The Dehumanisation Effect in War (an Intimate History of Killing).

A short extract from my chapter, Dehumanisation: "Using" the Species Barrier.

One method of dehumanising enemies is to say that they behave ‘like animals’ and therefore this allows that the target person or population can be treated as such. As ever, linguistic classification is crucial, and language is revealed as a powerful social institution in the construction of culturally transmitted attitudes.

For example, Joanna Bourke (1999: 229) relates the story of the 1939-45 radio broadcasts made by Sir Robert Vansittart. Apparently Vansittart suggested to his wartime listeners that the German public were undergoing a dramatic process of ‘reverse evolution’ which emphasised three alleged traits of the German psyche: envy, self-pity and cruelty. German nationals were characterised as ‘butcher birds’ who ‘felt no compunction about committing the most vile atrocities’ (1999: 229). It was also claimed by Vansittart that German soldiers liked to machine-gun children to death and, if they could not find children, they would turn their machine guns onto cows.

In the Vietnamese war in the 1960’s, the alleged war activities of the Viet Cong perhaps appeared even more shocking due to advances in photography and the production of catalogues of ‘atrocities’ which were distributed to the press by the South Vietnamese Embassy. It was clearly and regularly suggested that the Viet Cong soldiers of North Vietnam behaved ‘no better than animals’, with pictures of them killing, torturing and mutilating large numbers of South Vietnamese people.

Bourke describes photographs that depicted ‘beheaded women, men hacked to death with machetes, a baby whose body was ‘riddled’ with submachine-gunfire; the bodies of priests... breasts sliced off a nurse; the corpse of a tortured teacher; and a dead mother complete with nursing baby’ (1999: 229). Bourke found that combat soldiers who took part in several different conflicts had their ‘eagerness to fight’ heightened by such stories and clearly many came to believe that they were dealing with sub or nonhuman enemies. One soldier, appalled by one of the earliest uses of gas on the Western Front, said he grew ‘black with a deadlier hate’ which made him want to ‘kill and kill and kill’. After that, he said, he ‘butchered savagely’ (1999: 230). For another soldier, all Germans became ‘monsters’ when he learned of the concentration camps.

Scott Camil, a soldier in Vietnam, said that a feeling of terror ran through the troops when they were told of the atrocities of their enemy. In these circumstances, he said, ‘all laws of civilisation were suspended’. Therefore, because the Vietnamese did not act like human beings, ‘then they did not have to be treated as such...And when you shot someone you didn’t think you were shooting a human’ (1999: 230-31). Another veteran said he told himself he was just killing ‘commies’. He goes on: ‘Oh, maybe the first time I saw a dead North Vietnamese I flinched a bit but after that they just became dead animals. It was either he’d shoot me or I’d shoot him and I wasn’t shooting at a person’ (Simon Cole, in 1999: 232).

Further ways of justifying killing ‘the enemy’ was to characterise what was happening as socially accepted forms of ‘hunting’. This could be ‘big game’ hunting or foxhunting, or through seeing oneself as ‘a poacher’, and viewing dead enemy soldiers as part of the sporting ‘bag’ or the booty. Tank warfare was similarly equated with hunting animals and, ironically, given the size and noise of these machines of war, tracking people in a tank was sometimes regarded as a form of ‘stalking’. Even warfare at sea was characterised at times as hunting ‘prey’ and as catching the ‘quarry’ (1999: 233-34).