The use of language to dehumanize - Guest article by Wayne Collett

My husband Wayne and I have been involved in Christian ministry, disability advocacy, aged care and protection of the unborn for decades. We have followed the course of legislation in our country of Australia and elsewhere which has been both favourable for some of these groups and sadly, which has in some cases been extremely detrimental to the wellbeing of some, particularly in the area of abortion. In the state in which I live, Queensland, a baby can now be killed in the womb from conception right up to the whole of the third trimester and the politicians who enacted this legislation were shown on television hugging and congratulating themselves for passing it.

This guest article by my husband Wayne is an examination of how the terminology, or the words we use, gives an indication of how human life is viewed. I pray that the reader will find it thought provoking and a valuable resource. May God bless you as you read.

The use of language as a tool for desensitisation to the taking of human life, particularly in an otherwise civilised society

 

Recently, when responding to a vile affirmation of the murder of Charlie Kirk, which sadly came from a member of my extended family, I was on the receiving end of an outpouring of vitriol that ranged from an accusation that religion is the greatest threat to humanity to the Palestinian question to aborted children being nothing more than clumps of cells.

I was taken aback by the sheer level of hate that can spawn from the simple declaration that violence is never the answer to an opposing idea, which ironically emphatically proved the point I was trying to make.

This has prompted me to address firstly the veracity of the accusations levelled against religion and secondly to explore the use of language as a tool to support or incite violence.

To begin let’s look at their claim that religion (and knowing the person who made the statement I am confident they meant Christianity in particular) has been responsible for more deaths and suffering than any other motivator or ideology in history.

Personally I think most people with a reasonable level of education and a capacity for rational examination of history and evidence would dismiss such a claim outright, however if the reader considers this is, or may be the case then I would ask them to weigh the following and draw their own conclusion.

Firstly, have there been cases of harm or death done in the name of Christianity? Unfortunately the answer is yes. From the death tolls of the crusades and the inquisitions to the suffering of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of people, churches and institutions that claim Christian affiliation, the claims are undeniable. However as genuine bible-believing Christians should know, these actions are not consistent with the teachings of Christ and are therefore not Christian in their application. True followers of Christ do not commit murder, rape, incest or paedophilia. To be a follower of Christ is to share in His example of service and suffering. This whole premise would be akin to discovering a serial killer had the same surname as you and suddenly finding people are judging or avoiding you because of that commonality.

In the case of the crusades however, it could be said that they were a Christian political or military foil to the rise of Islam as it swept through the middle east and across the southern Mediterranean and that their determination to expel Islam from the holy land was motivated by the notion that the land had been defiled.

Likewise the inquisitions were a manifestation of brutality and violence that was motivated by a desire to strictly control doctrine and dogma within the catholic world. This is most evident by the response the early church had towards those believers who sought to disseminate the word of God by translating it into the vernacular so that it could be made more accessible to those who wanted a closer relationship with their creator. Early bible translators paid with their lives and this was motivated by nothing more than the desire of the church authorities (the pope, cardinals, bishops and priests) to maintain ultimate power and authority over the laity.

However, during the entire history of the church the vast majority of believers have been people dedicating their lives to the pursuit of growing in their relationship with God and serving others sacrificially as Christ demonstrated.

The explosion of understanding and revelation following the reformation begun by Martin Luther was an unshackling of God’s word that transformed a captured church into the bride God intended for His son.

Despite the failings attributed to the church through the evil intent of individuals following their own anti-Christian desires, the claim that Christianity has been the prime source of death and suffering over the last two millennia is simply egregious and not substantiated in any way.

 

What allows evil to flourish?

This work examines the ideologies that have spawned the orgies of hate particularly seen over the last one hundred or so years.

From this examination it is apparent that a common strategy of the oppressors is to co-opt the general population into their murderous intent, often by the use of language, imagery and propaganda with the intent to dehumanise the targets of their hatred.

 

What is Dehumanizing propaganda?

This is portraying a target group as vermin, disease, animals, or sub-human and has been a recurrent precursor and facilitator of mass killing in the last 100–200 years.

Scholars distinguish forms of dehumanization (e. g. , animalistic — likening people to animals, vermin, or parasites — and mechanistic — treating people like objects or machines). Dehumanizing language reduces empathy, increases moral disengagement, and makes violence easier for both leaders and ordinary participants to accept.

Scholars of genocide emphasise that dehumanization is one of several social-psychological and political building blocks (alongside ideology, political opportunism, historical grievances, and organizational capacity) that commonly precede genocides and mass atrocities.

