He [Man] is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out…and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. ..And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man”–with his mouth.
– Mark Twain
Aggression, cruelty, and, indeed, genocide, are likely to weigh much less on our conscience, or not at all, if we conceive of the enemy as subhuman, soulless, animal. And this may well be why it is important to study dehumanization, for it (dehumanization, not the study of it) helps overcome subconscious barriers that keep us from committing murders, especially on large scales.
“We must kill the Tutsi cockroaches” – Hutu radio station broadcast before 1994 massacre of Tutsis
The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. They [the Jews] were Untermenschen — subhumans — and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It’s wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies and others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats.
– Less than human: Why we demean, enslave and exterminate others
The public burning of a Negro would soon be known as a “Negro Barbecue” reinforcing the perception of blacks as less than human.
– Without sanctuary: Lynching photography in America
“You have never killed anyone yet, so today we shall have some killing practice. You must not consider the Chinese as a human being, but only as something of rather less value than a dog or cat”
– Japanese Second Lieutenant Ono to Japanese privates during ‘desensitization exercises’ practiced during the war against China, Rape of Nanking
And so, since the link between abject dehumanization and extreme ruthlessness has been well documented, I do not have the need to make the case for it any more than I already have. It has also been established, by Mark Twain and many others, that human beings are certainly capable of mass slaughter. Of fellow human beings, I might add. Scales may vary, and so may intensities, but we are always horrified to hear of murders.
But what of the tortures that precede these murders? We seem to have a singular preference for causing extreme torment and anguish among those that we do intend to exterminate. To annihilate is not enough, to excruciate is essential. These behaviors, are often characterized as unimaginable and unspeakable. And yet, when one examines the annals of torture, the details are quite similar: death by stoning, death by being thrown (as when babies are thrown), or being thrown to savage animals, being buried alive (and then stoned), being burned to death, mutilating and/or cutting off various body parts -finger chopping, yanking out finger and toe nails, being subject to various (unimaginable) medical experiments, and rapes – rapes, mutilation and forcing family members to rape one another, in front of one another. As I read the litany of cruelties that the Nazis performed on the Jews, that the Chinese performed on the Japanese, that people all over the world performed on people all over the world, my mind goes numb and unfeeling. For they don’t seem real, they don’t seem possible, nobody I know seems capable (enough to commit these acts), and they seem completely unimaginable. And yet, when we read about the murders, the tortures, the rapes and the mutilations in another part of the world, we find them unimaginable yet again. The human mind is endlessly amazed by its own capacity for cruelty.
The Rape of Nanking, written by journalist Iris Chang, tries to challenge the eerie silence that surrounds the Rape of Nanking – a brutal massacre carried out by the Japanese army in December 1937, when more than 300,000 Chinese civilians in Nanking were tortured and murdered. And yet, despite the death toll exceeding the immediate deaths from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki blasts, the atrocity is not openly discussed, does not find a part in history textbooks, and has been silently wiped from public memory.
I hadn’t heard of the Rape or this book. In fact, I first came across a reference to this book in another book The Woman Who Could Not Forget: Iris Chang Before and Beyond the Rape of Nanking- A Memoir written by Iris Chang’s mother after Iris’ suicide. The memoir suggests a link between Iris’ research and work on the Nanking massacre and the depression which ultimately cost her her life. Iris Chang left behind a 2 year old son.
Chang asks an important question in her book:
“What keeps certain events in history and assigns the rest to oblivion? Exactly how does an event like the Rape of Nanking vanish from Japan’s (and even the world’s) collective memory?”
Chang writes that a curious set of circumstances that arose post World War II led to the Nanking massacre being forgotten, or the story being hushed up by perpetrators, victims and spectators alike. With the end of the war, China, the Soviet Union and North Korea emerged as its post-war enemies, and the United States realized that forging an alliance with Japan would be a good strategy to challenge Communism. Chinese victims were silenced by the curtain of isolation imposed by Communist China. Japanese wartime conspiracy and conception of loyalty to its imperialistic government led to a stifling of any expression of remorse and little wartime reparations.
The Japanese government continues to deny the Nanking Holocaust.
[…] Tragedy, conspiracy and denial […]
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