Looking away or wilful ignornace
Language and Dehumanisation
If you change the language used about the ‘other’ – a potential victim – from that of a sentient being to that of an object it becomes easier to think of that person as an object, and then treat them as such. This aspect of organisational killing is extraordinarily widespread, and examples can be found in widely different international contexts.
We’ve already seen the use of the word ‘load’ to describe the people gassed in the Saurer trucks; and the way that entire memorandum evades using words that suggest the victims are human beings (‘97,000 have been processed’, etc.). But we should also understand that, throughout the concentration-camp system, the word ‘person’ to describe an inmate was forbidden. Instead the term ‘Stuck’ (‘item’ or ‘piece’) was the correct terminology; and after death the word ‘body’ or ‘corpse’ could not be used – indeed it was a disciplinary offence to use such language – the correct alternative to indicate a dead human being was ‘Figuren’ (‘pieces’).
Another common means of linguistic dehumanising is to turn human beings into animals, often the smallest, most despised creatures. The torturers under the Greek colonels referred to their victims as ‘worms’. In the Rwandan genocide Hutus called their potential Tutsi victims ‘inyenzi’ (‘cockroaches’). Stangl, the former commandant at Treblinka, made explicit the linkage in his mind between animals and human beings, when he gave Gitta Sereny the following account:
‘When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil,’ he said, his face deeply concentrated, and obviously reliving the experience, ‘my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse.6 The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, “Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the tins …”’
‘You said “tins”,’ I interrupted. ‘What do you mean?’ But he went on without hearing, or answering me.
‘I couldn’t eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes … which looked at me … not knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead.’ He paused. His face was drawn. At this moment he looked old and worn and real.
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In the reports that the Einsatzgruppen – the mobile killing squads – sent back to Berlin between 1941 and 1942 we also have an utterly dehumanised language, where people or victims are never mentioned, and instead a bizarre range of euphemisms are employed:7
‘cleansing activities’
‘security measures’
‘severe measures’
‘a special liquidation’
‘necessary liquidations’
‘actions carried out in an exemplary manner’
‘reprisal measures’
‘retaliation measures’
‘special tasks’
It is only rarely that the language in these reports becomes explicit, and that the people being killed are named – but even then only as a collective entity: ‘Only ninety-six Jews were executed in Grodno and Lida during the first days. I gave orders to intensify these activites.’
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But we shouldn’t regard such language of dehumanisation as a historical phenomenon. It surrounds us in our time. Think about the widespread use of depersonalised euphemisms in war contexts, the way, for instance, that the Orwellian term ‘surgical strike’ (death = health) has now widely replaced ‘bombing raid’ or ‘attack’. Or look at this breathless pitch from the military analyst Sir Timothy Garden, in the run-up to the Iraq War:
With war seemingly inevitable weapon designers will be looking forward to another opportunity for field-testing new products … The cluster bomb remains in US and UK inventories. Here a shower of small munitions is released over the target area. They can be effective against dispersed groups of military vehicles.
‘Products’ supposed to sound like any other consumer item.
‘Shower’ as in rain, as in refreshing, as in ‘it’s probably just a shower’ (i.e. ephemeral), when we’re actually talking about one of the most appalling weapons ever invented that explodes in the form of thousands of small mines.
Note the form of ‘is released’ – the passive construction – so the agents of this action – the killers – become invisible. And note the choice of that verb ‘release’ and not ‘explode’.
Finally the weapons are effective against ‘groups of military vehicles’ – i.e. inanimate objects, not driven by any human beings.
The language of technical jargon is particularly adept at removing any trace of humanity or suffering from the process of killing. Take this breathlessly excited description of the capabilities of the MQ-9 Reaper drone, from a USAF ‘factsheet’. This drone, also known as the Predator B, is said to be employed
against dynamic execution targets and secondarily as an intelligence collection asset. Given its significant loiter time, wide-range sensors, multi-mode communications suite, and precision weapons … it provides a unique capability to autonomously execute the kill chain (find, fix, track, target, execute and assess) against high-value, fleeting and time sensitive targets (TSTs).
So human beings are reduced to acronyms (‘TSTs’) – because it’s much easier to kill an acronym than a person of flesh and blood.
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Another way of removing a person’s humanity is by removing their name, and replacing it with a number. This has been common in prison and military systems throughout the world; it is often regarded as the first step in trying to break the resistance of a person. Primo Levi describes, in If This Is a Man, the moment in Auschwitz when he became a number:
Häftling [prisoner]: I have learnt that I am Häftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptised, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die … It seems that this is the real, true initiation: only by ‘showing one’s number’ can one get bread and soup … weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language. And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, a number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.
I came across this image many years ago, taken by the photographer Jean Mohr, in A Seventh Man, John Berger’s book about migrant labour in western Europe:
The first shock of this is to see a man reduced to a number, an object. The second shock is when we realise the man is a Turkish migrant worker and the figure has been written on him by a German doctor from a German corporation checking whether the man is fit for work. The third shock is to realise that this was happening in the 1970s, thirty years after the war – that there is a continuity in patterns of inhuman behaviour that we thought had been expunged from our world for ever.