距离不仅仅是一种物理空间，它同样是一种道德和心理的建构。由此可见，距离也是由施害者对受害者的认知所界定的。当受害者在施害者眼中已经经历了一场致命的通过仪式，并已经在其眼中“社会性死亡”时，面对面的杀戮才会成为可能。

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.

柯林·戴夫·格罗斯曼上校在其广受欢迎的著作《论杀戮：战争与社会中学习杀人的心理代价》中，详细论述了哪些因素使人更容易（或更轻易）杀人。他将距离谱视为一个关键指标，认为它是一个决定性的范围，从最远距离一直延伸到近身肉搏。与受害者保持距离，使人无法将受害者作为个体来识别。从一定距离开枪或投弹，会把受害者变成“未知”的目标，成为一团易于“抹除”的虚无。飞行员依赖机械辅助，屏幕上投射出被剪影化的受害者图像，供其定位。物理距离促成了杀戮，因此责任感与罪疚感也随之减弱。距离所造成的，是人与目标之间的情感疏离，从而使同情心无从生起。格罗斯曼发现，在物理距离之外进行杀戮时，“…没有一例个人在这种情况下拒绝杀死敌人”，也“没有一例与这类杀戮相关的精神创伤”。75

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

随着施害者与受害者之间的这种距离缩小，杀人就变得困难得多。施害者所面对的，是人类之间可被辨认的共同特征，即我们自身的许多方面都能在他人身上被看见、被感受到。《古兰经》告诉我们，在最基本的层面上，我们在许多方面是相似的：

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 - 人类啊！我们从一男一女创造了你们，又使你们成为各个民族和部落，以便你们彼此认识。在真主眼中，你们中最尊贵的，是最敬畏他的人：真主是全知的，是洞察一切的。

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.

凶手越是觉得受害者与自己亲近，杀害就越困难；除非这些受害者已经经历了“社会性死亡”——即被推到社会可接受范围的边缘，被逐出社会道德规范之外，沦为一种耻辱的境地，而他们的后代也将生而处于这种境地。

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.

这些因素，帕特森认为，意味着他们的后代将无法继承其先辈的传统。因此，社会性死亡必然助长种族灭绝倾向，因为种族灭绝受害者的生命已经被剥夺了意义。这种非人化针对的是群体认同。普里莫·莱维曾哀叹，纳粹剥夺了犹太人的一切自我认同，甚至包括他们的名字。他们唯一能够保留的，只是曾经拥有的名字所承载的自我意义：

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:

“我们已经一无所有了；他们夺走了我们的衣服、我们的鞋子，甚至我们的头发；我们若开口说话，他们不会听；即便听了，也不会明白。他们甚至会夺走我们的名字：而如果我们想保住它，就必须在自己内心找到力量去守住，设法让名字背后仍然留存一些属于我们的东西，留存我们曾经的样子。”76

“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

剥夺人类赖以相互联结的道德准则，是非人化的开端。一个人或一个群体所拥有的社会活力被剥离，这种对其尊严的毁损先于对受害者施加的任何身体伤害或死亡。穆斯林应当始终给予与其交往之人应有的礼遇。先知ﷺ会以其头衔称呼众人，承认他们的社会地位，并为他们的成就作证。这些因素不仅对于有效建立关系至关重要，也能预防种族灭绝倾向在社会中萌生，即便某个社群或族群遭到针对，也能提供积极的社会背景。在并不罕见的情形中，从广义上讲，这也是为了"人类的福祉"而挺身而出的体现，因为它维系了社会的凝聚力，使社会死亡的幼苗无法被种下或蔓延。 在德国，早在犹太人遭受肉体死亡之前，普通的德国男女就每天让犹太人经历社会性的死亡。菲利普·米勒（Filip Müller）对被押往奥斯维辛的"家庭营"的描述，极具感染力地传达了这一点。在他的描述中，我们注意到他所认为的那种曾经保护犹太人的社会秩序遭到了摧毁。他写道，一种群体性的社会死亡降临了：他熟悉的景观被毁得面目全非，归属感与安身之所被剥夺殆尽。

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:

“现在，当我看着我的同胞们昂首挺胸、勇敢而坚定地走进毒气室时，我问自己：万一我侥幸活着走出集中营，我的生活该是什么样的典范呢？如果我回到故乡的小镇，又会面对什么？这不完全是物质财富的问题，那些东西是可以再得到的。但谁能取代我的父母、我的兄弟，或是我家中其他的亲人？我是他们唯一的幸存者。还有朋友、老师，以及我们犹太社群中的许多人，又该怎么办呢？”

“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?

