Dehumanization And Its Vocabulary

Before the killing, the language changes.

This is one of the most reliable observations in the study of mass violence, and the strangest thing about it is how similar the language is across places and centuries that had no contact with each other. People who never heard of each other, separated by oceans and hundreds of years, reached for the same handful of words.

There are three families of them.

Animals. Rats. Vermin. Cockroaches. Dogs. Snakes. Apes. Pigs. Insects of every kind.

Disease. Cancer. Plague. Infection. Parasites. Lice. Contamination. Rot.

Formless mass. The flood. The swarm. The horde. The tide. The element. Notice that these last ones do not even grant a shape. They describe a quantity of something arriving.

The Record

In Rwanda, the radio station that helped organize the genocide called Tutsi people cockroaches, over and over, for months, until the word was ordinary. Snakes was the other one. The word for cockroach had been in political use for years before 1994, which is worth noticing: the vocabulary was in place long before the machetes were.

In Nazi Germany, the film industry produced a picture that cut directly from footage of Jewish people in a street to footage of rats pouring out of a sewer. Party literature described lice, and the extermination of lice, and this was not decoration. The gas used at Auschwitz was a commercial pesticide.

In the American West in 1864, a militia commander is reported to have justified the killing of Cheyenne and Arapaho children at Sand Creek with a piece of folk wisdom about lice: that nits become lice, so you kill the nits. I include that example on purpose. This vocabulary is not a foreign thing that happens in other countries. It has been spoken in English, by Americans, about people who lived here first.

Why The Words Do Work

They are not insults. Insults are aimed at a person and assume there is a person there. These do something else, and they do three specific jobs.

They move the target out of the circle. Every human being carries a rough map of who the rules apply to. Inside the circle, you cannot simply kill someone because they are in your way. Outside it, the question does not come up in the same form. Animal and disease language does not argue that someone should be moved outside the circle. It reports that they were never in it.

They change the verb. Watch what happens to the action once the noun has changed. You do not murder vermin. You exterminate them. You do not massacre an infection. You treat it. You do not attack a contaminated area. You clean it. Cleansing, purifying, clearing, treating, sanitizing. These are maintenance words. They describe unpleasant work that a responsible person does and that a squeamish person avoids.

This is the quiet genius of it. The vocabulary does not make killing attractive. It makes it dutiful.

Disease words specifically create urgency and reach children. An animal metaphor is bad enough. A disease metaphor does something extra. Infections spread. Infections do not negotiate. Waiting makes an infection worse, so hesitation becomes irresponsibility, and anyone counseling patience is helping the disease.

And disease has no innocent stage. This is why the nits line exists, in one form or another, in almost every campaign of this kind. Once a population is described as an infection, killing its children is not an excess. It is thoroughness. That specific move, the reasoning that reaches the children, is one of the clearest markers that a line has been crossed, and it always arrives through the disease family of words.

The Honest Complication

Here the course has to slow down, because the standard version of this lesson is too simple and researchers have spent the last decade saying so.

First complication: some of the worst cruelty requires that the victim be human.

Think about what humiliation is. You cannot humiliate an insect. Degradation, mockery, forced ceremonies, making someone beg, making someone watch: these only work on a being who has dignity to lose and who understands what is being done. In an enormous number of atrocities, perpetrators went out of their way to shame their victims first. That effort makes no sense if they truly perceived them as vermin.

So a hard version of the dehumanization theory does not survive contact with the evidence. Perpetrators frequently know exactly how human their victims are. That knowledge is sometimes the instrument.

Second complication: much violence runs on guilt rather than on subhumanity.

A great deal of harm is done to people regarded as fully human and morally guilty. Traitor. Collaborator. Criminal. Predator. Parasite in the economic sense rather than the biological one. And, worth pausing on, monster. Calling someone a monster is not the opposite of this process. It is a version of it. It says that a person is a kind of thing that ordinary rules do not cover.

You can watch this happen in societies where nobody is calling anybody a cockroach. The mechanism is not always subhumanity. Sometimes it is unforgivability.

The Better Frame

So widen it. The general category is moral exclusion: the process by which a person or a group is placed outside the boundary within which your ordinary obligations apply.

There are at least three routes in.

They are placed beneath the boundary, by animal and disease language. They are placed outside it by guilt, having forfeited their standing through what they did or what their group did. Or they are placed past it by irrelevance, which is the quietest route and the most common. Nobody said anything about them at all. They simply stopped appearing in the conversation as people with interests.

Dehumanizing vocabulary is the loudest of these and the easiest to spot. It is not the only one, and a person watching only for cockroach language will miss most of what actually happens.

Recognition, Not Outrage

The point of this lesson is not to give you a new thing to be angry about. It is to give you a reading skill. Here is what to watch for.

The shift from acts to essence. The most important sentence-level change is small. It is the move from what someone did to what someone is. "They broke the law" is an accusation. "They are criminals by nature" is a category. The first can be answered. The second cannot.

The permanence claim. Watch for the assertion that a group cannot change. Not that they have not changed, or will not, but that they are constitutionally incapable of it. This claim is doing a specific job. It closes the door on every response except removal.

Mass nouns. Notice when a group stops taking plural verbs and starts being described as a substance. The flood. The influx. The problem. Substances do not have members.

The maintenance verbs. Cleanse, purge, purify, clear out, treat, eradicate, sanitize, deal with. Any time an unpleasant task presents itself as housekeeping, look at what the housekeeping is being done to.

Talk about the children. As above. When the reasoning extends to the children of the group, something has gone very far.

When mockery becomes routine. A joke about a group is a joke. A joke that appears daily, from everyone, without anybody laughing much, is not a joke anymore. It is maintenance.

Two Cautions

This vocabulary is common and genocide is rare.

You are about to become able to see this language everywhere, because it is everywhere. It is in comment sections and on cable news and at dinner tables and in your own head. And the overwhelming majority of the time, nothing happens. People have called each other pigs and rats and vermin throughout recorded history in societies that never came close to mass killing.

So do not treat the vocabulary as a prophecy. Treat it as one instrument on a panel. It tells you something real about how far a particular boundary has been eroded, and by itself it tells you almost nothing about what happens next. Every genocide was preceded by this language. Almost every instance of this language was not followed by genocide.

If you finish this lesson and start seeing an imminent atrocity in every rude thing anyone says, the lesson has damaged you rather than equipped you.

The accusation is not the cure.

There is a strong temptation, once you have this vocabulary, to use it as a weapon. Naming someone as dehumanizing is a powerful accusation, and it is frequently used to establish that a speaker is beyond consideration.

Notice what that is. It is moral exclusion, arrived at by the guilt route, using an anti-dehumanization argument as the vehicle. It happens constantly and it happens in every political direction.

The point of learning to read this language is not to catch people. It is to notice a process, including when it is running in you, which it will.