It’s become quite fashionable in certain circles to inveigh against well…you know…
them.
I mean those hook-nosed, black-haired, filthy-rich, conniving nonChristians with the funny dietary laws who are conspiring against all that is right in just in our society.
Oh come on, you
know…them! The swarthy types who want to take over the world, rape our blonde women, kill our children, and steal our stuff. Those
others.
The Moslems.
The language of dehumanization never really changes. There might be some minor adjustments as societies and targets shift, but it’s striking to observe the common threads visible, whether you’re discussing the anti-Semitic writings of Julius Streicher, the racist novels of Thomas Dixon Jr., or Ann Coulter’s latest bigoted screed. The language doesn’t change because the purpose doesn’t change. Its intent is paint a grotesque caricature of THE OTHER that, through sheer repetition, overlays reality in the minds of the audience
We’ve been hearing the language a lot lately, and confined to those dark corners of society where it always exists, the trailer parks, compounds and bunkers where Klan and Nazi leaflets are passed around. Take a look at the rhetoric and imagery that are being offered up, not in clandestine meetings around burning crosses in the piney woods, but in bestselling books, on nationally televised news outlets and by nationally known media personalities, and the parallels between what they are saying and what other haters have said in the past are undeniable.
This piece is intended as a sort of primer, a step-by-step examination of how the language of hatred works -- and what it is for.
An important aspect of singling out THE OTHER is to invoke reflexive revulsion. One begins by defining the target group as unclean to the point of foul smelling. Observe the passages offered below:
By their very exterior you could tell they were no lovers of water, and to your distress you also knew it with your eyes closed. Adolph Hitler “How I Became an Anti-Semite”
At night when they'd detail me to help the ambulance corps carry off the dead and the wounded, there was a strange smell on the field that came from the blood and night damp and burnt powder. It always smelled like a nigger to me! It made me sick. Yes, Preacher, God forgive me, I hate 'em! I can't help it any more than I can the color of my skin or my hair.
From Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS
…Or is NATO -- like the conventions of civilized behavior, personal hygiene and grooming -- inapplicable when Muslims are involved?
Ann Coulter 2/15/2006 “Muslim Bites Dog”
This tactic is effective on a primal level, but can only go so far. After all, while “they stink” may be the sum total of one’s argument, relying on it isn’t going to convince those who notice that most if not all of the Jews/blacks/Moslems, etc. they meet do not, in fact, smell bad. So the evil of the Jew, the African American, the Moslem, etc. must be presented as a sort of taint that can never be washed away, a tragic, permanent, insidious state that renders an individual suspect no matter how clean, presentable, and “normal” he or she appears to be. Once THE OTHER always THE OTHER is another common theme in the language of dehumanization:
If a Jew comes along Wanting a priest to baptize him, Be on your guard and beware; Jew remains always Jew!
From Julius Streicher’s children's book, THE POISONED TOADSTOOL
Even liberals can see that in the pictures from New Orleans, because Jew-deluded American Whites haven’t just tried to build a nation on sand, they’ve used the worst possible kind of sand – the black kind. They’ve ignored this simple but compelling truth: You can take niggers out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of niggers, and given the slightest opportunity it will rise to the surface in all its snarling, spitting fury.
From a white supremacist website
LEE RODGERS: If your father is a Muslim, you're a Muslim, and as far as Islamic law is concerned, you are a Muslim forevermore.
OFFICER VIC: And there's no getting out.
LEE RODGERS: And Islamic law says: "You try to get out, any Muslim has not only the right but the duty to kill you."
KSFO talk radio 1/27/07
And “education,” of course, does absolutely no good. It can even be a detriment if the education is in THE OTHER’S religion:
Solly is delighted with the rabbi's praise. Solly says: "In the Talmud it is written: Only the Jew is human. The Gentile peoples are not called people, rather they are named animals.
Furthermore, in the Book of Sirach it says:
Terrify all the nations, 0 Judah! Lift up your hands against the Gentiles! Incite the wrath of the Gentiles against each other and pour out anger! Shatter the princes who are enemies to the Jews."
"Enough!" interrupts the rabbi. He comes up to Solly and shakes his hand. Then he says:
"You are a fine Talmud student. You will become a real Jew.”