难道不正是它们让我想起了童年和青年时代吗？没有它们，这一切岂不都会变得毫无生气、死气沉沉吗？那熟悉的故乡轮廓，那条秀美的河流，那令人深爱的风景，还有那些诚实正直的市民。如果我遇见霍琳卡的卫兵和迫害犹太人的暴徒，或是FS的人*——这些水蛭一般的家伙，在犹太同胞被驱逐之前吸干了他们的血汗，并夺走了他们的世俗财产——与他们迎面相遇，就会把我拉回最黑暗的过去。我根本无法重新拾起从前那快乐无忧的生活。我们的房子曾是我生命的中心，如今却会住进陌生人；我曾熟悉每一个角落的犹太学校，如今只剩下死一般的寂静。77

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. 伊扎尔在其中篇小说《赫尔贝特·希兹》中描写了1948年巴勒斯坦人从希兹村被暴力驱逐的经过，并思考了一名加害者良心上的挣扎。作品既受到自我反省的冲击，也受到空间时间性的牵引，成为思考与苦难、受害与归属相关的人类边界的媒介。伊扎尔在《赫尔贝特·希兹》中展示了这些地点如何处于流动之中：村民被赶走，年轻的占领者则在想象一个新的家园。正是在士兵集体冷漠的框架之中，叙述者才得以看见那种精神上的“不被放弃”的家园。

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.

他看见：

He sees:

“墙壁精心装饰……悬挂在墙上的小摆件，见证着一种如今根基已被抹去的悉心照料；处处留存着“女人以智慧建造她的家”的痕迹，细致入微地呈现着无数早已逝去的时光细节；一种秩序，对某个人而言是清晰可辨的，而一种混乱，则是另一个人随心所欲地闯入其中；一堆锅碗瓢盆的残件，因需要而随手聚拢，沾染着外人无法理解的私密欢喜与忧愁；破布碎片，只对习惯了它们的人才有意义——一种生活方式，其意义已然消失，勤勉已抵达它的反面，而一种深沉而巨大的沉默，笼罩了那些爱、喧闹、琐碎、希望，以及好与不那么好的时光，仿佛无数尚未埋葬的尸骸。”78

“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

当我们穿行于人生之中时，我们在他人的苦难中看到，自己的生活里也可能潜藏着类似的、想象中的苦难。Yizhar描述道：

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:

“住在这个村庄里的人们——难道墙壁不会在他们耳边哭诉吗？那些景象，那些喊叫过的与未曾喊出的尖叫，那些茫然无措的羔羊般的懵懂无辜，那些弱者的顺从，还有他们的英勇——那种独一无二的英勇，属于不知所措、无能为力的弱者，属于那些被沉默的弱者——新来的定居者难道感觉不到这里的空气沉重，充满了幽影、声音与注视吗？”79

“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

正是这种另一个人的明显在场——在一个由“未被尖叫的尖叫”，以及已经被尖叫出的尖叫所构成的空间中，再加上与“被沉默的弱者”之声的并置，使这段叙述既令人痛心，又极具启示。

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:

“我感到内心一阵可怕的崩塌。我心中有一个固定不变的念头,像一根被锤子钉牢的钉子:只要那个孩子的泪水还挂在脸上,只要他跟着母亲一起走上流放之路,而母亲正愤怒地强忍着无声的眼泪,只要他身上背负着不公的怒吼,而那声呼喊——到了时候,他的世界里不可能没有人去接住那声呼喊——我就永远无法接受任何事情。然后我对摩西说:‘莫伊谢,我们没有权利把他们赶出这里!’我不想让自己的声音颤抖。”80

“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

因此,各种非人化手段被付诸实施,旨在帮助施害者忘记受害者的人性。其中一种手段是在杀害之前对受害者进行改造。例如在大屠杀中,犹太人被迫赤身裸体聚集在一起,并被驱赶成群。赤身裸体、在营地中惊恐万分、茫然无措地移动的人群,给人造成了一种"他者"的印象。剥去衣物就等同于剥去人性,因为正常与异常之间的差异过于明显。随后,这种"他者"的视觉呈现又被延伸到确保受害者的行为显得遥远而非人类。纳粹的做法是对他们施以饥饿。在被迫生活于自身污秽之中的极端处境下,囚犯们被降至一无所有的境地。

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.

