WHAT WE DON’T FEEL STILL HURTS U S
A single word holds the key to the myriad crises plaguing the world – dehumanisation. It is omnipresent in wars, policies on migrants and shortfalls in humanitarian aid. It has also become the bedrock of those who perpetuate the ills.
Abasing your opponents is an unfortunate tool of the cut and thrust of campaigning and the warp and woof of politics in general. Using vitriol and venom to paint and caricature fellow human beings for political gain however, is cowardly and craven to the point of evil.
Gaza and the West Bank are the site of a world championship morals limbo competition, as in “how low can you go”.
In a recent BBC World Service radio interview, a former Israeli general never once referred to Palestinian civilians when discussing Gaza. He did, however contend that the strip had been completely radicalised.
One has to assume he hasn’t seen the endless images of Gazan civilians. They can hardly be faulted if they hold no love for Israel or its people, But it’s a fair bet that politics, ideology and vengeance are far from the top of the list for men, women and children whose most pressing reality is a desperate need for food, queuing for a bucket of water or scrabbling in rubble for whatever bits of their lives they can salvage, while listening to shelling, shooting and the sound of drones seeking targets.
However, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich seems to be of the opinion that all Palestinians, including children, are monsters and murderers. In a speech justifying his call for all Palestinians to be “resettled” somewhere other than the place they see as home, he said Israel “ cannot afford a reality where four minutes away from our communities there is a hotbed of hatred and terrorism, where two million people wake up every morning with aspiration for the destruction of the State of Israel and with a desire to slaughter and mass rape and murder Jews wherever they are.”
GUESS WHO ELSE
If the minister and his supporters don’t hear an echo from 90 years ago in that kind of dehumanisation, maybe they should listen to the speeches of Donald Trump.
In phrasing that more than a few commentators have noted reflects speeches and writing by Adolph Hitler, he portrayed migrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” and warned that if elected, he would carry out mass deportations.
Hamas talks about “Jews” but not the “Jewish people”. It lumps any and all as Zionists, as if that was an ethnic description. Its founding Covenant “is a comprehensive manifesto comprised of 36 separate articles, all of which promote the goal of destroying the State of Israel through Jihad (Islamic Holy War).
That’s dehumanising taken to Naziism level.
SEE NO FEEL NO
But is it any more dehumanising than, for all intents and purposes, and on available evidence, the world’s humanitarian crises are perceived?
The UN High Commissioner for Refuges (UNHCR) reported that by the end of 2023 “as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.” there were 117.3‑million forcibly displaced people.
And yet, there is little or no international pressure to end most of the conflicts, or ameliorate the conditions that provoke famine. It’s fair to conclude that images of women and children huddling in front of tents and makeshift shelters in refugee camps, or entire families trudging from Hell-to-who-knows-where with the archetypical “pathetic bundles”, don’t prompt Western TV viewers to make a psychological never mind visceral connection between the people on the screen and their own situation and children.
That’s dehumanising on an unconscious, and perhaps defence mechanism level.
Don’t relate to it and you don’t have to deal with feeling it.
A U.S. Army Apache helicopter pilot once told me how in Gulf War 1 he hit an Iraqi tank at night, from a mile away, with a missile that “blew it right off the top of my screen”, a reference to the fact that modern warfare is often more video-game distant than up close and personal.
When I remarked that it must have vapourised the men inside, he looked away and murmured: “You wouldn’t feel a thing.”
It seemed to me that saying “you” rather than “they” was his way of depersonalising what he had done. A form of dehumanising that ‚given what soldiers sent into combat are expected to, and by orders and job definition must do, is both an understandable and in many ways necessary, even justifiable defence mechanism. For politicians and the rest of us to dehumanise, however, is unfoggiveable to the point of inhuman.
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6 thoughts on “WHAT WE DON’T FEEL STILL HURTS U S”
There was a wonderful billboard put out by a domestic violence ngo here in joburg, many years ago. It said: “world peace begins at home”. And that’s so true — empathy starts in the first 6 months of life; if you smile at a baby often enough, within 6 months she/he will have an involuntary response of smiling back whenever someone smiles their way. And anyone who plats peekaboo learns empathy the moment they understand that holding their hands over their eyes, because others have a different perspective. Yet so many grow up without empathy — and are as a result capable of killing total strangers. I can’t help thinking that the wave of testosterone that is visible in today’s global politics has something to do with it. I can’t imagine such an appetite for killing if the world were governed by women.
I grant you women are in the main less bellicose., and many would be an improvement on today’s male leaders (although that’s a pretty low bar). But let’s not forget Maggie Thatcher cheering “Rejoice Rejoice” when the Belgrano was sunk with a massive loss of life in the Falklands war,which she declared.
There have to be exceptions to prove rules.
Women in leadership roles would be a wonderful thing. There have been many to balance Maggie:
Bandaranaike, Indira, Golda to name a few. Of course there was Mao’s wife and Isobel Peron who did not help the cause.
Sadly, even in our so called peaceful and polite Canada, women are sometimes hounded from office and endure unspeakable harassment from misogynists on the internet, on the street and even members in the a House of Commons.
This must change. I would say it’s happening at a glacial pace but this isn’t an apt analogy anymore. Glaciers are melting quickly.
It might be simplistic to say if all the current war mongers were replaced by women we would have no more killing and starvation. But, it would be a good start.
And we sure as hell need to start somewhere, and soon…
Cognitive dissonance is a term in psychology that describes a person’s thoughts & actions that are inconsistent or incompatible with their beliefs or values. A type of this condition is effort justification. A major example of this phenomenon is a human’s involvement in war. Killing the enemy requires a justification consistent with one’s believes & values. “For God & Country” has been a war cry by soldiers & their leaders for centuries. Or, “the only good — - — is a dead — - -.” However, in addition it helps if you can dehumanize the enemy. In WWII the Japanese & Germans were given a degrading name & cartoon characters depicting them as ugly brutish inhuman beasts. We weren’t killing people like us, but rabid animals. Plus, we don’t really have to distinguish between an army & civilians — they look alike, have the same religion, & obviously think alike. So, today since they’re all probably terrorists, they’re getting what they deserve. Also, today some put people of colour & immigrants in the same category. With the right justification one can avoid cognitive dissonance.