David Livingstone Smith Quotes

In a typically grandiose description of the military exploits of Pharaoh Amenemhet I, who ruled Egypt from 1985 to 1956 BCE, the enemies of Egypt are represented as nonhuman predators. "I subdued lions, I captured crocodiles," he boasted. "I repressed those of Wawat, I captured the Medjai, I made the Asiatics do the dog walk.

Social psychologists confirm that we are likely to perceive people outside our own community as more alike than those within it. We perceive members of our own group as individuals, but see other groups as more or less homogenous (psychologists call this the "outgroup homogeneity bias").

Like it or not, war is distinctively human. Apart from the raiding behavior of chimpanzees and the so-called wars prosecuted by certain species of ant, there is nothing in nature that comes anywhere near approximating it.

Before dehumanizing a population, we set them apart as a "race." That is, a variety of people who are fundamentally different from "us." The folk notion of race is very much an artificial construction.

Unlike these verses from the Koran, references to dehumanization in the hadith compiled two or three centuries later have a distinctly anti-Jewish flavor. They describe how a group of Israelites were transformed into rats, how unbelievers are turned into monkeys and pigs, and how Abraham's father was transformed into an animal and hurled into the raging fires of hell.

Slavery is as old as civilization, and has been practiced all over the world. It was ubiquitous in antiquity, and is taken for granted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (you may recall that Paul enjoined slaves to obey their masters "in fear and trembling" as they would Christ),

The history of humanity is, to a very great extent, a history of violence.

The disconcertingly fecal image of Moroccans as "undifferentiated brown stuff" has a counterpart in imagery used more recently in discussions of illegal immigration from Latin America to the United States, a country alleged to be "awash under a brown tide" of Mexican immigrants (as almost a century earlier, the American anti-immigrationist Lothrop Stoddard had warned that white America was soon to be swamped by a "rising tide of color"). The significance of the expression "brown tide" may not be obvious to all readers. The term refers to an algae infestation specific to the Gulf of Mexico that turns seawater brown.

Dehumanization isn't a way of talking. It's a way of thinking - a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.

We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. Hence … in poetry … trees, mountains, and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.

Michael Savage (the pseudonym of Michael Alan Weiner) is another popular radio host whose syndicated radio program is followed by 8 to 10 million listeners. Like Limbaugh, Savage derided the detainees as "subhuman" and "vermin," and suggested that forcible conversion to Christianity is "probably the only thing that can turn them into human beings.

Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren't lying around waiting to be discovered. They're made, not found.

Early Muslim references to dehumanization were overtly ethnocentric. Almost without exception, the people who are transformed into subhuman creatures - specifically, pigs, apes, and rats - are Jews.

A 1945 film called Japan: Know Your Enemy, directed by Frank Capra (who directed several popular motion pictures during the 1930s and '40s, including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's a Wonderful Life)

Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions ("As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away"; "Terror hunt snares twenty-five"; and "Net closes around Bin Laden") with enemy bases as animal nests ("Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama"; "Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked") from which the prey must be driven out ("Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out"; "America's new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves"). We need to trap the animal ("Trap may net Taliban chief"; "FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders") and lock it in a cage ("Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger"). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator ("Chained beast - shackled Saddam dragged to court"), or a monster ("The terrorism monster"; "Of monsters and Muslims"), while at other times he is a pesky rodent ("Americans cleared out rat's nest in Afghanistan"; "Hussein's rat hole"), a venomous snake ("The viper awaits"; "Former Arab power is 'poisonous snake'"), an insect ("Iraqi forces find 'hornet's nest' in Fallujah"; "Operation desert pest"; "Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark"), or even a disease organism ("Al Qaeda mutating like a virus"; "Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism"). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate ("Iraq breeding suicide killers"; "Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam").

Surely the vilest of animals in Allah's sight are those who disbelieve. - THE KORAN

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.