Equal Opportunity

 

Irony

 

Dehumanization

Published on The Lucifer Effect website:
http://www.lucifereffect.com/dehumanization.htm

At the core of evil is the process of dehumanization by which certain other people or collectives of them, are depicted as less than human, as non comparable in humanity or personal dignity to those who do the labeling. Prejudice employs negative stereotypes in images or verbally abusive terms to demean and degrade the objects of its narrow view of superiority over these allegedly inferior persons. Discrimination involves the actions taken against those others based on the beliefs and emotions generated by prejudiced perspectives.

Dehumanization is one of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil. Dehumanization is like a “cortical cataract” that clouds one’s thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. It makes some people come to see those others as enemies deserving of torment, torture, and even annihilation.

In this section, we will examine three forms that dehumanization has taken: Nazi Comic Books against the Jews; Faces of the Enemy—world-wide propaganda images of the “enemy,” and “trophy photos” of American citizens posing with African Americans who had been lynched or burned alive—and then portrayed in post cards mailed to family and friends.


Nazi Comic Books

Hitler’s “final solution” of genocide of all European Jews began by shaping the beliefs of school children through the reading of assigned texts in which Jews are portrayed in a series of increasingly negative scenarios. At the end of these lessons in civics or geography, we see the “reasonable” discriminatory actions that Germans should take toward Jews.

This educational propaganda was intentionally designed to create a dehumanized conception of Jews among students by means of providing them with required texts that were colorful and visually told provocative narratives. Students from primary school through High School read these books.

The originator of this idea was Julius Streicher, the editor of a weekly newspaper, Das Sturmer, “The Storm Troope,” that spread anti-Semitic propaganda to the general public in Germany. The “facts” presented in his newspaper (for adults, parents, and soon-to-be recruited Nazi SS perpetrators of destruction) were carried over into these school books. Streicher sought to create a perception of Jews as a sub-human race that was a threat to the national state of Germany. The idea was for this total indoctrination of these beliefs in the minds of the young and the old to such an extent that they came to have a conviction about the inferiority of Jews and the need to eliminate the threat they posed to the purity and superiority of the Aryan race.

The use of stereotyped conceptions of Jews as lecherous old men seducing young Aryan women, of dirty Jewish butchers, unscrupulous Jewish lawyers, hard-hearted Jewish landlords, rich Jewish business men and their wives ignoring the poverty around them, all combined to create a hate-filled image of Jews. In one of these comic books, after providing such “evidence” of the despicable nature of Jews, three conclusions are provided: kicking their children out of German schools, prohibiting them from using public facilities, like parks, and then expelling them from the country. Those “reasonable” consequences that Nazis should create for Jews foreshadows the more sinister ones of putting them all in ghettoes, then transporting them to concentration camps, and finally enacting the “final solution” of attempting mass genocide of the entire Jewish population.

Other comic books were in the guise of Geography lessons portraying different races of the world in the traditional stereotyped poses, and illustrating the dramatic comparison between handsome, strong Aryan men and weak, ugly fat Jewish men. Other images show Jews as vermin, as insects carried on the back of the devil.

Another aspect of the process of creating dehumanized images of Jews in the minds of the German populace was later in the process of their destruction to show pictures of their naked bodies, gaunt from starvation, sickness, and overwork in such ways that it was easy to dissociate them from the rest of humanity, to make them look sub human in ways that no other peoples have been.

My access to these Nazi comic books was provided by my colleague and friend, Professor John Steiner, who after having survived 3 years in Nazi concentration camps, started a long-term project of interviewing hundreds of his former tormentors.

In addition to simply viewing the images and probably listening to their teachers discussing and explaining them, the children were required to copy the text as practice in penmanship. It was yet another form of indoctrination.


Faces of The Enemy

What does it take for the citizens of one society to hate the citizens of another society to the degree that they want to segregate them, torment them, even to kill them? It requires a ‘hostile imagination,’ a psychological construction embedded deeply in their minds by propaganda that transforms those others into “The Enemy.” That image is a soldier’s most powerful motive, one that loads his rifle with ammunition of hate and fear. That image of a dreaded enemy threatening one’s personal well-being and the society’s national security emboldens mothers and fathers to send sons to war, and empowers governments to rearrange priorities to turn ploughshares into swords of destruction.


