On Being Human by Osman Latiff

Distance is not simply a physical space; it is a moral and psychological construct as well. In this way, range also is defined by the perpetrators’ perception of the victims. Face-to-face killing is enabled when the victims have been through a lethal rite of passage in which they have already died a “social death” in the eyes of the perpetrators.

Col. Dave Grossman in his popular work, ‘On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society’ details what makes it easy (or easier) for a person to kill. He considers the distance spectrum as a vital indicator, seeing it as a defining range - from maximum range to hand-to-hand combat. Distance from a victim disallows individual identification with that victim. Firing a weapon or dropping a bomb from a range converts the victims into ‘unknown’ targets, a mesh of nothingness easily ‘obliterated’. The aircraft pilot relies on mechanical assistance; a projected image showing silhouetted victims spotted on a screen. The physical distance facilitates the killing and therefore responsibility and guilt are stemmed. What distance creates is an emotional disassociating with the target, and thus disallowing feelings of empathy. Grossman found that with physical distance in killing, there is no “…one single instance of individuals who have refused to kill the enemy under these circumstances” and nor “a single instance of psychiatric trauma associated with this type of killing.”75

As this range between perpetrator and victim decreases, the killing becomes far more difficult. What a perpetrator would be exposed to is human codes of recognisability wherein much of ourselves is observable and felt in others. The Qur’ān informs us that at the base level we are similar in so many ways:

49:13 - People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another. In God’s eyes, the most honoured of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware.

The closer a perpetrator perceives his victim the more difficult a killing becomes, unless and until those victims have already experienced a ‘social death’ wherein victims are pushed to the margins of what is socially acceptable, excommunicated from the norms of what is moral in society, relegated to a state of dishonour into which their descendants will also be born.

These factors, Patterson argues, mean that their subsequent generations will be prevented from building on the traditions of their forefathers. Social death therefore necessitates the burgeoning of genocidal tendencies, because the lives of victims of genocide have already been rendered meaningless. This dehumanisation targets group identity. Primo Levi lamented that with the Nazis stripping everything of Jewish self-identity and even their names. The only thing which they can retain is the meaning of themselves from the names they once had:

“Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.”76

Dehumanisation begins with a stripping away of the moral human code which bonds us as human beings. The social vitality behind a person or group is stripped away and this defacing precedes any physical injury or death inflicted on that victim. It is important for the Muslim to always afford a customary privilege to the one with whom he is engaged. The Prophet (peace be upon him) would refer to people with their titles, recognise their social standing and bear testimony to their achievements. These factors are essential not only for the progression of effective relationship building, but also as a preventative in the social emerging of genocidal tendencies, providing a positive social backdrop if any community or ethnicity is targeted. In less-than-rare situations, this, in a broad context, is a fulfilment of a coming out “for the good of mankind” since it maintains a social cohesiveness and disallows the saplings of social death from being planted or spread. In Germany, long before the physical deaths of Jews began, ordinary German men and women made Jews suffer a social death every day. This is felt evocatively in Filip Müller’s description of the Family Camp taken to Auschwitz. In his description, we are alerted to a decimation of what Müller views as a social order in which Jews were once protected. In his words, he describes a communal social death in which his familiar landscape had been disfigured and a sense of place and belonging denied:

“Now, when I watched my fellow countrymen walk into the gas chamber, brave, proud and determined, I asked myself what sort exemplary of life it would be for me in the unlikely event of my getting out of the camp alive. What would await me if I returned to my native town? It was not so much a matter of material possessions, they were replaceable. But who could replace my parents, my brother, or the rest of my family, of whom I was the sole survivor? And what of friends, teachers, and the many members of our Jewish community?

For was it not they who reminded me of my childhood and youth? Without them would it not all be soulless and dead, that familiar outline of my home town with its pretty river, its much loved landscape and its honest and upright citizens? And what would happen if I ran across the Hlinka guardsmen and Jew tormentors, or the FS men*, leeches all of them who had sucked their Jewish fellow citizens dry before their deportation and stolen their worldly belongings? Coming face to face with them would take me back to the darkest past. It would simply not be possible to pick up the threads of my former happy and carefree life. In our house, once the centre of my existence, there would be strangers. In the Jewish school where I knew every nook and cranny there would be silence.”77

S. Yizhar describes in his novella Khirbet Khizeh, the violent expulsion of Palestinians from the village of Khirbet Khizeh in 1948 and considers the struggle in conscience of a perpetrator. At once challenged by self-reflection and temporalities of space, this serves as a medium for consideration of human boundaries related to suffering, victimhood and belonging. Yizhar shows in Khirbet Khizeh how those sites are in flux, as the villagers are pushed out and the young occupiers imagine a new home. It is in the frame of collective indifference of the soldiers that the narrator can see the mental ‘unabandoning’ of the home.

