Beheadings, dragging bodies through the street…what’s going on out there?
How can people do what they do to others?
The evil humans do has a rich history. As a person of faith, I believe the root is that we are naturally violent and selfish. My laid-back little 2-year-old has to be told (frequently) not to push his sister, and reminded to share. He doesn’t see pushing at home, and we share freely; what I see in him tends to support my belief of who we are.
But there’s a long distance from not sharing Thomas the Tank Engine to mutilating someone. So how do some get from here to there? One term often used is dehumanization. If I can think of you as something less than human, than I can treat you as I would a rabid dog and feel no remorse.
In ancient Rome, conditions were going from bad to worse. The Caesars needed something to draw the collective attention of the people away from their plight. Hmm, Christians had this odd practice of eating and drinking what they claimed as the body and blood of Jesus – that made them cannibals, and therefore a lower life form. No problem feeding them to the lions – and what a great distraction that provided.
In the middle ages, Christians emphasized that Islam was born through Ishmael, Abraham’s illegit son. This ignores the commonality in the culture of the circumstances of Ishmael’s birth – he was not considered illegit at that time, but the Pope and other leaders in the Western world needed a distraction for their subjects. And so the Crusades were born, as the civilized world turned back the tide of the illegitimate sons of Ishmael in Europe. As they were illegitimate, Crusaders could perpetrate any vile torture their minds could conceive – after all, those heathens weren’t quite human.
Early 20th-century Germany was very slow in rebounding from the devastation of World War I. Nazi propaganda in the early 20th century referred to the Jewish people as sub-humans, blaming them for all that was wrong in Europe. The lie was repeated often enough and with enough fervor that thousands of German soldiers participated in the extermination process, from driving the families out of their homes to loading them into boxcars, through giving the instructions to the nearly departed about the “shower” they were about to enter.
Today in a radical madras, young children are being taught that Allah is faithful and just, and that the infidel is a lower species.
What do you think they will do when they come of age?