Across multiple historical episodes, perpetrators and propagandists used a recurrent vocabulary and set of frames:

·         Vermin/pest metaphors (rats, cockroaches, insects) implying exterminability and contagion.

·         Disease/parasite metaphors (infection, contamination) implying the target threatens the body politic.

·         De-human descriptors (beasts, sub-human, vermin) to reduce empathy and legal/moral protections.

·         Existential threat framing (they are an internal enemy/traitors/plotters) to justify pre-emptive violence.

·         Cultural-civilisational frames (foreigners/aliens/outsiders) to justify “cleansing”.

These patterns recur because they leverage basic psychological responses (disgust, fear, disgust-induced moral exclusion) and can be transmitted efficiently by mass media, state institutions, religious or paramilitary channels.

The following examples demonstrate how language has been used to dehumanise certain ethnic, racial or political groups in order to justify their elimination.

Many readers will recognise the well-known instances of genocide or mass killings listed here however as will be shown, there is one particular case not generally associated as a genocide that far outstrips anything seen before in all of human history.

This document examines historical cases where such rhetoric was used to desensitise populations and mobilise perpetrators. I will also examine another case, rarely considered a genocide but which outstrips their combined numbers by a significant margin.

I will show how the same strategies are being employed today in regard to one particular genocide to make allies among the general population and quash dissent when questioned.

 

The Holocaust

Generally regarded as occurring between 1933 and 1945 the Holocaust was the attempted systematic extermination of the Jewish race. It was conducted in part under the justification of the Eugenics movement which had its origins in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The essence of eugenics is the desire to purify the racial profile of a nation by the systematic elimination of people of undesirable races, ethnicities or disabilities. It was this ideology that underpinned Hitler’s desire to create an Aryan master race of blonde-haired blue-eyed super men and women. In his twisted mind not only were Jews inferior genetically and socially but were also largely responsible for Germany’s economic woes after its defeat that ended the first world war.

Jews were seen to possess disproportionate control over national finances through the banking and lending institutions and were also seen as more immune to the impacts of the hyper-inflation that ravaged Germany after world war one due to their ability through their wealth to diversify their investments in foreign sources, thereby making them less impacted by internal economic woes.

In order to bring the general population on board with Hitler’s ideology a campaign of demonisation of the Jewish people was begun. Movie theatres would show propaganda films in which the Jews were characterised as rats which had grown to plague proportions and therefore needed to be culled in the interest of national purity. In this way the Nazis were able to dehumanise a whole sector of the European population and thereby justify their extermination.

The repetition of biological and vermin metaphors helped normalise dispossession and violence by framing Jews as a public-health problem or pest to be eradicated rather than fellow citizens.

By May 1945 it is estimated that six million (6,000,000) men women and children had been murdered. This figure doesn’t include Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals and other groups deemed undesirable, not to mention political opponents and the resistance movements.

 

Stalin’s Ukrainian Famine and the Great Purge

After the death of Vladimir Lenin the Soviet Union was ruled by Joseph Stalin, a man who transformed Lenin’s more pure Marxist vision for the USSR into more of a personality cult, somewhat akin to the Kim dynasty of North Korea today.

Stalin had a Russia-centric view of the USSR. This became evident in the early 1930’s when he virtually starved the people of Ukraine by commandeering their food production to supplement Russia.

During what became known as the Holodomor famine an estimated three and a half million (3,500,000) people died of starvation in Ukraine. In order to justify this to the general population he labelled Ukraine as a hot-bed of counter-revolutionaries and class-enemies and ultimately a threat to the security of the union.

Alongside and continuing throughout his rule, Stalin conducted what became known as the Great Purge, a systematic eradication of opponents with counter ideologies.

During this time people were encouraged to denounce anyone who was perceived as being less than 100% committed. This of course was fertile ground for abuse to settle old scores. The same thing was seen in China under Mao as well as Islamic theocracies implementing Sharia law.

It is estimated a further one and a half million (1,500,000) Soviet citizens were killed under the great purge. Therefore conservatively Stalin was probably responsible for around five million (5,000,000) deaths collectively.

 

Other significant genocides/mass killings

Alongside these examples are the Khmer Rouge atrocities of dictator Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979 with an estimated one million six hundred thousand (1,600,000) deaths, the Armenian genocide carried out from 1915 to 1923 by the Ottoman Turks of around one million two hundred thousand (1,200,000) people. The Rwandan genocide between April and June of 1994, costing around eight hundred thousand (800,000) lives and the Srebrenica Massacre of July 1995 causing an estimated eight thousand (8,000) deaths.