It is all done with words and images. To modify an old adage: Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can sometimes kill you. The process begins with stereotyped conceptions of the other, dehumanized perceptions of the other, the other as worthless, the other as all-powerful, the other as demonic, the other as an abstract monster, the other as a fundamental threat to our cherished values and beliefs. With public fear notched up and enemy threat imminent, reasonable people act irrationally, independent people act in mindless conformity, and peaceful people act as warriors. Dramatic visual images of the enemy on posters, television, magazine covers, movies, and the internet imprint on the recesses of the limbic system, the primitive brain, with the powerful emotions of fear and hate.

Social philosopher, Sam Keen, brilliantly depicts how this hostile imagination is created by virtually every nation’s propaganda on its path to war, and the transformative powers on the human psyche of these ‘images of the enemy.’ Justifications for the desire to destroy these threats are really afterthoughts, merely proposed explanations for the official record, but not for critical analysis of the damage to be done, or being done.

Postcard Photos of Lynchings

For over 100 years, many American citizens took “vigilante” actions against African Americans by lynching them or burning them alive, on various pretexts. It became common practice to record this violence by taking photos of the murdered men and women along with their murderers and observers. I call them “trophy photos” because they are similar in kind to those taken by big game hunters and fishermen, proudly posing with the dead beasts they had conquered. (I also use the same term for the photos of the abuse of the Abu Ghraib prisoners by the Military Police reserve soldiers.) Many of those posing in the photos were smiling young children. Some argue that the post card industry in America was stimulated by widespread sales of these lynching photos.

Visit Without Sanctuary, a collection of photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America. Here are a sample [warning: contains graphic violence] of those images.

A recent publication provides the documentation of these destructive dehumanized practices through copies of the actual postcards and photographs. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2004, Sante Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publishers) J. Allen, H. Als, J. Lewis,& L. Litwak, Eds. and commentators. See also Ralph Ginzberg’s 100 Years of Lynching. (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press.)

Advertising In Christian Magazines

Is it really necessary for magazines such as Sojourners, Christianity Today and others to have more advertising than content? Check out this discussion:

http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/2008/12/14/why-does-sojourners-magazine-have-more-advertising-then-content/#comments

Distributism

Any economic philosophy espoused by G.K. Chesterton can't be all bad. It seems to be an application of Jesus' command to "sell your possessions and give to the poor" and the early church model of Acts 4:

Below copied from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

Distributism, also known as distributionism and distributivism, is a third-way economic philosophy formulated by such Roman Catholic thinkers as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc to apply the principles of Catholic Social Teaching articulated by the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum[1] and more expansively explained by Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno[2] According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (socialism) or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals (capitalism). A summary of distributism is found in Chesterton's statement: "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."[3]

Essentially, distributism distinguishes itself by its distribution of property (not to be confused with redistribution of property carried out by socialism). Distributism holds that, while socialism allows no individuals to own productive property (it all being under state, community, or workers' control), and capitalism allows only a few to own it, distributism itself seeks to ensure that most people will become owners of productive property. As Hilaire Belloc stated, the distributive state (that is, the state which has implemented distributism) contains "an agglomeration of families of varying wealth, but by far the greater number of owners of the means of production."[4] This broader distribution does not extend to all property, but only to productive property; that is, that property which produces wealth, namely, the things needed for man to survive. It includes land, tools, etc.[5]

Distributism has often been described as a third way of economic order opposing both socialism and capitalism. However, some have seen it more as an aspiration, which has been successfully realised in the short term by commitment to the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity (these being built into financially independent local co-operatives and family owned, small businesses).

The Working Poor

I was asked on a survey about my experiences with the working poor. This was my response:

How much space do you have?

I have been working poor since 1997 when I quit my job and started living on donations. However, my children have never gone hungry, even one meal, nor have they had to sleep on the street. God has provided for us, and now even a house and our daily food, although we often eat food from dumpsters-- but not filthy food.

I have seen people who don't want to beg and so they look for cans to recycle. They may make 30 dollars a day for working five hours in independent recycling.

