The untermensch mentality
I once heard someone say that English is the easiest language to learn but the hardest to master. I'm very dubious about the first part of that truism but I fully concur with the second. Even somone who dedicates years of their life to learning English will find themselves constantly befuddled by the fact that grammatically, English doesn't have rules, it has tendencies. There are always annoying exceptions waiting to trip up the non-native speaker.
But there is also the problem of vocab. To the best of my knowledge, English has the largest vocabulary of any language. A Chinese speaker learning English will often despair that a concept which is covered by just one word in Chinese has four or five names in English, each of them subtly different.
Yet in spite of its bulging lexicon, English frequently imports words from other languages, especially French. I don't know the reason for this but I would like to think that sometimes a foreign word sums up a concept more succinctly than any English competitor. So you may want to hook up with someone at a pre-arranged "meeting point" but somehow it sounds better if the two of you get together at a "rendez-vous".
I came across a German word recently which is slowly making its way into the English lexicon. The term in question is "untermensch" and roughly translates as "under human". It has strong Nazi undertones being, unsurprisingly, a term of which Hitler was fond. There's something about the word, something savage in its sound, which seems to capture the concept it defines far better than its rather anaemic English competitor "sub-human".
I believe that all of us are guilty of seeing other people as "untermensch", as somehow less human than we are. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that every person has genocidal urges, that all of us dream of wiping out other people. But I do believe that everyone is guilty of viewing other groups of humans, be they different religions, different races, different nationalities or different cultures, as less deserving of compassion than our own. Even if we do care about "them", we care about "us" more.
So from a Western viewpoint, when "people like us" are thrown out of Kosovo en masse, as happened in 1999, there is an outcry and "something is done". Yet on the other side of the world, the people of East Timor were subjectd to far worse treatment for far longer and, outside of a tiny number of dedicated campaigners, the West did absolutely nothing to help. With their dark skin and their strange culture, the Timorese are not like us in the way that the Kosovars are. So when they suffer, we care much less, if at all. I could list exmples like this all day - would the genocide in Rwanda have been allowed to happen if those involved had been white?
Every day thousands of people in the Third World die of hunger and preventable disease. It is an appalling and avoidable human tragedy. But these people aren't white and they aren't Western so their plight is largely ignored. Sure, when a tin-shaker confronts you in the street, your conscience makes you give them some money but who, being honest, spares a thought for these poor people in the course of the average day? I freely admit that I do not. To us they are untermensch, they are human, but not quite human enough for us to actually do anything much to help them.
As with famine and disease, so with war. The primary aim in war is to dehumanise the enemy, to view them as untermensch. Once this is achieved, it is possible to do terrible things to them. The latest exmple of this dehumanisation in the Iraq war was the beheading yesterday of American Nick Berg by a group linked to al-Qaida.
As Larry pointed out in another blog, those who held this young man captive could easily have shot him in the head if they wanted to execute him in "revenge" for the torture at Abu Ghraib. This at least would have afforded his family the small comfort of knowing that when the end came, it came quickly.
Instead the kidnappers chose to decapitate their hostage in what I'm led to believe was a long, drawn-out process. For one human being to do this to another, they need to ignore their victim's humanity. They must disregard the fact that the man they are about to subject to an agonising death is a son or a father or a brother, and simply see him as an American, as the untermensch enemy of global jihad.
And so to with the torture in Abu Ghraib. Before I even start, let me say that I'm only comparing the two things in terms of viewing the adversary as untermensch. I'm not conflating torture with murder. The Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib will be scarred, emotionally and physically, by the experience for the rest of their lives. But at least they will have the rest of their lives in which to be so scarred. Nick Berg will not.
Nevertheless, those who subjected these prisoners to this kind of treatment must have percieved their victims as less than human. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the prisoners were dragged along on leads like dogs. To behave in such a way to another human being must requore the denial of their humanity.
This is not something which happened overnight. For years, decades even, American culture has demonised Muslims in general and Arabs in particular as untermensch, as terrorists, as extremists. This demonisation has now come to its horrible but logical conclusion.
Even now, some are trying to diminish the torture which happened at Abu Ghraib. I have read that these prisoners were supposedly "the most wanted", as if this somehow reduces the immorality of their treatment. This is specious. The whole point of human rights is that they should be applied equally to everyone, regardless of what they have done. We vary widely in our "humane-ness" as people, but we are all equally human. Thus while Saddam Hussein and Nelson Mandela are at opposite poles morally, they are each as human as the other. And as prisoners, they are each entitled to the same level of dignity.
Well, that at least is the theory. But as long as we think of those outside of our realm as untermensch, then the concpet of universal human rights will never be fully realised. It's a wonderful idea, and it's pursuit is fully justifiied, but I feel that the untermensch mentality stands in the way of its full realisation.
We can't have universal human rights until we have a universal vision of humanity. That means not just humanity in war (there's an oxymoron). It also means that we should be concerned about suffering and injustice, regardless of the race, or culture, or nationality, or religion of the victims. This is an impossible aim, but it is well woth pursuing.