同样,苏联战俘也是如此。讽刺的是,正是霍斯(Höss)制造了这样的条件,他说:“他们已经不再是人了……他们变成了只想着吃东西的野兽。”81 沃尔特斯(Wolters)推测,阿布格莱布照片中所描绘的对伊拉克男性的性羞辱,暗示了观者对美国士兵的认同,从而将观看者纳入一种新殖民主义叙事之中:在这一叙事里,低劣的阿拉伯“他者”被其西方入侵者所支配。

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.

他们制造出这种标志性的酷刑景象、将人类创伤搬上舞台，使其与黑人私刑受害者的照片具有可比性。这些照片将黑人的苦难与白人旁观者的旁观姿态形成对照。56 这种对受害者的规训与“他者化”，是确保看守执行其政策而不必承受内疚之负担的必要步骤。自然的做法是人性化，即将自己所见的自身投射到他人身上。哈比勒的例子在此十分重要：他杀害了自己的兄弟，由病态的嫉妒转而陷入对自身行为根深蒂固的悔恨。在观察一只乌鸦刨挖泥土时，他意识到兄弟遗体的毁损以及他所躺卧的大地的毁损，都需要将其掩埋起来，以使所失之物恢复常态并得以修复：

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 - 但他的私欲怂恿他杀害自己的兄弟:他杀了他,于是成为了败亡者中的一员。

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

5:31 - 神派了一只乌鸦去刨地，向他示范如何掩埋他兄弟的尸体。他说："哎呀，我真没用！我难道不能像这只乌鸦一样，掩埋我兄弟的尸体吗？"他因此感到懊悔。

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.

真主选择乌鸦这件事，也同样令人惊叹。

The choice Allāh makes of a crow is also remarkable:

“以喜鹊为例。运用与海豚和大象研究中相同的“假标记”设计，最近一项研究表明，喜鹊能够通过镜子辨认自己。需要说明的是，喜鹊并非普通的鸟类：它属于鸦科，该科还包括乌鸦、渡鸦和松鸦，拥有异常发达的大脑。把喜鹊放在镜子前，它们会试图去除喉部羽毛上一个小小的彩色贴纸。它们会用爪子不停地抓挠，直到标记消失，但对黑色的标记则不予理会，大概是因为它在它们黑色的喉部羽毛上并不显眼。如果附近没有可以照见自己的镜子，它们也不会这样急切地抓挠。”83

“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

很有意思的是，喜鹊无法容忍身上有异物，它能察觉到异常并设法将其除去。同样，开始刨土的乌鸦也教导了哈比勒，他的兄弟需要被埋葬，逝者的身体理应埋入地下。谋杀的丑恶既玷污了大地，也玷污了人的良知，这一认识在他心中唤起了悔恨的自我觉醒。一个人要与自己无法认同的人断绝联系，要容易得多；而“他者化”过程所凸显的差异，否定了使我们进入所谓“人性”这一集体框架的人类相互辨认的符码。菲利普·卡普托在1977年的回忆录《越战传闻》（A Rumor Of War）中，记述了他早年在美国海军陆战队（USMC）服役、参与越战初期的经历。他描写了一个越共男孩惨烈的死亡，并清晰地阐述了：通过考虑那些将我们所有人联结在一起的人类辨认符码来理解他人的“人性”，将要求我们重新构建对那个“他者”的认知。

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:

“他身上什么都没有，没有照片，没有信件，也没有身份证件。这会让情报部门失望，但对我来说无所谓。我希望这个男孩保持匿名。我希望把他看作一个死去的敌人，而不是一个有名字、年龄和家庭的人。”

“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.

“这让一切变得容易多了。”84

That made everything easier.”84