Jules Streicher, THE POISONED TOADSTOOL
Even you are still labouring under the delusions of 'Reconstruction.' The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, or the leopard his spots… Your scheme of education is humbug. You don't believe that any amount of education can fit a negro to rule an Anglo-Saxon, or to marry his daughter…The more you educate, the more impossible you make his position in a democracy. Education! Can you change the colour of his skin, the kink of his hair, the bulge of his lips, the spread of his nose, or the beat of his heart, with a spelling book? The Negro is the human donkey. You can train him, but you can't make of him a horse. …
From Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel, THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS
He went to a Muslim school, a madrassa they call it, funded -- those things are funded by Saudi Arabia. It's basically a school for terrorists, now this particular one was in Indonesia. He was there for four years, I understand. I don't know what kind of indoctrination process went on there. He was quite young at the time, but he doesn't seem to be, so far, very eager to talk about it.
Lee Rodgers on rumors that Barak Obama attended a “Madrassa” or Muslim school when he was six. 1/23/07 KSFO
Then, off course, there’s that sturdy old chestnut, “These people have no culture anyway.” THE OTHER is portrayed as incapable of building a society or contributing to it:
That does not build a Jewish community, for that would be a positive trait. Quite the opposite. One must see how the Jew cheats, exploits and tortures his blood comrades when he is placed in power over them. There is no worse traitor to his own blood than the Jew. I myself have seen how Jewish overlords misuse their Jewish comrades and exploit them to death.”
Third Reich writer Robert Ley, "Pesthauch der Welt"
The African has held one fourth of this globe for 3000 years. He has never taken one step in progress or rescued one jungle from the ape and the adder, except as the slave of a superior race. In Hayti and San Domingo he rose in servile insurrection and butchered fifty thousand white men, women and children a hundred years ago. He has ruled these beautiful islands since. Did he make progress with the example of Aryan civilisation before him? No. But yesterday we received reports of the discovery of cannibalism in Hayti. Thomas S. Dixon, THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS
There are many Arab countries, but there is hardly an Arab nation-state…here is no Lebanese nation...there is no Iraqi nation....Not that Kuwait or Saudi Arabia is a nation either…The problem with Saudi Arabia is that there are no Saudi Arabians. Most of its people live in remote mountains by the rules of their clan or of their tribe; they don't even know what a nation is."
Marty Peretz, on The New Republic's Blog, "The Plank," 1990
This kind of hatred is typically referred to as “dehumanization” because it denies its targets the traits we associate with being human – cleanliness, empathy, the ability to build a community… One way of sidling even further into the “they’re not human” mindset is to talk about the “problem” they pose in the manner one would discuss animal populations. Thus, that other cliché in the language of hatred: “They’re out-breeding us!”
If present trends continue, by the end of the century Germany will be a nation with only 40-50 million inhabitants, and we know that on our borders other peoples are growing quickly and strongly. Sooner or later, these other peoples will come in conflict with a shrinking and dying German people, and the result of the supposed doctrine of happiness will be a hard and bitter national death for our children.
Dr. Groß, "Nationalsozialistische Rassenpolitik. Eine Rede an die deutschen Frauen (Dessau, C. Dünnhaupt, 1934)
The Negro birth rate is almost twice as high as that of the Whites. There is no White population explosion in America, or anywhere in the world. It is all colored. The colored woman has the children; the White women are on the pill or have abortions.
Ray Smith “The Black Man’s Gift to Portugal” on the Stormfront Website
Because we see what is happening in Europe. Russia is a good example. When people stop having babies because they are inconvenient, populations cease being self-sustaining, end up filling population gaps with immigrants who then make demands on the culture the homies might not like, such as demands for Sharia law in some parts of Europe.
John Gibson, Fox News, 5/18/06
Merely having more children is not going to suffice against so dangerous and powerful a force as THE OTHER. Having established that they cannot be trusted to be truly clean, or to interact with other human beings as human beings in a society typically interact, or to understand the same impulses that drive other human beings in a community, the next question to be answered is, “what do we do?”
The answer frequently is “Harden your heart.” THE OTHER must be seen as so dangerous, so deceitful that most if not all individuals who make up its whole are “guilty,” whether it’s through ties of blood or by simply being at home (or in a vehicle on the road out of the area being attacked) during a bombardment. The crimes of THE OTHER must be portrayed as so heinous that the crimes committed against them are forgivable. On the whole, there are no innocent OTHERS, but if one does grudgingly concede some measure of innocence, Dr. Dershowitz’s modified version of Orwell’s famous line from his satiric novel ANIMAL FARM – “some animals are more equal than others” -- should be kept in mind. Remember, a teenage girl deliberately killed by THE OTHER’S bomb is an atrocity that exposes the vicious inhumanity of the bombers and warrants a raw-throated roar of anguish and rage. A teenage girl deliberately killed by our bomb is a pity (why didn’t she get out of the way?) that should elicit little more than a dignified moue of regret that such tactics are necessary.
