that enforced Mao’s program of social reform—used derogatory labels like “pigs,” “dogs,” and “vampires” for the men and women whom they persecuted, and imprisoned them in detention centers called cowsheds.41
Many party administrators were labeled “capitalist running dogs” and removed from office. The Red Flag published an article titled “Clean Up All the Parasites” (Vol. 11, 1966). Soon slogans such as “Down with monsters and demons” and “Sweeping away all monsters and demons” were everywhere: on wall posters, in official newspapers, in the Red Guards’ leaflets and in the rallying cries.42
Chemistry professor Li-Ping Luo, who grew up during this period, recounts how dehumanizing talk was intertwined with acts of violence:
It was still late August when one day the door to the Spanish House was flung open, and the two spinsters were forced to kneel in front of it. Dragged from her wheelchair, the old mother was forced to join them, but she was so feeble that she collapsed into a heap on the terrace. The mob yelled and screamed, banging their fists on every available surface. The old women were called “bloodsucking leeches,” “maggots,” and “intestinal parasites.”43
Similar to Mao’s cultural revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge portrayed those regarded as internal enemies as worms, germs, termites, and weevils, infecting and undermining the new political order. Pol Pot commanded his army to cleanse Cambodia of ethnic Vietnamese, enjoining them to “kill the enemy at will, and the contemptible Vietnamese will surely shriek like monkeys screeching all over the forest.” This was to be a nation for the Khmer (the majority ethnic group in Cambodia), purged of all foreign influences. Thus began a gigantic, and tragic, experiment in social engineering in which religion, public services, industry, banking, and even currency were abolished. There was to be no private property, and formerly urban populations were forced to become agricultural laborers.44
Yale University historian Ben Kiernan, an expert on the Cambodian genocide, explains that ethnic Khmer who were suspected of being unsympathetic to the party’s aims were accused of merely appearing to be Khmer, of having “Khmer bodies with Vietnamese Minds.”45 Like the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide was conceived as a cleansing of diseased elements, the extirpation of a lethal infection (“what is infected must be cut out” was a popular party slogan), and the elimination of carriers of germs. As Pol Pot put it, “There is a sickness in the Party.… If we wait any longer, the microbes can do real damage.” Men and women were executed because the “pro-Vietnamese virus” infected them.46 Kiernan adds that:
While making no claims of genetic racism or “scientific” precision, the CPK leadership employed biological metaphors that suggested the threat of contamination. It referred to enemies as “diseased elements,” “microbes,” “pests buried within,” and traitors “boring in,” just as the Nazis had talked of Jews as “vermin” and “lice.” Pol Pot considered the CPK’s revolution the only “clean” one in history, just as the Nazis had “cleaned” areas of Jews; and his regime, equally obsessed with “purity,” launched its most extensive massacres … with a call to “purify … the masses of the people.”
And after a bloodbath in the Eastern provinces, in which as many as a quarter of a million Khmer were wiped out, Pol Pot announced, “The party is clean. The soldiers are clean. Cleanliness is the foundation.”47
Those who were not killed were harshly treated. “We were being treated worse than cattle,” reported one survivor, “the victims of methodical, institutionalized contempt … no longer human beings.” Another reported being told that his mother, who had recently died, was less valuable than a cow: “[Cows] help us a lot and do not eat rice. They are much better than you pigs,” he was told.48 Agents of Pol Pot’s socialist paradise who tortured and killed approximately seventeen thousand detainees in Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh (also known as “S-21”) considered their victims not as human beings but as, in the words of one survivor, “less than garbage.” (As another ex-prisoner put it, “We weren’t quite people. We were lower forms of life. Killing us was like swatting flies, a way to get rid of undesirables.”) Writing about this episode, historian David Chandler points out, “that dehumanizing the victims made them easy to kill.”49 They could even be eaten. One witness described how, as a child, he had watched as a man was killed with an axe, and then “the cadre … opened up the man’s chest, he took out the liver.”
