The Weapon of De-Humanisation

By Sebastian Egerton-Read

The natural instinct of human beings is to feel compassion for other human beings. We can see evidence of this all over the world all the time, generally when people learn about other people with horrible situations or unfortunate circumstances, they give what they can or do what they can to help. Examples of this range from events like comic relief, specific relief efforts like those being carried out currently for Japan and in fact in everyday life. If we can accept this basic assertion that people generally act in a way that is friendly and good to one another (generally, not exclusively), then it is rather confusing to look at the world and see such disparity and such inequality. It should be noted that this human conscience is clearly an evolutionary feature of human beings. Its history can be traced back quite clearly to the growth of population and increased ability of human beings to destroy each other. The human conscience has been developed towards each other quite clearly to avoid a human self-destruction.

However, the picture is not quite as simple as that, or at least this conscience hasn’t worked perfectly. For example, look at the current agenda of our country’s government. They are cutting public services drastically and at an incredibly fast rate, they are attacking benefits and generally pulling all of the safety nets from under the poorer population’s feet. They are of course at the same cutting corporation tax, making London into a tax haven and continuing to leave the country’s richest relatively untouched. This is in response to an economic crisis that was sparked from the top and not from the people who are being made to suffer from it. These cuts will have a devastating social and personal impact on people’s lives. People are losing their jobs, their financial security, their opportunities in Education; so much is being taken away. Funds used to reduce teenage pregnancy and to deal with youth drug abuse are being slashed. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the quantity and rapidity of these cuts will devastate the lives of hundreds of thousands of people if not more.

So, how can there actually be people who perpetrate this devastation? I have often heard people say that it is in an absence of a conscience that allow the likes of David Cameron to do what he does. However, this must be too simplistic. Are we to believe that this key evolutionary feature simply goes missing in some people on certain political issues? No, something more complex is going on here. The first difficulty with human conscience is that it is extremely subjective. Another aspect of this is that I do not doubt that in some way, Cameron believes that is current policies will make this country more successful and more powerful. There is also the case that different people have different priorities and different emphasise.

Having said that there is a difficult and complex issue here, in the case of the current government, and in fact in all mainstream politics, there is a de-humanisation of the population. The government is only able to do these things if they don’t consider the human beings involved and effected. The notion of the welfare state was in many ways the ultimate expression of the latest development of human conscience, its slow break up has gone hand in hand with the continued detachment of politics from the population and effective de-humanisation of that population.  The narrative that we are told is completely discriminatory, people who ‘work hard’ and ‘do the right thing’ are rewarded and people who do not will not be supported. Regardless of the validity of those statements, which is pretty doubtful, they are subjective. How do you judge when someone is working hard? It seems the definition of it from the Conservative ideology is simply getting a rubbish mind-numbing job and finding a way of getting by, frankly that sounds like hard work rather than working hard. An expression that Cameron and co uses all too often is this idea of rewarding people for ‘doing the right thing’. What is the ‘right thing’? This is where the de-humanisation starts. It is accepted that human beings are completely unique and diverse and yet there is a government that prescribes a way to live, doesn’t offer alternatives and then punishes those that don’t accept that prescription. The government’s ‘lazy unemployed’ agenda is a prime example of this; unemployed people are packed together and described in abhorrent discriminatory ways.

This de-humanisation is so powerful, it wins people over. Rather than considering the possibility of a complex long set of individual circumstances that could lead to someone being unemployed. ‘The unemployed’ receive the tag of being lazy and as some sort of plague on the population. Once they have that tag, rather than supporting them, it actually makes more sense to follow the government’s logic from there. This can be applied to every section of the population that this government is attacking, from immigrants to the working class. Once they are robbed of their human identity, they can be targets.

De-humanisation manifests itself in all sorts of parts of human life. I recently encountered it on campus myself. A group of Israeli students came to campus this week as part of Israeli Awareness Week. They were polite, well-mannered, clearly well-educated and actually quite nice to talk to. However, when talking to them about the Israel/Palestine issue they talked about the Palestinian people as violent, savage and uncontrollable. Now if that is true, or a person believes that to be true, then it is perfectly logical to attack that violence and savagery and to exterminate it, which is in many ways what Israel has been doing slowly over the last sixty years. However, describing 11 million Palestinian people as savage and violent is simply not true. The Palestinian people are people, individuals who have lost their homes, family members and in so many case, their sense of worth. The reality is that those Israeli students could not defend the policies of their country if considering the Palestinian people in those terms. I re-iterate, these students were perfectly nice and reasonable to talk to, but the success of their government in de-humanises a population of people allowed them to have these completely indefensible views on 11 million people.

Examples of de-humanisation can be found throughout history. The age of European imperialism is one of the most obvious examples; genocides are virtually always accompanied by de-humanising groups of people. De-humanisation is undoubtedly the greatest weapon of oppression on every level, and it is something that must be fought at all costs.