Dehumanization, part three of three

Finally, my third class from last week. (I wish I had more time to blog.) My third class is History of the Holocaust and perhaps it's obvious that Nazi victims were dehumanized. Yet the particulars about how they were dehumanized came to be highlighted as we turned to a new part of the course about "culpability," in other words, we turned to examining perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers (including resisters). An excerpt from Lifton's work on Nazi doctors highlighted how the use of language distanced the doctors from the prisoners of Auschwitz, making them into things other than human beings in their minds. An excerpt from Browning's famous Ordinary Men made plain that not all perpetrators were able to dehumanize the victims, but that most could become used to killing civilians.

None of the readings intended to excuse the "willing participants" (a phrase we came up with to describe and encompass all who exhibited behavior that did not help the victims), but it was clearly difficult for students not to keep very clear the distinction between understanding a person's behavior and exculpating a person.

Dehumanization, part two of three

In my Wednesday class, on Europe from 1789 to the present, we discussed readings about the First World War. A common theme that jumped out to us from Sassoon's poetry, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Sholokov's Quiet Flows the Don, and even Juenger's The Storm of Steel was the moment a main character had to decide whether to kill the person, the enemy, right in front of him. It seemed to us that each of these stories at some point dealt with the question, why not kill that person? A main character was forced to see the enemy as an individual human. Sometimes this moment resulted in the main character choosing not to kill, sometimes this moment came too late. Against much writing and promotion of duty -- whether the duty owed to one's nation as in, for example, another reading we had from Bernhardi which argued the necessity of war in the abstract, or the duty that overrides one's panic in the trenches as in Juenger's writing -- there certainly seemed to be common theme to undo the dehumanization that had been done.

Dehumanization, part one of three

I don't think I have enough time this semester to devote to blogging. But I promised to post about the theme of dehumanization appearing in all three of my classes last, so here goes part one in what looks to be a three-part post.

In my Tuesday class the history of the crusades, we started talking about the different perspectives of the participants (willing or not) in the crusades. One of the assigned readings, "The Crusaders' Perceptions of Their Opponents," by Margaret Jubb, discusses the labels used by (Latin) Christian chroniclers. She asserts, "It is significant that the term 'Muslim' is absent from medieval sources. Instead, the crusaders' opponents are variously described by the chroniclers as 'infidels', 'Gentiles', 'enemies of Christ/God', and above all, 'pagans'." [This is on page 228 of the book, Palgrave Advances in the Crusades, edited by Helen Nicholson. Someday blogging will advance enough to allow a respectable footnote.] This is an interesting observation, but it would have been more interesting had her article discussed more than just the crusaders' Muslim opponents. How did chroniclers label other opponents? Did they also insist on ignoring evidence that contradicted their views of their other opponents the same way that they ignored evidence about Muslims' religious practices? (Jubb points out how the chroniclers ignored evidence of Muslims' monotheistic and aniconic religion. - p. 229) By comparing the use of labels, I think her argument regarding the use of the "other" to define themselves would have been broadened, strengthened, and enabled to ask more probing questions about medieval perceptions of the "other."

A theme across all my classes this week (will post more later)

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)

A run of run-on sentences

I had a lot of grading to do over spring break. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe it was just that once I started noticing them I kept noticing them, but there was an inordinate number of run-on sentences in the papers. I hope not to find them in the midterms I still haven't graded.