I was looking for when in history we have heard rhetoric like this from the highest offices. My first thought was “let them eat cake” before the French Revolution. Like most things, someone has a book about it. His list of dehumanization goes back to
Medieval times Jews depicted as hybrid creatures
The Willmington Massacre in 1898 where people trying to form a bi-racial gov’t were killed
Nazi depictions of Jews as half rat/half human
US military descriptions of the Japanese
Iran
Hamas - the most recent
He goes into the idea of a hierarchy to the universe, saying this is ingrained in our thinking, although he admits there is debate. To get people to do something like (at 27 min) watch a lynching like they did back in 1893, as a family event, people need to see the victims as lower on that hierarchy. He also discusses monsters in books and movies, which is interesting.
Then (at 37) he brings in authorities. We are “ultra-social” and see humanness in faces, we need this care for each other or we couldn’t survive. AND, we have a trust in authority, it goes hand-in-hand with the trust and care for each other. When an authority says a human isn’t a human, rational thinking has a way to process that. One of the slides has an illustration from Ernst Haeckel, showing an African man with Great Apes. This was accepted around 1890. I couldn’t find the picture, maybe that’s good.
The conclusion then, is, we see humans but throughout history we know people called each other “non-human”. We can trace those to someone claimed authority that taught this.
Edit: oops forgot the YouTube
