Dehumanizing Others, Torture, and Genocide: The Power of Hate (article)

The starting points of mass violence and hatred are economic problems, political disorganization, rapid social changes, a nation’s history of shame, military defeat, declining power, power, and intense political conflict in the society. All these are manifested in situations where many people have lost their jobs, their economy has suffered from monetary devaluation, there is a strong respect for authority, and unhealed wounds due to past violence against them. Other components are when there is a belief in the culture’s superiority, when religious belief systems are threatened, or when killing or humiliation are a daily occurrence. This state of affairs develops into dehumanizing the victims, leading to exclusion, harm, and murder of them, who are designated evil—not human beings like “us,” therefore deserving of elimination. It is thus, in the end, “easy” to kill, because it is not humans that are being killed, but dangerous objects or parasites. This pervasive, synchronized attack on all aspects of life involves the cooperation of masses who are persuaded and united by a similar ideology.

The political-ideological-religious justifications in all these contexts represented a mental instrument that could validate dehumanizing the chosen enemy, justify subjecting this enemy to atrocities, and give “meaning” to the apparent necessity of exterminating dangerous “elements” as part of a battle between good and evil. As Ira Brenner pointed out:

Dehumanization exemplified by the Nazis and other dictatorships, is a two-step process. Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans, as in the Hutus’ degradation of the Tutsis, referred to as ‘cafards’, or insects. A second type of dehumanization occurs in the case of suicide bombers. They bypass their individual victims’ identity and then rehumanize themselves as spokespersons for their group, while rehumanizing the victims as representatives of the opposing large group (“Terror and Societal Regression: Does Psychoanalysis Offer Insights for International Relations?” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 54: 977-988, 2006, 979).

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Another example of dehumanization is that both Lenin and Hitler conceived of their nation or people in biological terms, as an organism containing a parasite consuming or sucking the blood of the people. The continuing presence of this deadly organism within the body politic would lead to its destruction and death unless removed. Hitler described the German nation as a living organism consisting of the German people as good cells. Jews were called bacteria or parasites, pathogenic cells that had invaded the otherwise healthy organism. In order to rescue or save Germany (from death), the source of the nation’s disease, Jewish bacteria or parasites, had to be removed from within the body politic. Political forms of violence occur as people struggle to destroy those entities that, they imagine, are working to destroy the entities that they worship and with which they identify. Therefore, political ideologies are built upon a rescue fantasy (Richard Koenigsberg, “Hitler, Lenin and the Desire To Destroy ‘Parasites,’” March 20, 15, libraryofsocialscience.com).

The planners of genocide and torture can provide potential killers with retributions, like acknowledgement of their acts or social promotion, but they can also decide to kill them if they do not comply with their orders, dehumanizing them. They also provided potential killers with a convincing rationale that included a “moral” or a “positive” goal achieved by the genocide (e.g., “purity of the race”) combined with monolithic dehumanization of the target population (e.g., “they are the bacteria of our society”). There is usually a paradoxical message in this rationale: The target population is seen as being both strong (the threat) and weak (they can be easily killed since they are not humans), between the good (us) and the evil (them).

Different emotional effects are present in this process. Envy is one of them, activated in the polarization of society. Envy is based on hatred of the good and the desire to destroy it because of its inaccessibility. The perpetrators find a group to envy to project what they wish to have upon. Another affect present in the destruction of others is revenge. The fantasy is that by killing external persecutors, one will be freed, once and for all, of destructive impulses. This constitutes a powerful motivation for the ego to maintain such defensive strategies. In fact, it often appears as the only way to protect oneself from unbearable anxiety. In cases where projective identification is excessive, such an unconscious strategy to avert anxiety induces a wish for destruction, not only of the perpe-

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trators involved, but also of whole groups of people who become associated with these alleged persecutors. Actually, such projection of “all things evil” onto an exterior “enemy” is a recognized scheme used knowingly by some politicians or governments who deem it useful to focus the attention of the masses on an outside target rather than on domestic issues.

Relying on people’s instincts to distance themselves from horror, fear, and dehumanization, perpetrators seek to destroy memory in both survivors and those advocating for survivors. These are attempts to externalize humiliating personal, cultural, or other national feelings of unacceptable weakness and helplessness. They can do so by repeatedly and ritualistically recreating these feelings in the victim population. If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives, since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness.

Psychoanalytic thinkers believe that violence and hate can lead to a regression to more archaic modes of behaving, such as splitting and projective identification, thus weakening the capacity of the ego. It can also activate manic defenses as a means of protecting positive human representations (“objects” in the language of psychoanalysis), as well as the development of envy, revenge, paranoid projections, and changes in the super-ego and ego-ideal. Psychoanalysts showed how individuals in such situations projected both the superego and the ego ideal onto the leader, thus relinquishing their own individuality, with a subsequent regression that resulted in following their leader. When the leader replaces the ego-ideal, actions which have earlier been forbidden by the super-ego are now permitted. The individual’s prohibiting superego is thus made lax and corrupt. It is a matter of a mutual process of seduction between the leader and the led.

The charismatic leader who is thought to have the solutions to the problems channels the need of the individual as well the needs of the masses, to be liberated from the personal responsibility of solving the internal anxiety. Paranoid thought processes can be maintained and legitimized; internal superego conflicts are replaced by external struggles. The price of being freed from personal re-

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sponsibility is docile submission. This passive consenting is based on a corruption of the ego-ideal, which gives rise to the superego relaxing its earlier norms and prohibitions. Aggressive impulses are encouraged and given full expression. The result is a lasting and permanent corruption of the superego.

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