Describing human beings as rats or cockroaches is a symptom of something more powerful and more dangerous - something that's vitally importang for us to understand. It reflects how one thinks about them, and thinking of a person as subhuman isn't the same as calling them names. Calling people names is an effort to hurt or humiliate them. It's the use of language as a weapon. But dehumanizing a person involves judging them to be less than human. It's intended as a description rather than as an attack, and as such is a departure from reality - a form of self-deception.
(...) We are all potential dehumanizers, just as we are all potential objects of dehumanization.
The uneasy relationship between the economic attractions of slavery and the Enlightenmen vision of human dignity was a long-standing one, and for those torn between the demands of conscience and the seductions of self-interst, there was a way out of the dilemma. They could deny that African slaves were human, and in this way they could square the moral circle.
Thinking sets the agenda for action, and thinking of humans as less than human paves the way for atrocity. The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. they 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 the others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats.
(...) Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites.
What about the Americans and their English-speaking allies? We were the good guys, weren't we? Allied personnel also dehumanized their enemies (as one soldier wrote in a letter home, "It is very wrong to kill people, but a damn Nazi is not human, he is more like a dog") but on the whole dehumanized the Germans less than they did the Japanese. Germans, after all, were fellow Anglo-Saxons - strapping blue-eyed boys who might just as well have grown up on farms in Oklahoma. But the Japanese were another story. A poll of U.S. servicemen indicated that 44 percent would like to kill a Japanese soldier while only 6 percent felt the same way about Germans.
The "Japs" were considered animals, and were often portrayed as monkeys, apes, or rodents, and sometimes as insects (...).
It's all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it's tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What's most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It's that they were ordinary human beings.
Like their German allies, the Japanese believed that they were the highest form of human life, and considered their enemies inferior at best and subhuman at worst. American and British leaders were depicted with horns sprouting from their temples, and sporting tails, claws, or fangs. The Japanese labeled their enemies as demons (oni), devils (kichiku), evil spirits (akki and akuma), monsters (kaibutsu), and "hairy, twisted-nosed savages". Americans were Mei-ri-ken, a double entendre translated as "misguided dog".
(...) We called the Chines 'chancorro' ... that meant below human, like bugs or animals. ... The Chinese didn't belong to the human race. That was the way we looked at it.
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- Livingstone Smith, D. (2011). Less Than Human. Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin's Press (excerpts)
- photograph by Roy DeCarava (Boy Playing, Man Walking, 1966) via
