Dehumanizing as a tool of the colonizer
By Sheila MacGregor.
February 8, 2024
The dictionary defines dehumanization as depriving of positive human qualities. “brutal management methods and fear can dehumanize people.”
Examples of dehumanizing language when referring to a person or group of people may include animal, cockroach, rat, ape, snake, vermin, monster, infestation, parasite, alien, savage, and subhuman.
When a colonizer wants to take over a territory from indigenous people, they use dehumanizing methods against them to justify driving them off the land or creating a genocide against the population.
In the case of the colonizers of North America, the colonized peoples were denied human rights, which involved seizing “native” histories and representing them as backward, depraved, and savage.
Later down the line, when the shiploads of Africans were brought to the US, they were treated as property, sold in town squares. Many times, they were separated from their families, not allowed to educate themselves, and isolated into a world so small that the enslaved person would begin to believe that only their enslaver could meet their basic needs.
The indigenous population of Palestine has been the victims of a 75-year campaign to de-legitimize and dehumanize them for the colonizer to have the superior position and to gain and keep the support of the United States to colonize the whole of Palestine. In the process, the occupier also dehumanized itself.
According to an interview with Hajo Meyer, a German-born Dutch physicist, Holocaust survivor, and political activist, he said, “I saw in Auschwitz that if a dominant group wants to dehumanize others, as the Nazi dehumanize me, the dominant group must first dehumanize themselves, the same holds nowadays for Israel. They dehumanize themselves by diminishing empathy through propaganda and indoctrination to be as cruel as some were. They have given up everything that has anything to do with humanity-empathy.”
Gideon Levy gave three principles that enable Israelis to live easily with their brutality towards the Palestinians.
A. “Most Israelis deeply believe that we are the chosen people, and if we are the chosen people, we have the right to do whatever we want.”
B. “We are the victims. It is the only occupation in history in which the occupier presents itself as the victim and the only victim around.”
C. “The third set is the most dangerous one, and this is the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians, which enables us Israelis to live in peace with everything because if they are not human beings like us, then it is not a question of human rights .”
In this era when the global media is readily available for the colonists to use in their favor, they can spread more propaganda and dupe the world into the belief that the Palestinians are savage animals determined to teach their children to be terrorists who are therefore not only a danger to Israel but to the world.
It entails us who are beginning to see the truth to continue to fight back and to work diligently to re-educate the world to combat the insidious spread of propaganda against the Palestinians so that they will no longer be invisible to the world; they can win this battle and live in a free Palestine at last with total self-determination.
