First, De-humanization

A fundamental feature of all authoritarian regimes is the dehumanizing of some group of “others.”  Those people are not like us—not native, not moral—and they don’t belong here.  They are “less” than us, not worthy of consideration.  They are “sub-human,” or, at least, not fully human.  They are a menace, untrustworthy and threatening to our way of life.  So, we will isolate them, persecute them, deprive them of the rights owed to everyone else.  In every way—and human imagination seems remarkably adept at devising ways—they will be marginalized, removed, and ultimately, perhaps, exterminated.

This sort of thinking is pernicious, and when it comes to dominate a government--our government--it is also horrifying. 

So, I was particularly horrified when I opened a news story that my wife, Amy, shared with me about a new White House website:  aliens.gov.  I urge everyone to view it, and I offer this caveat:  it is so profoundly disturbing that you may wish you had never seen it. 

The essence of the message—conveyed ominously to underscore the intensity of the threat based, it says, on newly declassified information—is that our country has been invaded by aliens.  These aliens are immigrants, but portrayed as space aliens--they are that different from us, that scary, that dangerous.  And, if the message weren’t clear enough, the video concludes with a tabulation of the crimes that immigrants have been arrested for, searchable by location. For good measure, it also provides real-time updates on “encounters” with aliens (except that the numbers aren’t tracking anything real; they change at a predictably steady pace).   

We have witnessed our government ruthlessly target immigrants in ways that many have noted is reminiscent of police states—grabbing people off the streets, tearing them from their families, their homes and their schools, abducting them when they appear for required immigration check-ins.  But this is something different, a kind of linguistic violence that is as threatening to our democracy as the ICE agents’ extreme tactics.

Of course, if the immigrants rounded up and deported are “aliens,” then all of this, and more, is justified.  It is merely an effort to remove these foreign, threatening elements from our midst.  In this way, any acts of violence committed against them are simply self-defense.  Why should we act any differently?

Dehumanization functions here to justify the unjustifiable.  It legitimizes an entirely irrational and unsubstantiated fear of those who are different, who do not come from here, do not look like us.  This is “our” country; “we” are simply removing what doesn’t belong here.

The bedrock of any just society must be that all people have the right to be treated with dignity, the right to the equal protection of the law, the right to express themselves freely so long as they do not threaten others.  Aliens.gov is explicitly designed to undermine exactly those principles, which is why it is so dangerous.

I am reminded of the Rwandan genocide, which was instigated through the propaganda broadcast on Radio Mille Collines, a Hutu-owned station that repeatedly demeaned Tutsis as “cockroaches.”  There cockroaches, here space aliens. 

To be clear:  I am not suggesting that our government is engaged in, or inciting others to, genocide of immigrants.  But it is an unmistakable step in that direction, simply because it opens the door to relegating them to the status of “non-human,” meaning that how we treat them is of no significance.  As M. Gessen pointed out in her NY Times piece, quoting Benjamin Valentino at Dartmouth, the primary danger is that aliens.gov will make us into bystanders, not perpetrators.  We will begin to view the government as engaged in a project of protecting us from an ominous threat by non-human actors who have no business being here and no right to legal protections.

A website of this sort would be deeply concerning even if it came from an extremist, far-right group. The fact that it is coming from the White House makes it extraordinarily dangerous, precisely because it is coming from the people determined to act on it.  Moreover, it is an abrogation of a responsibility of every democratic government, which is to ensure the protection of everyone under its authority. This administration’s anti-immigrant policies and draconian tactics are well-documented.  Even so, it is appalling to see such explicitly dehumanizing rhetoric coming from our country’s leaders.

For some years I taught a course at Carleton College on “Religious and Moral Issues of the Holocaust.”  On the last day of the course, I would read a final statement to the class about the limits of what I thought such a class could accomplish, and what I thought were the “lessons” of those events for our time.  It read, in part:

Confronting the Holocaust is not the sort of thing one can write a good 5-page paper about; it is not measurable in letter grades.  It is something that shakes us to the core.  . . .each of us bears the awful responsibility to choose between good and evil, between elevating humanity and degrading it. . . .  We can resolve to increase our moral sensitivity to all those who are marginalized and oppressed, knowing that the Holocaust is but one extreme example of what has happened and could happen again to others.  We can look to the example of the farmers in Le Chambon and the fishermen in Denmark and try to emulate their courage.  In short, we can maximize our potential for goodness and we can stand firm in our commitment never to negate one another’s humanity--not even a little bit, not even if the state requires it and our clergy people tell us that God permits it. 

That is what I think we can take away with us.  And that is not something that I know how to teach or to grade.  Ultimately, life will give you a chance to demonstrate what you have learned from your study of the Holocaust. Whatever grade you get in this course, I hope and trust that, on the only test that finally matters, you will not fail.  

It begins with negating the humanity of others.  When such dehumanization becomes government policy, our moral obligation is clear.  We must reaffirm the humanity of all, emphatically and unceasingly.  Every day, each of us has the opportunity, in hundreds of ways large and small, to fulfill that obligation.