Dehumanize, demonize, propagandize: any atrocity can be justified.
Image: Amazon.com
This story is about what colonialism does to the colonizers. Conquering and suppressing others turns people into monsters, as we have seen in Gaza for four months now.
All colonizers do terrible things, so why do I single out Israel and America? Because, as journalist Patrick Lawrence wrote on Consortium News, “We are now able to watch videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating as they murder Palestinian mothers and children, as they dance and sing while detonating entire neighborhoods, as they mock Palestinians in a carnival of racist depravity.”
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I could write 20 pages listing Israeli crimes and not be any closer to the end, because they keep committing new ones. Who could have imagined healthy young people blocking food deliveries to people their government is starving, and dancing while doing it?
History shows that such depraved behavior could happen to anybody put in the position of subjugating and oppressing others. People become monsters when they learn to dehumanize and demonize their targets, to create narratives that justify their aggression and to believe the narratives they create.
The European colonizers who looted the world for centuries dehumanized everyone they conquered. The Africans, Americans, and Pacific Islanders were savages, non-people who could be starved and massacred at will. Read a bit about what the Belgians did in the Congo, and you will be reminded of what’s happening in Gaza now.
European colonizers said they were bringing civilization and modernity to backward savages. They talked about the “white man’s burden” to enlighten the darker peoples. More often than not, they enlightened by massacring them and stealing their stuff.
Since World War II, the US and Israel have taken over where Europe left off. Like Americans, Israelis absorb daily propaganda that teaches them they’re the good guys. Palestinians, even children, are terrorists and deserve all the pain they get.
I’ve written eight articles on Gaza, published on Medium, Substack, and lately on Op-Ed News. I get a lot of comments from Israeli trolls and their supporters in the US and England. They explain why what Israel does is necessary and desirable. The more people they kill, the more justified they feel.
In response to an article called Jews Are Traumatized People, a young Israeli man wrote, “You propose I share my home with a hyena. When I scream because I am being eaten alive, you will write about my trauma and how it has warped me. When the hyena has consumed even my bones, you will declare peace.”
He hits all the monster notes. His people are in danger. Their enemies are animals. The world doesn’t understand. It’s all Hamas’ fault.
Israel-supporting monsters come back again and again to the murderous Hamas attack of October 7, which they have blown up to a full-scale attempted genocide of Jews. They repeat Israeli government tales of mass rapes, beheaded children, incinerated families, none of which are backed by independent evidence.
None of the trolls admit they have ever done anything to hurt Palestinians. Occupying people for 75 years, dispossessing them of their homes, destroying their farms and villages, making them live under a blockade, imprisoning and shooting their youth — these kind of things fall outside the narrative and can be ignored.
They also ignore the slaughter — -rivaling the extermination camp Auschwitz — which they are perpetrating in Gaza. To them, they are just hated because they’re Jews. One wrote me, “See, the world has already forgotten October 7.” She couldn’t imagine how killing 50.000 people and destroying whole cities might lose them popular support.
Americans share monster bloodlines
Israelis aren’t unique in their cruelty. Although I can think of only a few recent examples such as the Rohingya in Burma, or the Tutsis in Rwanda, looking at American history reveals centuries of similar horrors.
The 400 year genocide of indigenous Americans included regular massacres like Wounded Knee, bounties placed on Natives’ scalps, regularly driving them off their land, raping their women, forbidding them fishing and hunting, depriving them of drinking water, polluting their land, and clear-cutting their forests.
American colonists’ crimes started long before there was a United States. When Columbus “discovered” the West Indies in 1492, his men enslaved the native people and worked them to death mining gold.
When Europeans settled in North America, the Natives wouldn’t work as slaves, so settlers drove them away. They brought in millions of Africans to do the work, brutalizing them in ways that go beyond anything we’ve seen in Palestine until recently.
Not just the leaders
It’s not only colonial leaders who turn into monsters. Their people often do, too, probably because they swim in propaganda that provokes fear and hate. Surveys show a large majority of Israelis cheer on the obliteration of Gaza and want to see more.
Similarly, older Americans might remember people shouting ‘Nuke them’ at Arab countries during the oil embargo of 1973, or saying ‘Turn it into a parking lot’ of any country who resisted US dominance, like Iran during the takeover of the US embassy in 1979.
