'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Dehumanization alerts, Iraq

One way that people prepare themselves--and any onlookers--for their own use of violence against other people is by calling the intended victims by names designed to dehumanize and marginalize them, thus making it more "okay"--or even laudable--to kill them.

Most recently we saw how the men of violence beheading Americans in Iraq referred to Americans as "dogs". And from the American side, meanwhile, I've recently been seeing a number of instances where US field commanders refer to whole communities of Iraqis as "cancers" (that have to be cut out by violence.)

It happened again in this piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran on the front page of today's WaPo:

"Fallujah has become a cancer," declared [Marine Capt. Jeff] Stevenson, echoing a metaphor used by several senior U.S. commanders in Iraq.

And later on, this additional dehumanizing metaphor, again used for Fallujah:

"We need to take out that rat's nest," said one senior Marine officer in Fallujah, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his views contradict those of his commanders. "The longer we wait, the stronger they get."

The "cancer" analogy is one I've definitely heard before--from Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, speaking in August 2002 about Palestinian nationalists.

One notable thing about all these dehumanizing metaphors--as with the term "inyenzi" (cockroaches) that Hutu-power extremists used, to refer to Tutsis in the run-up to the genocide in Rwanda--is that in all these cases, it is actually a virtuous or at least a "hygienic" act to "clear out" and exterminate the said objects and rid the world of them. (And yes, this is the view that many Arabs have of dogs, too.)

I have a suggestion. How about everyone involved in what is essentially a politically struggle for control--whether in Iraq or Palestine-- moves towards not dehumanizing their enemies in this way, but gets back to referring to them simply as "my opponent", or "a person whom I deeply disagree with", or whatever? Metaphors of "unclean objects" are usually designed to break the bonds of shared humanity that link each person on this earth to each other, and to make it "okay" for one person to "wipe out" another...

Actually, have you noticed the extent to which homecleaning/hygienic metaphors have already become absorbed into the discourse of modern warfare? I just wrote, "wipe out"... Then, there are "mopping up" operations, some of which, alas, may lead to "ethnic cleansing"... So you can just see what referring to people as "rats", or "cockroaches", or "dogs", or "cancers" can lead to...