He sees:

“walls attentively decorated…little ornaments that hung on the walls, testifying to a loving care whose foundation had been eradicated; traces of female-wisdom-hath-builded-her-house, paying close attention to myriad details whose time now had passed; an order intelligible to someone and a disorder in which somebody at his convenience had found his way; remnants of pots and pans that had been collected in a haphazard fashion, as need arose, touched by very private joys and woes that a stranger could not understand; tatters that made sense to someone who was used to them – a way of life whose meaning was lost, diligence that had reached its negation, and a great, very deep muteness had settled upon the love, the bustle, the bother, the hopes, and the good and less-good times, so many unburied corpses.”78

As we navigate through life, we see in the distress of another that there may be a potential for similar imagined distress in one’s own life. Yizhar describes:

“The people who would live in this village – wouldn’t the walls cry out in their ears? Those sights, screams that were screamed and that were not screamed, the confused innocence of dazed sheep, the submissiveness of the weak, and their heroism, that unique heroism of the weak who didn’t know what to do and were unable to do anything, the silenced weak – would the new settlers not sense that the air here was heavy with shades, voices, and stares?”79

It is the patent presence of another in a space made up of “screams that were…not screamed”, as well as having been screamed, juxtaposed with the sounds of the “silenced weak” that makes the account so harrowing and yet so instructive:

“I felt a terrifying collapse inside me. I had a single, set idea, like a hammered nail, that I could never be reconciled to anything, so long as the tears of a weeping child still glistened as he walked along with his mother, who furiously fought back her soundless tears, on his way into exile, bearing with him a roar of injustice and such scream that – it was impossible that no one in his world would gather that scream in when the moment came – and then I said to Moshe: “We have no right, Moishe, to kick them out of here!” I didn’t want my voice to tremble.”80

And so, various techniques of depersonalization are put into action, aimed at helping perpetrators forget the humanity of their victims. One such technique is a transformation before being killed. In the Holocaust for example, Jews were forced to congregate naked and to be herded together. An impression of Otherness was created around the naked mass of bodies moving along the camp in abject terror and bewilderment. Being stripped of their clothing was akin to being stripped of their humanity since the dissimilarity between what was normal and abnormal was too striking. The visual display of otherness was then extended to ensuring that the behaviour of such victims was too remote and unhuman. The Nazis did this by subjecting them to a starvation. In the extremity of such situations where inmates were forced to live in their own filth, they were reduced to a nothingness.

Similarly, Russian prisoners of war, Höss who was ironically responsible for creating such conditions, said, “They were no longer men…They’d turned into beasts who thought only about eating.”81 Wolters surmises that the sexual humiliation of Iraqi men depicted in the Abu Ghraib pictures implies audience identification with the American soldiers and thus incorporates viewers as participants in a neo-colonial narrative in which an inferior Arab Other is dominated by his Western invader.

Their creating of an iconic spectacle of torture and the staging of human trauma renders them comparable to photographs of black lynching victims which contrast the projection of black suffering with the mode of bystanding in white spectators.82 This conditioning of victims and Othering was a necessary step to ensure that guards carried out their policies without the emotional burden of guilt. The natural way is to humanise, to place onto another what one sees in oneself. The example of Hābīl, having murdered his brother is important here in that he transitioned from pathological envy to entrenched regret over his actions. In observing a raven scratching away at the earth, he realises that the disfigurement of his brother and of the earth upon which he rests require a hiding away, so as to normalise and repair what had been lost:

5:30 - But his soul prompted him to kill his brother: he killed him and became one of the losers.

5:31 - God sent a raven to scratch up the ground and show him how to cover his brother’s corpse and he said, ‘Woe is me! Could I not have been like this raven and covered up my brother’s body?’ He became remorseful.

The choice Allāh makes of a crow is also remarkable:

“Take the magpie. Applying the same sham-mark design as used with dolphins and elephants, a recent study has shown mirror self-recognition in magpies. Now, mind you, the magpie isn’t just any bird: It is a corvid, a family that includes crows, ravens, and jays, endowed with exceptionally large brains. Put in front of a mirror, magpies will try to remove a tiny colored sticker attached to their throat feathers. They will keep scratching with their foot until the mark is gone, but will leave a black mark alone probably because it doesn’t stand out against their black throat. They also won’t do any frantic scratching if there’s no mirror to see themselves in.”83

It is very interesting that the magpie was unable to tolerate a foreign substance on its body. It was able to detect an abnormality and sought to remove it. Similarly, the raven that began to scratch the earth taught Hābīl that his brother needed to be buried, that a deceased body belongs under the earth. The vileness of murder defiles both the earth and the human conscience, and this realisation produced a self-awakening of remorse within him. It is far easier for a person to disconnect from one he cannot associate with, and the differences heralded by a process of Othering deny the human codes of recognisability that enter us into a collective frame of what we call ‘humanity’. In Phillip Caputo 1977 memoir, A Rumor Of War, about his service in the United States Marine Corps (USMC) in the early years of the Vietnam War, he describes the graphic death of a Viet Cong boy and writes lucidly about the way accessing another’s ‘humanity’ by considering the human codes of recognisability that connect us all would necessitate a re-framing of that Other:

“There was nothing on him, no photographs, no letters, or identification. That would disappoint the intelligence, but it was fine with me. I wanted this boy to remain anonymous. I wanted to think of him not human being with a name, age, and family, but as a dead enemy.

That made everything easier.”84