Dehumanization

on the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jürgen Stroop described Jews resisting deportation to Nazi camps as "bandits". pulling a leash attached to the neck of a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison, who is forced to crawl on the floor, while Megan Ambuhl watches, 2003. Dehumanization is the process, practice, or act of denying full humanity in others, along with the cruelty and suffering that accompany it. It involves perceiving individuals or groups as lacking essential human qualities, such as secondary emotions and mental capacities, thereby placing them outside the bounds of moral concern. In this definition, any act or thought that regards a person as either "other than" or "less than" human constitutes dehumanization. Dehumanization can be overt or subtle, and typically manifests in two primary forms: animalistic dehumanization, which denies uniquely human traits like civility, culture, or rationality and likens others to animals; and mechanistic dehumanization, which denies traits of human nature such as warmth, emotion, and individuality, portraying others as objects or machines. It has historically facilitated a broad range of harms, from discrimination and social exclusion to slavery, colonization, as well as other crimes against humanity, and is recognized as a significant form of incitement to genocide.

on the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jürgen Stroop described Jews resisting deportation to Nazi camps as "bandits".]] pulling a leash attached to the neck of a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison, who is forced to crawl on the floor, while Megan Ambuhl watches, 2003.]] Dehumanization is the process, practice, or act of denying full humanity in others, along with the cruelty and suffering that accompany it. It involves perceiving individuals or groups as lacking essential human qualities, such as secondary emotions and mental capacities, thereby placing them outside the bounds of moral concern. In this definition, any act or thought that regards a person as either "other than" or "less than" human constitutes dehumanization. Dehumanization can be overt or subtle, and typically manifests in two primary forms: animalistic dehumanization, which denies uniquely human traits like civility, culture, or rationality and likens others to animals; and mechanistic dehumanization, which denies traits of human nature such as warmth, emotion, and individuality, portraying others as objects or machines. It has historically facilitated a broad range of harms, from discrimination and social exclusion to slavery, colonization, as well as other crimes against humanity, and is recognized as a significant form of incitement to genocide. ===Native Americans=== (1844) sculpture, depicting a triumphant Columbus and a "female savage" (Indian woman)]] . Up to 300 Natives were killed, mostly old men, women, and children. ]] Native Americans were dehumanized as "merciless Indian savages" in the United States Declaration of Independence. Two sculptures reflecting this view of the Natives were commissioned by the U.S. government and stood outside the U.S. Capitol from 1844 to 1958: The Discovery of America which depicted a triumphant Columbus and a "female savage", according to the Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan who proposed the sculpture, and The Rescue whose sculptor Horatio Greenough wrote that it was "to convey the idea of the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes". Following the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890, author L. Frank Baum wrote: The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past. In Martin Luther King Jr.'s book on civil rights, Why We Can't Wait, he wrote: Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. King was an active supporter of the Native American rights movement, which he drew parallels with his own leadership of the civil rights movement. Both movements aimed to overturn dehumanizing attitudes held by members of the public at large against them. ===Israelis and Palestinians=== Dehumanization has been a persistent and influential factor in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, contributing to intergroup hostility and serving as a strong predictor of support for violence across both societies. In protracted conflicts characterised by high levels of insecurity and entrenched group identities, boundaries between in-groups and out-groups often become more rigid, which reinforces psychological separation and facilitates dehumanizing attitudes. Dehumanization has been identified as a central mechanism in sustaining violence in protracted conflicts, which reinforces collective victimhood identities, legitimizes hostility and perpetuates cycles of violence and retaliation. Empirical research has found that both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli participants who expressed dehumanizing views of the other group were more likely to support retributive forms of justice and violent measures, as opposed to restorative or conciliatory approaches. Historical examples of dehumanization in Israeli society include comparing Palestinians to the biblical "sons of Amalek", a tribal group portrayed as inherently evil. Dehumanization contributes to the justification of exclusionary and violent policies, with studies linking dehumanizing attitudes to public support for measures such as population transfers amongst segments of the Israeli population. Dehumanizing narratives have also historically appeared in nationalist slogans, such as the early Zionist phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land", which is interpreted as a symbolic erasure of Palestinian peoplehood. Dehumanization