When Mr. Bramsig or Mrs. Knöterich feel pity for an old woman wearing the Jewish star, they should also remember that a distant nephew of this old woman by the name of Nathan Kaufmann sits in New York and has prepared a plan by which all Germans under the age of 60 will be sterilized. They should recall that a son of her distant uncle is a warmonger named Baruch or Morgenthau or Untermayer who stands behind Mr. Roosevelt, driving him to war, and that if they succeed, a fine but ignorant U.S. soldier may one day shoot dead the only son of Mr. Bramsig or Mrs. Knöterich. It will all be for the benefit of Jewry, to which this old woman also belongs, no matter how fragile and pitiable she may seem…One of the most effective defenses is an unforgiving, cold hardness against the destroyers of our people, against the instigators of the war, against those who would benefit if we lose, and therefore also against the victims, if we win.
From a speech by Josef Goebbels
Keep the facts in mind…the people of Georgia are orderly and conservative, the descendants of ancestors who have been trained in America for 150 years. There is among them no foreign or lawless element…When the picture is painted of the ravisher in flames, go back and view that darker picture of Mrs. Cranford outraged in the blood of her murdered husband. Excerpt from an Atlanta Newspaper account of a black lynching victim, accused of and murdering a man named Cranford and raping Cranford’s wife. The lynch mob stripped the accused man of his clothes, saturated him with oil, cut off his fingers, ears, and genitals, and skinned his face before burning him alive.
But just who is a “civilian” in the age of terrorism, when militants don’t wear uniforms, don’t belong to regular armies and easily blend into civilian populations? We need a new vocabulary to reflect the realities of modern warfare. A new phrase should be introduced into the reporting and analysis of current events in the Middle East: “the continuum of civilianality,… The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. … it would be informative to learn how many of the “civilian casualties” fall closer to the line of complicity and how many fall closer to the line of innocence.
Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others
Allan Dershowitz, LA Times, 8/22/06
So since there is no point differentiating between “innocent” Jews, black or Moslems and the guilty majority, the next step is to identify and either segregate or closely watch all members of that group. Not everyone can be trusted, after all, to read the tell-tale signs that obviously mark out THE OTHER to the well-informed citizen. This is frequently described in terms of social hygiene, not of targeting human beings, but battling filth, vermin, infection, or insanity, of quarantining a dangerous contagion.
One of these measures is the institution of the yellow star that each Jew must wear… It is a remarkably humane measure on our part, a hygienic and prophylactic measure to be sure that the Jew cannot infiltrate our ranks unseen to sow discord.
Josef Goebbels
The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop is its center of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment. Mrs. Frances Willard, Head of the WCTU, in THE VOICE, October 1890
DAVID ASMAN: Should we single out Muslim immigrants for special scrutiny to protect Americans and our markets?
JIM MICHAELS, Editorial Vice President, Forbes Magazine : Yep. … the fact is Muslim society throughout the world is infected with Islamofascism.... …They (the terrorists who attacked the British subway system) were British citizens, most of them. They were second generation. They were people who brought the infection with them.
From an exchange on FORBES ON FOX 8/19/06
The alert reader will notice the manner in which these quotes swirl around a central, mostly unspoken point. Frequently the language of hatred is oblique, consisting of justifications for an assumption that the writer or speaker trusts an audience to understand without going through the sordid process of actually stating it outright. Its purpose is to convince listeners and readers to either treat THE OTHER as less than human, or to countenance such treatment, treatment that can include exclusion, internment, torture, murder, or even outright extermination.
Every now and then, of course, this need to not just insult, but physically attack THE OTHER through either legal or extralegal means, must be stated directly. In a society where the language of hatred has become more and more mainstreamed, the ability of such statements to shock or outrage steadily diminishes. The language of extermination is increasingly accepted as a normal part of political discourse, whether stated directly our couched in long winded, pseudo-scholarly terms:
The Jewish people is the people of the Devil. It is a people of criminals and murderers. The Jewish people must be exterminated from the face of the earth.
Die Geheimpläne gegen Deutschland enthüllt," Der Stürmer, 1933
As Americans, we must either soon recognize and accept the fact that, with reference to the word at large, Providence has ordained the sole and universal ascendancy of what men, and, at the same time, made equitable provision for the extinction of all the black and copper-colored races, or else we ourselves, as delinquent offshoots o the Caucasion type, are absolutely certain to be expunged from the earth, and will deserve to be so expunged, for our willful blindness and disobedience.