I know of some people who work for phone sales. They get hired in one place, work for a few weeks or months, get laid off and then they have to look for work again. They never get enough to get an apartment.

I know of others who are on disability at about 500 or so dollars a month. They try to work as often as they can, but their physical or mental disabilities don't allow them to work for long, so they soon have to quit or they get fired. Eventually they find another job.

People who live on the street all want to work. Everyone is looking for work to do. But they have mental or physical or social limitations that don't allow them to work as long as they would like. I know of some people who look for work, but then they have an attack from their mental illness, and they are unable to work for two days to a week after that. They can't hold down a job like that.

What people on the street and some folks on disability need is work that will be flexible with their situation. Work that will allow them to take off and who will help them to fill out the necessary paperwork. Not just a day labor place, but a social assistance project that gives people work as they are able to work so they can make more income than they currently get-- even if they don't have enough for an apartment.

Scriptures on the Responsibilities of Government

Here are the main passages that talk about the responsibilty of government for their citizens-- what they should focus on and what their rule is about. This is for all government officials, whether in a small town or the President of the U.S. A couple of them-- Deuteronomy 17 and Mark 10 are specifically for Judeo-Christian rulers, those who seek after God, but the rest apply to all government officials.

I'd love to send this to President-elect Barak Obama, or, heck, even the mayor of Gresham, OR, but I don't think they'd read it or think anything of it apart from one line summary their underlings gave them. But, for those who care, here it is:

Ecclesiastes 9:14-18
There was a small city with few men in it and a great king came to it, surrounded it and constructed large siegeworks against it. But there was found in it a poor wise man and he delivered the city by his wisdom. Yet no one remembered that poor man. So I said, "Wisdom is better than strength." But the wisdom of the poor man is despised and his words are not heeded. The words of the wise heard in quietness are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good.

Proverbs 31:4-9
It is not for kings, O Lemuel, It is not for kings to drink wine, Or for rulers to desire strong drink,
For they will drink and forget what is decreed, And pervert the rights of all the afflicted.
Open your mouth for the mute, For the rights of all the unfortunate.
Open your mouth, judge righteously, And defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.

Psalm 72:12-15
For the king will deliver the needy when he cries for help, The afflicted also, and him who has no helper.
He will have compassion on the poor and needy, And the lives of the needy he will save.
He will rescue their life from oppression and violence, And their blood will be precious in his sight;
So may he live, and may the gold of Sheba be given to him;
And let them pray for him continually; Let them bless him all day long.

Proverbs 29:14
If a king judges the poor with truth, His throne will be established forever.

Psalm 82:1-4
God takes His stand in His own congregation; He judges in the midst of the rulers.
How long will you judge unjustly And show partiality to the wicked?
Vindicate the weak and fatherless; Do justice to the afflicted and destitute.
Rescue the weak and needy; Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.

Daniel 4:24-34
This is the interpretation of your dream, O king, and this is the decree of the Most High, which has come upon my lord the king: that you be driven away from mankind and your dwelling place be with the beasts of the field, and you be given grass to eat like cattle and be drenched with the dew of heaven; and seven periods of time will pass over you, until you recognize that the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whomever He wishes. And in that it was commanded to leave the stump with the roots of the tree, your kingdom will be assured to you after you recognize that it is Heaven that rules. Therefore, O king, may my advice be pleasing to you: break away now from your sins by doing righteousness and from your iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, in case there may be a prolonging of your prosperity.'
All this happened to Nebuchadnezzar the king. Twelve months later he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon. The king reflected and said, 'Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?' While the word was in the king's mouth, a voice came from heaven, saying, 'King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is declared: sovereignty has been removed from you, and you will be driven away from mankind, and your dwelling place will be with the beasts of the field. You will be given grass to eat like cattle, and seven periods of time will pass over you until you recognize that the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whomever He wishes.' Immediately the word concerning Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled; and he was driven away from mankind and began eating grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair had grown like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws. But at the end of that period, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever; For His dominion is an everlasting dominion, And His kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, But He does according to His will in the host of heaven And among the inhabitants of earth; And no one can ward off His hand Or say to Him, 'What have You done?' At that time my reason returned to me.”