has been used not only to deny the humanity of Palestinians but also to undermine their historical presence on the lands. During the 2014 Gaza War, studies found high and comparable levels of blatant dehumanization among both Israeli and Palestinian participants. A survey using the "ascent of man scale", a common measure of dehumanizing attitudes, found that, on average, both sides rated each other closer to an animal than a fully evolved human when shown a March of Progress image. On the scale with "0 corresponding to the left side of the image (i.e., quadrupedal human ancestor), and 100 corresponding to the right side of the image ('full' modern-day human)" Israelis on average rated Palestinians 39.81 points lower than their own group and Palestinians on average rated Israelis 37.03 points lower than their own group. Following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, dehumanizing language intensified in Israeli political discourse. Senior officials used animalistic dehumanization through metaphors, such as "rats" and "cockroaches", to describe Palestinians in Gaza, which served to legitimize acts of violence. These statements have drawn international scrutiny and were cited in legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concerning allegations of incitement to genocide. Dehumanizing content also circulates widely on social media. In Israel, such rhetoric targets not only Palestinians but also left-wing Jewish Israelis, who have been depicted in demonizing and animalistic terms, including "dogs", "microbes", and "vermin". Political orientation has also been shown to influence levels of dehumanization, with research indicating that right-wing Israelis are more likely to dehumanize Palestinians than left-wing Israelis. Dehumanizing zoomorphisms are found in both Israeli discourse and Palestinian discourse. During South Africa's submission to the ICJ that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinians, the president of the ICJ cited Yoav Gallant for using the phrase "human animals" in reference to Palestinians. On the Palestinian side, dehumanization has also been linked to support for violence. According to Joana Ricarte, dehumanizing perceptions of Israelis have contributed to moral frameworks that legitimized violence, including the October 7 attacks. ===Language=== Language has been used as an essential tool in the process of dehumanizing others. Examples of dehumanizing language when referring to a person or group of people may include animal, cockroach, rat, vermin, monster, ape, snake, infestation, parasite, alien, savage, and subhuman. Other examples can include racist, sexist, and other derogatory forms of language. The use of dehumanizing language can influence others to view a targeted group as less human or less deserving of humane treatment. In Unit 731, an imperial Japanese biological and chemical warfare research facility, brutal experiments were conducted on humans who the researchers referred to as 'maruta' (丸太) meaning logs. Yoshio Shinozuka, Japanese army medic who performed several vivisections in the facility said, "We called the victims 'logs.' We didn't want to think of them as people. We didn't want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree." Words such as migrant, immigrant, and expatriate are assigned to foreigners based on their social status and wealth, rather than ability, achievements, or political alignment. Expatriate is a word to describe the privileged, often light-skinned people newly residing in an area and has connotations that suggest ability, wealth, and trust. Meanwhile, the word immigrant is used to describe people coming to a new location to reside and infers a much less-desirable meaning. The word "immigrant" is sometimes paired with "illegal", which harbors a profoundly derogatory connotation. Misuse of these terms—they are often used inaccurately—to describe the other, can alter the perception of a group as a whole in a negative way. Ryan Eller, the executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Define American, expressed the problem this way: A series of language examinations found a direct relation between homophobic epithets and social cognitive distancing towards a group of homosexuals, a form of dehumanization. These epithets (e.g., faggot) were thought to function as dehumanizing labels because they tended to act as markers of deviance. One pair of studies found that subjects were more likely to associate malignant language with homosexuals, and that such language associations increased the physical distancing between the subject and the homosexual. This indicated that the malignant language could encourage dehumanization, cognitive and physical distancing in ways that other forms of malignant language do not. Another study involved a computational linguistic analysis of dehumanizing language regarding LGBTQ individuals and groups in the New York Times from 1986 to 2015. The study used previous psychological research on dehumanization to identify four language categories: (1) negative evaluations of a target group, (2) denial of agency, (3) moral disgust, and (4) likening members of the target group to non-human entities (e.g., machines, animals, vermin). The study revealed that LGBTQ people overall have been increasingly more humanized over time; however, they were found to be humanized less frequently than the New York Time's in-group identifier American. Aliza Luft notes that the role of dehumanizing language and propaganda plays in violence and genocide is far less significant than other factors such as obedience to authority and peer pressure.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1370169144 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.