DEHUMANIZATION: the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities.
- it is one technique in incitement to genocide. It has also been used to justify war, judicial and extra-judicial killing, slavery, the confiscation of property, denial of suffrage and other rights, and to attack enemies or political opponents.
THE DREAD OF FOREIGN FORM
Understood as a reduction to abstraction, dehumanization is designed to portray opposition as something “other”, as something outside society, as separate from “us”, therefore something other than “human”. This can occur through language and artwork that likens individual humans or groups to non-human beings, ignoring individuality as that can facilitate empathy or understanding of a stigmatized group.
The use of societal institutions (state, school, family) may be employed and is historically directed against perceived political, racial, ethnic, national, or religious threats. Occurring across several platforms, it is facilitated by status, power, and social connection resulting in such behaviors as violence and support of violence, and is the most important precursor to moral exclusion by which targeted groups are placed outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of courtesy apply.
“Dehumanization doesn’t just arise in the human heart. It comes from external influences: ideologies that are embedded in a culture for decades or centuries and propaganda by people who have investment in us doing terrible things to one another”- David Livingstone Smith
Prior to the events of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941; Japan had, much like their German allies, been portrayed as a looming threat or menace in propaganda. Afterwards and leading up to the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945; the depiction began to morph. No longer was Japan presented as lurking fear but as treacherous rats hiding and scurrying about, vermin seeking to infiltrate your once safe home.
When military, political, or terrorist opposition are labeled as vermin, negative cultural associations begin. Seen as loathsome, and equated with disease and destruction, a denizen of the earth’s bowels, the rat is viewed as unclean. A repellent figure and source of instinctive revulsion, the invoking of this imagery provokes extermination models of response.
By slowly rolling out the propaganda campaign of presenting the Japanese as rats, they gradually conditioned the population to accept the means of eradication. Rat as plaguewielder, one of the perceived “lower” life-forms who foster anxiety around verminous behaviors and subterranean movement, invisible and relentlessly eating at the ground beneath your feet, undermining the structures we assume are safe. This allows for the popular acceptance of this viewpoint.
Once the public opinion of the Japanese was no longer one of human but that of a huddled mass of underground pestilence, the easier it was for the public to live with the idea of radiating them off the planet.
Scholars of propaganda agree that images that emphasize the “otherness” of the enemy are fundamental to wartime because they create the preconditions necessary to military action. Contemporary media and its discourses are indisputably an instrument of war, helping governments win “domestic and international public opinion”, a task as essential to winning modern wars as defeating the enemy on the battlefield.
XENOPRESENCE IN DRONING SWARMS (ENEMY CONSTRUCTION)
The persistence of the use of animal imagery in enemy construction, dehumanized “other” in media propaganda, is much more than representational strategy. Print journalism is a political as well as ideological force, whose collected headlines lay the groundwork for the language of eradication and annihilation.
The propaganda model put forth by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that corporate media are able to carry out large-scale, successful dehumanization campaigns when they promote the goals (profit making) that the corporations are contractually obliged to maximize. Decoding these subtle operations of media frames and filters those potent, systemic influences grounded in “money and power” that shape, distort, or censor “marginalizing dissent”, while allowing government and dominant “private interest” to establish their perspective through a perceived neutral network of media. As a result, mainstream, for-profit news media are frequently enmeshed in tactics that are closer to propaganda than journalism.
By demonstrating a clear pattern, the framing of “enemies” as hunted prey, as repugnant animals, the enemy as entities that are most often considered noxious by society, have significant prevalence in headlines, as many “readers” scan headlines rather than read a full article. They represent a primary source of condensed information to a large portion of the population, ultimately influencing and directing interpretations as much as they summarize content. This compressed narrative is, therefore, particularly ideologically powerful.
Terms like “swarm” are used to emphasize the speed, mass and irresistible nature of attack; reflecting anxieties of an inhumanly numerous opponent that it does not simply move, but “swarms”, threatening not merely attack, but obliteration.
Media reports are littered by language that expresses notions of pursuit, capture, and entrapment via vocabulary such as “hunt”, “trap”, “snare”, and “net”: enemies are “caught in a trap”, terrorists “scurry” for cover, or “slither” out of sight. Neutral terms such as “looked and searched for” have been almost entirely replaced.
Simply put, the hunting model is straightforward: the transgressor is an animal that needs to be tracked down and results in the successful conclusion of the animal’s death.
ATROCITY EXHIBITION
The link between widespread dissemination of dehumanizing images of the enemy and oppression and even genocide are well established and observed.
The first three stages leading to genocide are classification, symbolization, and dehumanization. Animal, prey and disease-related metaphors in a single gesture accomplish all three of these steps, combining into a procedure that simultaneously identifies, marks, symbolizes and devalues the “other”. Genocide is not a product it is a process. It may appear suddenly, but in actuality is a series of distinct but linked and progressive steps each integral to the “genocide process”.
The next three stages are organization, polarization, identification, extermination and finally denial of act. The language and images used to represent the “enemy-other” are a key-role in these stages. Consistently represented as less then human, it becomes psychologically acceptable to engage in genocide atrocities.
Once language deems the subject as an animal to be captured and eliminated, and it’s proliferation has the effect of desensitizing us to it, such phrases come to seem simple and natural descriptions and not what they are: representations that perform significant ideological work.
It’s in this battle for your mind, your thoughts, that ideological warfare is waged. Propagandists use attention grabbing headlines and your short attention span to promote agendas. Who’s agenda? The agenda of whatever corporation, industrial complex, or country that funds the story, terms and taglines are chosen, accentuated, and introduced to the public.
They judge and analyze our response and allow the social collective conscience to take root. Over time, this implanted idea becomes to be believed as one’s own. Some willingly kneel like dogs, others choose to be thrown to them ultimately dehumanizing both in the process.
“Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul”- Saul Bellow