One man exclaimed, “One man’s liver is another man’s food.” Then a second man quickly placed the liver on an old stump where he sliced it horizontally and fried it in a pan with pig grease.… When the liver was cooked, the cadre leader took out two bottles of rice-distilled whisky, which they drank cheerfully.50
Almost twenty years later, in 1994, what is perhaps the most notorious genocide of the late twentieth century exploded in Rwanda. It was the culmination of long-standing tensions between the two largest ethnic groups in the country: the Tutsi and the Hutu. Traditionally, the Tutsi, who were a pastoral people, constituted the ruling class, while the agriculturally based Hutu had a lower position on the social hierarchy. When the Belgians colonized Rwanda in the late nineteenth century, they reinforced the existing social hierarchy by regarding the Tutsis as superior to their Hutu countrymen and providing them with greater social and economic opportunities. Once the Tutsi monarchy was overthrown by a Hutu uprising in 1959, ethnic antagonisms remained. In 1963–64, Hutus killed around 10,000 Rwandan Tutsis, and between 1965 and 1991 Tutsis slaughtered around 150,000 Hutus in a series of incidents in neighboring Burundi. By the early 1990s, tensions were coming close to the boiling point. It was at this time that plans were drawn up to exterminate all the Tutsis in Rwanda.
The genocide was foreshadowed in po
pular media, principally the magazine Kangura (“Awaken!”). A year before the genocide erupted, Kangura published a notorious article describing the Tutsi as vile, subhuman creatures.
We began by saying that a cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly. It is true. A cockroach gives birth to another cockroach.… The history of Rwanda shows us clearly that a Tutsi stays always exactly the same, that he has never changed. The malice, the evil are just as we knew them in the history of our country. We are not wrong in saying that a cockroach gives birth to another cockroach. Who could tell the difference between the inyenzi who attacked in October 1990 and those of the 1960s? They are all linked … their evilness is the same. The unspeakable crimes of the inyenzi of today … recall those of their elders: killing, pillaging, raping girls and women, etc.51
Then, when Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in April 1994—apparently at the hands of radical Hutus, but blamed on Tutsi assassins—all hell broke loose. There were calls to exterminate the Tutsis, and their Hutu sympathizers, as government-supported civilian militias began what was called a “big clean-up.”52 In the space of three months, around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were shot, burned, hacked, and bludgeoned to death by marauding mobs.
Dehumanization played an unmistakable role in these events. As the passage I quoted from Kangura indicates, Tutsis were called inyenzi—cockroaches—in state-sponsored propaganda. Rakiya Omaar, director of the human rights organization African Rights, affirms, “In Rwanda they referred to Tutsis as cockroaches. They were not human beings.… [They said,] ‘Don’t worry, you’re not killing humans like you. You are killing some vermin that belongs under your shoe. You’re killing cockroaches,” which is why a secret military operation against the Tutsi had the code name “operation insecticide.”53 Tutsi were also called rats, vermin, disease, snakes, and sometimes weeds. Tutsis also dehumanized Hutus, depicting them as monkeys and gorillas, as vicious, flesh-eating monsters, and collectively as a hyena (in Rwanda, hyenas are regarded as extremely filthy and disgusting, as well as being very dangerous).54
Slogans like “Tutsis caused problems and must be exterminated with their eggs,” “If you cannot catch the louse, you kill its eggs,” and “If you set out to kill a rat, you must kill the pregnant rat” were invoked to justify the murder of women and children.55 Esperance Nyirarugira, a woman who was raped during the genocide but managed to escape with her life (and whose entire family was hacked to pieces) is quite explicit about this. “Based on what I saw,” she told Daniel Goldhagen, “Hutu thought of Tutsi as animals. They did not have the value of a human being.… You could pass some people and they shout at you saying, ‘Look at that cockroach,’ ‘Look at that snake.’”56 The killers confirm this. Elie Ngarambe, who took part in the bloodbath, informed Goldhagen that his comrades “did not know that the [Tutsi] were human beings, because if they had thought about that they wouldn’t have killed them. Let me include myself as someone who accepted it; I wouldn’t have accepted that they [the Tutsi] are human beings.”57
Finally, I want to address the role of dehumanization in the genocide that has dominated the first decade of the present century: the mass killing in Darfur, Sudan. The historical background to the Darfur genocide is quite complex. It was the upshot of ethnic conflict between a powerful Arab minority (including the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum) and other ethnic groups collectively called zurug (“dark” or “black”). These people are physically distinguished from Arabs not by their skin color, but rather by facial features such as the shape of lips and nose, and, importantly, by their ethnic background.58
Darfur has a history of ethnic conflict. As late as the nineteenth century, it was a source of human chattel for the Arab slave trade. More recently, Libya’s Muammar el-Qadaffi supported the Arab-dominated Sudanese government in the hope of creating an “Arab belt” across sub-Saharan Africa, while the Arab and Islamic Union, a group that successfully campaigned for the election of Sudan’s prime minister in 1986, had an explicit agenda of subordinating the zurug to Arab rule and claimed that the “Arab race” had introduced civilization to the region. The rising tide of Arab supremacism led to a Darfurian rebellion in 2003, which the Sudanese government tried to put down with the help of Janjaweed militias. The militias brutally and indiscriminately killed, maimed, and raped civilians, which brought about the death of as many as 400,000 people and the displacement of millions more.59
The mayhem in Darfur hasn’t been accompanied by written or visual propaganda. There are no films like The Eternal Jew or magazines like Kangura. But the influence of dehumanization is evidenced by victims’ accounts of what the Janjaweed say to them during the attacks.
