How Some Human Beings Are Dehumanized to Kill a Large Number of Fellow Human Beings, and How This Impacts Them

Gaza 6
Victims of the massacre in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza. Omar AshtawyAPA images

It is an essential part of being human beings that people have at least some compassion towards fellow human beings and they hesitate when they have to harm others in serious ways (expect when this is essential for self-defence). Despite this, an extremely sad aspect of history is that ordinary men have been asked, and in fact trained, to kill innocent human beings in large numbers. This training inevitably involves dehumanization, or depriving human beings of something essential to humanity, depriving them of the presence of compassion and ethical consciousness in them.

          Unfortunately, although humanity is supposed to be ‘progressing’ and the period of the last hundred years has been regarded by many people as the period of the maximum ‘progress’, the last century has also seen some of the worst mass murders and genocides of entirely innocent persons, facilitated by the increasing destructiveness of technology available for this purpose.

          Those who carry out and facilitate these mass murders and genocides do not have special monster teeth and claws, in real life they outwardly appear as normal persons (at least one mass murderer has even received the Nobel Peace Prize – the number of victims related to his decisions and policies is certainly in excess of one million!)

          Persons and societies who try to inflict cruelties on others generally try to distance themselves from the suffering they cause. Historian Raul Hillberg has written in the context of the holocaust,

          “It must be kept in mind that most of the participants (of the holocaust) did not fire rifles at Jewish children or pour gas into gas chambers… Most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, talked on telephone, and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desk.”

          Elaborating this theme further, Ravi Sundaram has written in his review article on Zygmunt Bauman’s book ‘Modernity and the Holocaust’. (Economic and Political Weekly, February 29, 1992).

          “The emergence of a complex division of labour under modern capitalism has meant that functional specialisation generates necessary remoteness of human agents from the end-product of their social action. In this context, the bureaucrat’s own action becomes an end in itself. Once so isolated from the consequences of action, the bureaucrat, untroubled by moral dilemmas, can pursue his allocated tasks.

          “The architects of the holocaust, the bombers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the technocrats who designed the Vietnam War, could continue doing so without moral qualms precisely because of the social production of distance in modernity. This aspect is crucial in understanding technological evolution of the holocaust. In the early history of the holocaust, the victims were rounded up and machine-gunned at point-blank range. The administrator soon found this both primitive and inefficient and damaging to the soldier’s morale. Other techniques were sought which would preserve the optical distance between the murderer and the murdered. The result – the gas chamber, the perfect murdering machine. This reduced the role of the killer to that of the ‘sanitation officer’ who simply pressed the button which released the gas into the chamber filled with the hapless victims.”

          Speaking of their experience of two earlier wars, the veterans of the US armed forces said in a statement just before the Iraq invasion of 2003, “In the last Gulf War, as troops, we were ordered to murder from a safe distance. We destroyed much of Iraq from the air, killing hundreds of thousands, including civilians. We    remember the road to Basra – The Highway to Death – where we were ordered to kill fleeing Iraqis. We bulldozed trenches, burying people alive. The use of depleted     uranium weapons left the battlefields radioactive. Massive use of pesticides, experimental drugs, burning chemical weapons depots and oil fires combined to create a toxic cocktail affecting both the Iraqi people and Gulf War veterans today. One in four Gulf War veterans is disabled.

          “During the Vietnam War we were ordered to destroy Vietnam from the air and on the ground. At My Lai we massacred over 500 women, children and old men. This was not an aberration, it’s how we fought the war. We used Agent Orange on the enemy and then experienced first-hand its effects. We know what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder looks, feels and tastes like because the ghosts of over two million men, women and children still haunt our dreams. More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in battle.”

          It is evident from this statement of war veterans, who have seen and experienced present day military invasions more than anyone else, that –

l    So dangerous are present day weapons that even the winning side of a one-sided war is likely to suffer heavy physical damage.

l    Even in one-sided wars, soldiers of the stronger side are habitually asked by superiors to inflict massive unbearable cruelty and kill without any need for killing.

l    All this cruelty is of course terrible for the victims but it also leaves permanent scars on the victors, on soldiers who are forced to inflict these cruelties.

          This last aspect, frequently ignored, is very important for understanding the enormous costs of war also for the victors. As the veterans of US armed forces have clearly said of the Vietnam experience, “More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in battle.”

          The parents of many American soldiers going to war are aware of these risks, as is evident in several statements released by the organisation ‘Military Families Speak Out.’ One parent Stephen Cleghorn said, “If we go to war in Iraq, the loss of innocent civilian lives will be high and horrific … The soldiers in the area will know what they have done. They will see it with their own eyes or they will see it in the eyes of their fellow soldiers.” Nacy Lessin and Charley Richardson have said about their son, “We don’t want him to be wounded or die. We don’t want him to be forced to wound or kill innocent Iraqi civilians. That would kill a part of him – and a part of us.”

          This then, is the invisible cost of war. Reader’s Digest has described the suffering of a child, Kim Phuc at the time of bombing of Trang Bang (Vietnam) by US planes (R.D. November 1997),

          “The bombs, canisters filled with napalm, had smashed into ground behind Kim and instantly ignited. The jellified gasoline, designed to stick to and incinerate anything it touches, splashed onto Kim’s back. Her flowered cotton shirt and pants – even her sandal – combusted. She was engulfed in a cloud of smoke and fire as napalm peeled away the skin from her back and left arm. Terrified, Kim kept running. At first she could feel nothing. Then she felt as if she had been thrown onto an open fire. In horror she saw the skin drop off her arm like clothes off a doll. As she ran naked down the road that led out of the village, she began screaming, “Too hot! Too hot! Please help!”

          This magazine also noted the impact of this suffering on the sensitive mind of the pilot who caused this suffering: “Now he stared at the picture of Kim Phuc, her agony caught for eternity. His own son Louis was about the same age. He could almost smell the child’s burning flesh.

          … Later he kept his role in the bombing of Trang Bang secret, locked deep within his soul. It surfaced in the form of a nightmare. First Plummer would see a      picture of Kim, with arms outstretched and mouth frozen in a silent scream. Then the image would widen to include Kim’s brother and cousins running alongside her. Finally, he would hear their screams, louder and louder until he felt surrounded by the accusing children. To drown his guilt, Plummer began drinking heavily. In July 1973 he married for the second time, but he still kept his secret. No one can understand, he thought. John Plummer’s drinking cost him his marriage in 1979. It was a vicious circle; he drank to put the bombing out of his mind, but the drinking made him more obsessed.”

          Apart from tormenting the sensitive mind forever, war – time cruelties can also have a somewhat different impact. In order to come to terms with the cruelties inflicted by them, some soldiers deliberately train their minds to become very insensitive to human suffering.  This insensitivity later enters into their close personal relationships and can destroy them. There have been reports of domestic violence being much higher in the families of soldiers returning from wars which involved a lot of violence against innocent civilians.

          Hence the dehumanization that is required to train some persons for agreeing to kill a large number of innocent people does not end with this these killings and can later destroy their own life–and of their near and dear ones– due to longer-term serious impacts.


         It should be widely emphasized that any large-scale killing of innocent persons—and these continue to take place even today the most obvious example being that of the genocide in Gaza—is perhaps the most tragic, distressing and unjust aspects of our world and its history. The most well thought out, strongest and sustained efforts need to be made to ensure that such violence never takes place.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071.  

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