Hunton R. Helper, Nojoque: A Question for a Continent, 1867
DON IMUS, host: They're
eating dirt and that fat pig wife of his is living in Paris.
ROSENBERG: They're all brainwashed, though. That's what it is. And they're stupid to begin with, but they're brainwashed now. Stinking animals. They ought to drop the bomb right there, kill 'em all right now.
Imus in the Morning, 11/12/04And of course, whatever happens in the future will be the responsibility of THE OTHER rather than those who actually perpetrate crimes against THE OTHER. The typical stance is that of a normally peace-loving people who have pushed to the limits of their patience and now are forced to act, however reluctantly:
If the Jew wants to fight, it is fine with us. We have wanted that fight for a long time. There is no room in the world for the Jews any more. The Jew or us, one of us will have to go. We know that the Jew will lose, that he and his devilish, life-denying and destructive doctrines will be destroyed.
Robert Ley
Those involved might have gone too far, but they are white men and Crawford was black. The black must submit to the white or the white will destroy him… inevitable and racially justifiable his own reckless course due to chest inflation from wealth…It will never do to convict white men for the act, for we will have more negroes to kill becaue of it. It must be not guilty on all counts.
1916 editorial from the ABBEVILLE SCIMITAR (Louisiana) on the lynching of Anthony Crawford, a well-to-do black plantation owner who, after a quarrel with a white store-owner, was seized by a mob, hung up in a pine tree and “Shot to Pieces.”
Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation…You keep screwing around with stuff like this, we're going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you.
Lee Rodgers, 10/25/06, KSFO Radio
Unfortunately, there are always people who just don’t understand the need for hardness in such a war, and here is where even further blurring of the line between the “innocent” and the “guilty” take place. Anyone who refuses to join in the war against THE OTHER is considered to be in league with THE OTHER and ultimately must be treated as THE OTHER. The language used against these “traitors” becomes indistinguishable from the language used against THE OTHER. The concept of THE OTHER is thus expanded to include not only members of the target group, but all who refuse to join in the war against THE OTHER.
If someone wears the Jewish star, he is an enemy of the people. Anyone who deals with him is the same as a Jew and must be treated accordingly. He earns the contempt of the entire people, for he is a craven coward who leaves them in the lurch to stand by the enemy.
Josef Goebbels 1941
On this spot a few years ago a white man was found who had been tarred and feathered because he preached social equality to Negroes. If you are a reckless Negro or a White man who believes in social equality, be advised Dade county don’t need you.
From a monument that appeared on a sidewalk in Miami, Florida, 1925. Reported by the Miami Herald.
We do detest you, we despise you and we hold you in complete and utter contempt…The day will come, the day will come when unpleasant things are going to happen to a bunch of stupid liberals, it’s going to be amusing to watch, very amusing to watch.
Lee Rodgers, KSFO radio, 6/30/06
The cumulative effect of all this is a sort of inoculation against empathy or fellow feeling, the widespread belief that THE OTHER stands so far outside of what is human that they are undeserving of humane treatment, or even the common decency typically extended to all fellow humans. Extending common decency is dismissed as irrational weakness, softness. This effect on certain individuals was neatly summed up by a posting on Lucianne.com shortly after the death of liberal Senator Paul Wellstone in a plane crash in 2002. “Should I feel guilty because I’m glad he’s dead? If I feel like liberal democrats are American traitors, isn’t that a logical response?”
Thus, the person repeatedly exposed to the language of hatred does not see acts of violence against THE OTHER the way those not exposed to such language sees it. The person who has repeatedly heard THE OTHER described as stinking, brutal, animals/infections/cancers/vermin can see,
NOT
BUT INSTEAD
NOT
BUT INSTEAD
NOT
BUT INSTEAD...I'm sure you get the idea.
Take a good hard look at these pictures. Note the differences between the nasty reality of the man kneeling beside the mass grave and the fantasy of the strong Aryan confronting the fat Jew, the reality of the children smirking at a black man who’s just been hanged, and the fantasy of the noble Klansmen seizing the black rapist. That’s what it’s all about.
The language of dehumanization has only one aim, and when it begins to leak out into mainstream discourse from the dank little crevices and holes, the klaverns, bunds, and terrorist cells where it typically lurks, anyone who has a conscience needs to pay attention and be concerned.
It’s the sound of a society talking itself into doing something atrocious.
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