“Dog, son of dogs, and we came to kill you and your kids.”
“Kill the black donkeys! Kill the black dogs! Kill the black monkeys!”
“You blacks are not human. We can do anything we want to you.”
“We kill our cows when they have black calves. We will kill you too.”
“You make this area dirty; we are here to clean the area.”
“You blacks are like monkeys. You are not human.”60
And so it goes on. As I write these words, there is a fragile peace in Darfur—a peace that might at any point give way to renewed violence. But even if the peace turns out to be lasting, you can be certain that the first major genocide of the twenty-first century will not be its last.
THE SUBHUMAN
Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art … thy wild acts denote the unreasonable fury of a beast.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ROMEO AND JULIET 61
So far, in this book, I have kept theory to a minimum. My aim has been to convince you that dehumanization is a real and significant phenomenon, and that it is worthwhile taking it seriously. Hopefully, I have succeeded in this task, and it’s now time to shift gears. I’ll continue to describe examples of dehumanization in the rest of the book, but my descriptions will be more closely tied to an examination of the underlying processes. There will be a little less narrative, and a lot more analysis.
I want to start by considering an exceptionally explicit example. In 1942, a lavishly illustrated magazine hit the German newsstands. Entitled The Subhuman, edited by Himmler, and published under the imprimatur of the SS, its purpose was to educate the German public about the alarming threat posed by “Mulattos and Finn-Asian barbarians, Gypsies and black skin savages … headed by … the eternal Jew,” creatures that are “beasts in human form.”
The text begins with a quotation from Himmler himself, dated 1935, and this sets the tone for the pages to follow. “As long as there have been men on the earth,” he expounds, “the struggle between man and the subhuman will be the historic rule; the Jewish-led struggle against mankind, as far back as we can look, is part of the natural course of life on our planet. One can be convinced with full certainty that this struggle for life and death is just as much a law of nature as is the struggle of an infection to corrupt a healthy body.”62 The text goes on to proclaim:
Just as the night rises against the day, the light and dark are in eternal conflict. So too, is the subhuman the greatest enemy of the dominant species on earth, mankind. The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes, and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being.… Not all of those who appear human are in fact so.
Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside of this creature lie wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy.
There are fifty more pages of this stuff, accompanied by photographs of sinister-looking Jews and Russians, filthy hovels, desecrated churches, and piles of corpses (to illustrate the Jewish proclivity for committing mass atrocities). Illustrations of Jewish degradation are juxtaposed with pictures of their who
lesome Aryan counterparts. The illustrations of Jews have captions like “subhuman horde,” “Jews as subhuman leaders,” “the mud huts of the subhuman,” and “wanton murder by the subhumans.”
This should all seem familiar. Looking back on the examples of dehumanization presented in this book—the genocides described in the present chapter, the oppression and enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans, the extermination of the indigenous peoples of the New World, and all the rest—it’s striking that, although the details vary from culture to culture and epoch to epoch, the dehumanizing imagination consistently produces astonishingly similar results. Not only do the images of the dehumanized people resemble one another to a remarkable degree, but the general form of dehumanization—the broad assumptions that inform it—are also strikingly similar. This unity in diversity suggests that there is something that all of these examples have in common, something that undercuts their cultural and historical variety. That “something,” I will argue, has to do with the machinery of the human mind and the psychological legacy of the evolutionary trajectory of our species.
In the next few chapters, I will be examining these matters in detail. For the moment, I will summarize the fundamental characteristics that all the examples of dehumanization share, illustrating each of them with examples from the Nazi era, and particularly The Subhuman, as well as occasionally from other socio-historical contexts.
Less Than Human Page 17