In the fall of 1939, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s propaganda minister, left his usual haunts in Berlin and traveled to the city of Lodz in central Poland to visit the ghetto where thousands of Jews and Roma were confined—a place of hunger, overcrowding, degradation, and disease. Later that day, he jotted down in his diary, “Car trip through the ghetto. We get out and have a close look at everything. It’s indescribable. They are no longer human beings, but animals.” He continued, “It is therefore no humanitarian task, but a task for the surgeon. One has to cut here, and one must do so in the most radical manner. Or Europe will disappear one day due to the Jewish disease.”1
Goebbels mostly talked about Jews not as animals but as members of an inferior human race. In one of his earliest publications, a pamphlet called The Nazi-Sozi, he wrote, “Sure, the Jew is also a human being. None of us has ever doubted that. But a flea is also an animal,—albeit an unpleasant one.”2 So we find Goebbels telling us that Jews are subhuman on one occasion, and being adamant that they are human on another. What was going on?
It wasn’t just Goebbels who spoke this way. Do you remember Maria, the woman who participated in the 1993 anti-Roma pogrom in Romania? She told a reporter, “On reflection . . . it would have been better if we had burnt more of the people, not just the houses,” conceding that, as much as she despised the Roma, they were people, but then she went on to insist, “We did not commit murder—how could you call killing Gypsies murder? Gypsies are not really people, you see? . . . They are criminals, sub-human, vermin.” If you read Maria’s words carefully, you’ll notice something strange. She seems to be contradicting herself at every turn. First, she expressed regret that the mob hadn’t killed more of the people. But right afterward she said that Gypsies aren’t really people. Next, she said that Gypsies are criminals, but criminals are by definition human beings. And finally, she proclaimed that Gypsies are subhuman vermin. Maria seems to both assert and deny that the Roma are human beings. Whatever they are, they should be killed—of that much she is sure.
These examples are explicit, but it’s even more common for people who denigrate others as animals to implicitly reveal that they recognize them as human beings. Cast your mind back to the passage from Der Untermensch that I quoted in chapter four. It states, “The subhuman hordes would stop at nothing in their bid to overthrow the world of light and knowledge, to bring an apocalypse to all human progress and achievement.” Now, ask yourself whether it makes any sense to say that subhuman animals like rats can “bid to overthrow the world of light and knowledge.” Obviously not. Only human beings can do that. So even this virulently dehumanizing anti-Semitic text implies that Jews are human beings.
What are we to make of these contradictions and inconsistencies on the part of those who dehumanize others? Some people think that they’re evidence that dehumanization isn’t real. They interpret them as showing that when people refer to others as vermin or animals, they’re expressing contempt and disgust, or trying to humiliate and degrade them, but that they don’t mean to say that these others are literally subhuman animals. These criticisms are important, and they deserve to be taken seriously. But taking them seriously doesn’t mean that we’ve got to embrace the conclusion that dehumanization isn’t real. It just moves us toward a more subtle and sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of dehumanization.
There are a couple of reasons why we should be hesitant about accepting the conclusion that dehumanization isn’t real. One is that there are plenty of examples where people clearly intend their claims about sub-humanity to be taken literally. Think back to the testimony of those Rwandan killers who said that they did not recognize their victims as human, and if they had done so they couldn’t have carried out the hideous acts that they did. There are other examples from other atrocities of men saying exactly the same thing. If you reject the reality of dehumanization, you have to reject this testimony. You have to claim that the genocidaires were lying, or that these were all false memories. There are also third-person reports by people like the seventeenth–century’s Reverend Morgan Godwyn, who I discussed in chapter ten. Godwyn reported that his informants told him quite explicitly that Black people aren’t human beings, because they lack a human soul. Instead, they are to be classed with the “brute beasts.”
Finally, there are scores of scientific and theological texts written from the Middle Ages to the present—some composed by distinguished scholars and others by crackpots—that propose that certain racialized groups are subhuman (there are plenty of examples of this sentiment expressed on neo-Nazi and White supremacist websites). Whatever one might think of these people, it’s hard to doubt their sincerity.
There’s another reason why we should reject the conclusion. We should reject it because there’s something basically wrong with the underlying argument. The argument is based on the principle that people can’t believe contradictions. For example, try as you might, you can’t believe both that someone is more than six feet tall and that they’re less than six feet tall. Your mind just won’t play ball with this. So, when people like Goebbels say that certain other people—in this case, the Jews of Lodz—are subhuman, and they also say, or at least imply, that the very same people are human beings, it can’t be that they believe both statements. It must be that they believe one of them but not the other. But which one do they believe? It’s most straightforward to suppose that when Goebbels talked about Jews as human he meant that literally, but when he called them animals he was expressing his contempt and hatred of them.
The thing is that people can believe a contradiction. Of course, it’s logically true that a statement and its opposite can’t both be true, but human psychology can’t be squeezed into the rigid rules of logic. People believe in contradictions a lot. Sometimes it’s because they don’t notice that they believe two things that can’t both be true. For example, a person might be opposed to abortion on the grounds that it’s morally wrong to take innocent human lives, and yet support a war that’s certain to result in children’s deaths. Sometimes, when people see that they’re committed to contradictory positions, they decide to let go of one of them. But sometimes they can’t let go of either of them, because both seem to be equally true. They manage to live with the contradiction.
People can and often do have beliefs that don’t add up, so couldn’t this be true of Goebbels, Maria, and all the other people who dehumanize others while also acknowledging their humanity? Couldn’t it be that there are people who really do believe that some members of our species are subhuman, but who can’t manage to relinquish the belief that those same people are human? I think that this accurately describes what goes on in a dehumanizing mind, and that it opens the door to a much deeper understanding of dehumanization.
To resist dehumanization effectively, you’ve got to accept that it’s real. You’ve got to believe that people mean the worst that they say, rather than dismissing or making excuses for it. So, be wary of claims that dehumanization is just a way of speaking and that nobody actually believes that groups of people are less than human. In the next few chapters we’re going to delve much more deeply into the nature of the dehumanizing process, and you will see that it’s both more complex and a great deal stranger than the picture of it that I have painted thus far.