15 March 2013
By Kayla Chang, Copy Editor
Someone once told me that when he thought of Hitler, he thought of him not as a dictator or evil incarnate, but as a young boy who grew up wanting nothing more than to be happy. Images of Hitler have since existed in my mind as surreal fusions of past and present, of his life and mine. I imagine him walking along the beach, ocean waves bleeding through his toes like skin through lace, maybe stopping once in a while to pick up a seashell or trace swastikas in the sand. He tells his dad that he doesn’t want to sit in a cubicle for the rest of life like some mindless automaton, and instead wants to paint colors on the blank of canvas, and terror on the face of Jews. He delivers drunken late-night monologues about how suicidal he feels to a naked lover, who stares vacantly at the twitching fuzz of his mustache. He organizes Facebook events: “Assemble, Brownshirts, for we must stamp all opposition into the ground. Terror must be broken by terror. BYOB!!!1”
Point is, I humanized Hitler. Hitler wasn’t some calculating genius who worked his way to the top using the foresight of a chess master; he was just an angry high school dropout.
Let me be clear: Hitler was obviously a monster. But only figuratively, not literally. He possessed certain traits that predisposed him to evil deeds, and he happened to exist in a particular social climate that facilitated his actions.
We tend to dehumanize the dehumanizers. We feed mythologies that elevate them to the level of a demigod because we refuse to comprehend the banality of evil. We explain the complexities of historical and contemporary outcomes in disproportionately simple terms and, in doing so, make light of social problems.
This tendency colors our political attitudes. In the face of injustice, we retaliate with further injustice. But man has to prove that he does not deserve so much injustice, that his greatness lies in his decision to be stronger than it. And to do that, he must be just himself. Injustice exists in our self-imposed blind spots. Truth is lost in miles of false reasoning, cloaked in deceptively beautiful doctrines.
Shift the focus from gun control to mental health, though mental illness accounts for one out of ten gun-related deaths. Pretend that gun violence is perpetrated by a united legion of ax-wielding homicidal maniacs, foaming at the mouth, screaming for the death of the Lord Demon Balam. Herd them up like cattle. Gut their brains with rusty ice cream scoops. Ignore the wide range of socioeconomic disadvantages that propagate gun violence and, in accordance with the pattern of human history, blame the mentally ill.
Kill our killers, because justice can apparently be bought only with the blood of men. Support a penalty that is uncivilized in theory and unfair and inequitable in practice, a penalty that is imposed disproportionately on those who are of color, those whose victims are white, those who are poor and uneducated and concentrated in certain geographic locations. Refuse to recognize it for what it essentially is: a revenge. An emotion disguised as principle. An impulse related to nature and instinct, not to law.
Support our government as it embarks on killing sprees with unmanned aerial vehicles, sending them everywhere from [REDACTED] to [REDACTED]. Applaud its valor as it operates beyond the reach of legal oversight. As dead bodies pile up in mounds. Read stories of mistaken identity, of faceless remains, of women and children killed. But tell yourself it’s okay, that the immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers is for the greater good. Tell yourself the doves of peace perch on the wings of a drone.
When we dehumanize, we forget what man is capable of, for better and for worse. By dehumanizing each other, we isolate ourselves. In isolation, your despair becomes your strength. And when left long enough alone, that despair becomes a weapon of merciless power. We are breeding our own monsters. We are dealing an injustice to mankind as a whole by failing to take into account the misery of our common condition.
People are too readily resigned to fatality. Too ready to believe that progress lies in bloodshed. And whatever truth there is in that, our task is never to serve the cruel and inhuman elements in such truths.