Deuteronomy 17:14-20
When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, and you possess it and live in it, and you say, 'I will set a king over me like all the nations who are around me,' you shall surely set a king over you whom the LORD your God chooses, one from among your countrymen you shall set as king over yourselves; you may not put a foreigner over yourselves who is not your countryman. Moreover, he shall not multiply horses for himself, nor shall he cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, since the LORD has said to you, 'You shall never again return that way.' He shall not multiply wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; nor shall he greatly increase silver and gold for himself. Now it shall come about when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests. It shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, by carefully observing all the words of this law and these statutes, that his heart may not be lifted up above his countrymen and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, to the right or the left, so that he and his sons may continue long in his kingdom in the midst of Israel.

Mark 10:42-45
Jesus said to them, "You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise authority over them. But it is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many."

Romans 13:3-4
For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil.

I Timothy 2:1-2
I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.

Gentrification and the Homeless

Gentrification doesn't have to mean kicking the homeless out of their outdoor homes, but it almost always does. After all, the name of the game is "beautification" and "improving the real estate value" and the homeless are unwitting enemies of those shining values.

When my apartment building in Rockwood was being "cleaned up" on the first day the new owner took ownership, he gave me and my family a thirty day notice, because the homeless people we had visiting us in our apartment (not sleeping around our apartment, mind you) wasn't good for the "work I am doing" as he put it.

The fact is, the homeless are seen as non-enitities, non-existant, or persona-non-gratia by property owners and developers. And those who work with or defend the homeless are simple nuisances.

What a wonderful day it will be when the poor of the world can kick the developers out of their homes for being compassionless!

Culture War: A Case Study

The Bovine Brouhaha

Found in "Mental Floss", here:
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20663


Grab a fork and a knife (and a rifle, if you’ve got one). First up on the menu is The Grattan Massacre, a bloody clash between American Indians and U.S. troops that played out in 1854 in the Nebraska Territory, just east of what is now Laramie, Wyoming.

If you thought Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was bad news, consider what the cow that wandered away from a Mormon pioneer train on the Oregon Trail started. The rabble-rousing bovine clomped its way into a camp inhabited by the Lakota Indians, one of seven tribes that made up the Great Sioux Nation. Not being ones to turn down a free lunch, the Lakota promptly killed the presumably abandoned cow and ate it.

That might not seem like a big deal, but in the mid-1800s, few peace pipes were being passed between American Indians and new settlers. So, when the cattle owner realized the fate his cow had met, he immediately went to tattle his tale at the Territory’s nearest outpost of officialdom, Fort Laramie. In response to the incident, U.S. officials dispatched an eager young second lieutenant and recent West Point graduate named John L. Grattan to bring the cow thieves to justice.

What happened next underscores the downside of history’s insistence on naming events only after they happen. Had John L. Grattan known he was riding off to The Grattan Massacre, it seems likely he might have conducted himself more civilly with the Sioux. Instead, Grattan’s approach would later prompt a fellow Fort Laramie officer to comment, “There is no doubt that Lt. Grattan left this post with a desire to have a fight with the Indians, and that he had determined to take the man at all hazards.”
With nearly 30 men in tow, Grattan met with the Brule Lakota chief, Conquering Bear, and demanded the surrender of the guilty parties. By most accounts, Conquering Bear was open and reasonable during the negotiations, and it was Grattan’s behavior that escalated tensions. At some point, Conquering Bear stood up, and nervous U.S. soldiers—thinking the chief was making a move—opened fire, killing Bear and his brother. Warfare quickly broke out on both sides, and Grattan’s entire party perished.

When news of the event reached the U.S. War Department, officials sought swift revenge on the Sioux. A little more than a year after the Grattan Massacre, on September 3, 1855, General William S. Harney and roughly 600 soldiers caught up with the Lakota tribe. Harney ordered his men to open fire, and nearly 100 Lakota men, women, and children were shot dead in what became known as the Battle of Ash Hollow. (Apparently, 30 Army men being killed equals a massacre, while 100 Sioux being killed equals a battle. Ain’t history grand?)