How many innocents would be killed in turning a country of 80 million into a parking lot? It seems Americans don’t care. Not everyone, of course, but many people living in a colonial culture adopt its contempt for the colonized.
How to become a monster
If you want to become a monster, you can follow the American and Israeli script in five ways. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy argued that three factors create a monster mindset in Israelis: chosenness, victimhood, and dehumanization of the other.
1.Think of yourself as special. Levy points to surveys showing that most Israelis think of Jews as specially chosen by God. Other monsters have felt similarly. Hitler’s Nazis considered Germans the “master race,” better than anyone else. President Ronald Reagan called America ”the shining city on the hill.” 19th century leaders proclaimed America’s “manifest destiny” to conquer.
2. Having established your superiority, dehumanize the inferior others. They don’t suffer, think, or feel like you do. Killing or oppressing them is an unfortunate necessity, like the way we treat animals, and may even be for their own good.
Israeli leaders regularly describe Palestinians as “a cancer,” “vermin,” “dirty,” “primitive” and called for them to be “annihilated,” language that reminds journalist Chris McGeal, who covered the Rwandan genocide, of the terms used by Hutus to describe Tutsis.
You might call the others hyenas, as my Medium critic did, or you might use the less evocative but equally dehumanizing term “terrorist.” Hamas are never people; they are always terrorists.
“Terrorist” has become a label used to slander anyone who stands against the colonizer. In several American states, opposing the operations of factory farms is legally called terrorism. Yemenis are called terrorists for blocking Israel-bound ships, but Israelis are never called terrorists for bombing neighborhoods full of children.
Levy says, “If Palestinians are not human, then there is no question of human rights. If you scratch under the surface of every Israeli, you will find that almost no one treats the Palestinians as human.” Dehumanization is crucial to becoming an effective monster.
3. But don’t stop there. Demonize those you wish to put down. Attribute the worst of crimes and the most vile of motivations to the other. Call unarmed protestors potential killers and shoot them down, as Israel did in the 2018 Great March of Return in Gaza, or attribute unspeakable crimes to them, as they do to Hamas every day. These stories don’t have to be true; they resonate with people primed all their lives to hate.
4. Project your own actions and plans onto those you demonize. Think how Israel always says Palestinians ‘deny their right to exist,’ while denying that Palestine or Palestinians actually exist.
They constantly say of Palestinians, “They want to drive us into the sea,” while working full-time to drive Palestinians into the desert, as they are doing now. Israelis say, “Palestinians teach their children to hate us,” while teaching their own children to hate them.
Projection is a well-known psychological defense mechanism; countries and individuals do it all the time. Think of Americans accusing Russia of meddling in their election, while they go around the world subverting elections in other countries, including Russia.
5. Never stop propagandizing yourself, your people, or the world. Tell stories and don’t worry about facts, like the claims that UNRWA was involved in the October 7 attacks, evidence-free claims that led to the defunding of the #1 relief operation in a Palestine under siege. Censor platforms that challenge your story.
Becoming a nation of monsters isn’t easy. You need to go through the above steps, and you need a philosophy that tells you being a monster is a good thing. Racism is a good start, but not enough by itself.
The Americans and Israelis have such a philosophy, often called neoconservatism. According to Canadian history professor Shadia Drury, the neoconservatives dominate US and Israeli foreign policy. Neoconservatives call for dominating the world and teach that lying is a good thing, because the masses can’t handle the truth. This explains the constant lying their governments and media do.
When your people become monsters
Can monsters ever become human again? Maybe. When the British Empire collapsed after World War 2, they seem to have accepted a less dominant role in the world. The apartheid government in South Africa fell, and nothing horrible happened. Maybe the Afrikaner monsters decided they were better off being humans.
So, it could happen. But I note the UK, South Africa and Nazi Germany only changed because they had to. More powerful forces beat Germany down in a massive war, and used crippling sanctions to shut down South Africa’s economy.
Could something like that happen to the US and/or Israel? I don’t know, but maybe the world can come up with something. In personal interactions, I try to focus on the dehumanization and demonization parts. Do they really believe the people they dehumanize have no valid motivation? Is the other really subhuman or supremely evil? Do you contribute to the conflict in any way?
Sometimes it works.
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