Politics of dehumanisation

Characterising opponents as insects or animals begins the demonisation process

IT ALL starts with outrageous and incendiary comments by some of our politicians which our elder statesmen and women would rather ignore, But such comments should never be ignored.

When a politician calls a government minister a dog, or says they will cut the throats of white people, or on more than one occasion repeats: “we are not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least not for now,” those comments aim to dehumanise.

For supporters of such politicians to start calling a leading journalist a whore, telling her to leave the country and go back to India, we have truly reached a new low that should never go without sanction from our courts.

If it is not hate speech then what is it? It is not even that such statements could lead to physical violence; those very supporters already called on their comrades to “go attack her,” “rape her,” “peel that skin off her pink body,” and “burn her alive”.

This pattern has unfolded time and again over the course of history. Politicians have attempted to dehumanise those they consider opponents, or those they feel threatened by.

The formal definition of dehumanisation is the psychological process of demonising the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment.

This very process of dehumanisation can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes and genocide.

Those making such comments about one of our senior journalists are not monsters, any more than those who joined the ranks of the Nazi party in 1939 or those who began to mobilise their Hutu compatriots in Rwanda in 1994.

These were all ordinary people who were driven to do the most horrendous deeds by starting to dehumanise those they considered “the enemy”.

The first step in this dangerous, slippery slope has always been to reduce someone, or a group of people, to sub-humans. When such comments take place within the context of an election campaign, they are even more dangerous, as political passions and tensions are already running high.

Dehumanisation always opens the door for cruelty and genocide.

What is it that made apartheid’s footsoldiers pose with the dead bodies of black South Africans?

There is only one explanation. Former apartheid soldiers and torturers will tell you just how they were able to commit such dastardly deeds – they were taught in police training college in the 1960s and 70s that those belonging to the ranks of the communist party or liberation movements were subhuman and a dangerous threat to a moral society. This is precisely what enabled them to unleash their aggression and justify eliminating people in the most brutal ways imaginable.

But dehumanisation seems to be a common theme throughout human history. The Nazis had referred to Jews as rats or subhumans “Untermenschen.”

The Nazis had seen Jews as enemies of civilisation, and called them lice, parasites, bacteria or vectors of contagion. Hitler claimed he would “get rid of the virus.” The evil that was exacted on the European Jewry as a result strains the limits of the imagination in terms of its horror. Never has the world seen such perfected cruelty to other human beings.

In the end when a sampling of Nazi war criminals were tried for their crimes, the writer Hannah Arendt, who attended Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman’s trial, observed that men such as Eichman were not monsters but ordinary people who were terrifyingly normal.

Similarly this was also the observation of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela who spent 46 hours interviewing Eugene de Kock in prison – she found him not to be a monster but just an ordinary man. Her book, A Human Being Died

That Night, about her observations of De Kock, scrutinised how and why an apparently ordinary man became murderer-in-chief for a brutal regime and was ultimately characterised as “prime evil”.

And while South Africa was transitioning to democracy and Nelson Mandela ushered in a new democratic dispensation, Rwandan Hutus were preparing for mass murder.

The Hutus involved in the genocide had called the Tutsis cockroaches “inyenzi,” or snakes “inzoka” who needed to be killed. In each case human beings were ascribed the characteristics of animals or insects, giving the impression they were vile, dirty and sneaky. This was in every way similar to what had happened 55 years earlier in Nazi Germany.

The difference was the methods used to exterminate the perceived threat. One was a killing orgy in the plain light of day, and the other a calculated, systematic method of mass extermination hidden from sight.

However, human beings have managed to wreak havoc on each other. There are lessons for every generation, and we best heed those lessons if history is not to keep repeating itself.

Calling people dogs, generalising about races of people in our country, and calling for journalists to be gruesomely attacked or killed is not only unacceptable but takes us to the precipice, beyond which lies only an abyss.

SHANNON EBRAHIM The first step … has always been to reduce someone, or a group of people, to sub-humans