Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

War is expensive, in human life, environmental degradation, and in its destruction of human values. Nevertheless, most nations do not hesitate to spend what they believe is necessary to either defend their territory or conquer that of another nation. In every case, ‘the other’ is defined as less than human. Costa Rica is the exception; it has no army.

Hitler ran through the wealth, resources, and people of Germany in his quest to conquer the world in the name of his
imaginary ‘master race.’ Dehumanization, fear, and hatred were the essential psychological weapons of his war and that of so many others. For Hitler, the source of all evil and the greatest threat to the ascension of his vision of Germanic victory was the Jewish people—civilians just trying to live normal lives. All fascists require a scapegoat, and they target the weakest groups as the greatest threat—usually defined in racist terms.

Putin has tried to define the Ukrainian nation and people as simply non-existent in order to overrun and annihilate hem. He accuses the Ukrainian people of being Nazis and he consciously targets objects of Ukrainian heritage for destruction in order to annihilate the Ukrainian culture, which he denies exists. Every fascist has an excuse for his inhumanity—hmmm, nearly every one of them a male. Netanyahu—supported by Israel’s allies who take the absolute position that Israel can do no wrong—endlessly invokes Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ as the pretext for his efforts to destroy the Palestinian people, all of whom he defines as terrorists. Some are, of course, as are some ‘settlers’ and IDF fighters. However, as with every people, most just want to live in peace. Indiscriminate bombing and shooting 40,000 innocent civilians and refugees cannot be justified as ‘defending’ one’s nation.

I cannot avoid the analogy between the so-called ‘settlers,’ supported by the military power of the IDF, illegally driving out native residents of the West Bank, and the ‘settlers’ of the American West. These farmers and ranchers took over native lands with the assistance of the U.S. Army via massacres and removal of ‘First Nations’ peoples from their homes, forcing them into ‘reservations.’ When a group ‘settles’ an ‘uninhabited’ area, the people who live there are implicitly, and often explicitly, defined as less than human.

All is Fair in Hate and War

In each of these and many other cases, the propaganda of autocratic leaders, brings many of the people along on a genocidal journey by instilling enough fear and hatred of ‘the other‘ to keep them in line and recruit many to execute terror on ‘the enemy’ people, and not just in military combat. In Stanley Milgram’s (1963) classic study of obedience to authority, his students’ behavior quickly grew more aggressive when acting as ‘guards’ in a simulated-prison experiment. That experiment demonstrated how easy it is under certain conditions for the dehumanization process to become contagious, especially when legitimated by authority figures. Evidence of contagion in the process of dehumanization can be found in almost every war.

War is always justified—in the eye of both the aggressor and in the eye of the victim plotting retaliation. Of course, in many cases both sides are aggressors, and victims as well. And the other side always started it. The territory of the other is always claimed as one’s own. For Putin, there is no such thing as Ukraine. For Netanyahu and his theocratic fascist gang, the Palestinian people are not human; every last man, woman and child is inherently a terrorist and ought to be expelled or killed. One of Netanyahu’s cronies even said publicly that it may be justified to starve the entire population of Gaza to death. In most cases, a nation’s leaders are the primary cause of death and destruction; their propaganda drags their people along in contagious compliance.

War Itself is Terrorism

Never mind the Geneva Conventions for the conduct of war; nobody abides by them or enforces them anyway. That is a hard statement to make. But ruled for the conduct of mass murder seem self-contradictory. The International Court of Justice can garner all the facts it can and declare both Hamas and Israeli leaders as war criminals—and by any definition of a crime of mass murder, they are. None of that, however, changes the facts of assassination, sexual abuse, and torture of ordinary people. The vortex of mutual evil accelerates by its own contagious force.

It is All About Dehumanization

The Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the lynching of Black folks in America, the global colonial slave trade, the “winning of the American West,” the torture that characterized Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and many other examples of organized brutality have one thing in common: dehumanization.

That may be easy to say, and rather obvious in terms of historical fact. But it is so important that we understand these
examples and those closer to home in real-world terms, in terms of the actual personal experience of brutality, both physical and psychological, exacted upon some humans by others.

I once knew a professional assassin, whose work was sanctioned by the government and private entities for whom he worked—he enjoyed and took pride in his work. The victim of childhood abuse, brutality had become part of his personality. His risk-taking bordered on a death wish. Dehumanization is what enables such inhumane treatment of ‘the other’ (and even sometimes the self) while blindly maintaining a personal sense of righteousness and necessity.

 Humans are capable of great acts of intellect, art, technical achievement, empathy and compassion. We are also fully capable of brutal acts of denigration, torture, abuse of all kinds, and crimes against humanity. Only the circumstances, the
forces around us, and the strength of our moral compass—if we have one, some apparently do not—determine whether our behavior is grounded in authoritarian dehumanization or compassionate care.

The current surge of American white nationalism and neo-fascist authoritarianism, which would purge any knowledge
of the violence of our racist history from the education system and from the culture itself, is a very bad sign. Acknowledgement of the menace of dehumanization is exactly what we need now, not its opposite: book banning, voter suppression, political violence, and denial of reality.