All of these examples employed a form of dehumanising propaganda to incite and justify violence.

 

In summary

While not an exhaustive list of atrocities carried out by dictators, autocrats and psychopaths the total of just over 14,600,000 likely represents the majority of the officially recognised numbers of fatalities.

 

The unspoken genocide

If the figure of 14,600,000 deaths attributable to the major atrocities of the last one hundred or so years seems shocking then consider a conservative death toll approaching one hundred million (100,000,000) due to a single cause that is rarely regarded a genocide at all.

I’m speaking here of the estimated number of abortions carried out primarily in western nations since the early 1970’s.

Since that time a conservative estimate of the number of abortions carried out in the USA, France, UK, Germany, Australia and Canada sits at just under ninety-six million (96,000,000) with the USA representing the vast majority at almost sixty-six million (65,700,000).

Again, almost 100 million unborn children killed.

So, how does the abortion issue mirror the same pattern as a genocide?

Before abortion became a post-conception contraceptive (an ironic oxymoron) it was touted as being an act of last resort, limited to cases of rape or incest, or in cases where the pregnancy would likely result in the death of the mother.

However with greater accessibility and a conditioning of the population by activists and corporate abortion providers, abortions are performed in most western countries with little or no questions asked, often for any reason and are commonly legal up to the moment before birth. This has resulted in the deaths of millions of children for reasons as trivial as being the wrong gender. While not included in the statistics because of a lack of data, consider the Chinese “one child” policy that ran from 1980 to 2016.

Anecdotal evidence suggests a disproportionate number of girls were aborted in China due to a cultural preference for boys, given a boy was perceived as more valuable in rural/agricultural regions and would carry on the family name. When only one child was allowed many considered it must be a boy. This has now led to a drastic gender imbalance among the younger Chinese population with stories of girls being abducted from urban areas (and neighbouring countries) to satisfy the demand for wives in rural areas.

Like all other events mentioned here abortion advocates utilise certain language to achieve the same goal of conforming the general public into supporters. The most common is to dehumanise the unborn child by referring to them simply as a foetus or even more dismissively a “clump of cells”. This language is intended to assuage the conscience of a woman having an abortion by equating the procedure to little more than having tonsils or an appendix removed.

Another common catch-phrase is the “my body my choice” often used as a chant at pro-abortion rallies or when trying to shout down opponents. This slogan ignores the fact that the unborn child, while temporarily sharing its mothers body, is not part of the body, in that it consists of its own unique DNA and therefore is an individual, unique from its mother or father.

When challenged with the genetic uniqueness of the child, proponents of abortion struggle to justify the clump of cells argument and will often spiral into an unhinged rant about bodily autonomy. Despite this many western nations have legalised the abortion of a child virtually up to the moment before birth, a procedure so horrific that most advocates will not discuss the details of how it is performed.

The abortion genocide is not only linked by its use of slogans. Like the Holocaust it has its roots in the same ideology and indeed shares some of the same key figures.

 

Eugenics and Margaret Sanger

As mentioned earlier in reference to Nazi Germany, the eugenics movement played a major role in creating the environment into which the abortion movement has flourished.

Margaret Sanger, born in 1879, was an early advocate for women’s rights and was virulent in her views of what she deemed defective families and races. A staunch racist and antisemite she was guest speaker at KKK meetings and wrote extensively on the need to restrict the breeding of what she called “human weeds”. This included non-white races, particularly African Americans, and families with a history of less than desirable IQs.

There is a trove of her comments supporting these views in her own published works and also candidly in correspondence later made public. To offer just a few, these are some of her own words.

1.       "We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." — from a letter to Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, December 10, 1939, p. 2.

 

2.       "The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." — Woman and the New Race, Chapter 5, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families." (1920).

 

3.       "But for my view, I believe that there should be no more babies." — Interview with John Parsons, 1947.

 

4.       “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief aim of birth control.” — Birth Control Review, May 1919.

 

5.       “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” — The Birth Control Review, 1921.

 

6.       “Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying… demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism. … Every single case of inherited defect, of mental defectiveness, or of disease such as tuberculosis, syphilis, cancer, should be considered as a definite indication for sterilization or segregation.” — The Pivot of Civilization, 1922.

 

7.       “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. … The procreation of this group should be stopped.” — The Pivot of Civilization, 1922.

 

8.       “Birth Control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.” — Woman and the New Race, 1920.

 

9.       “The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aim of eugenics: to make the racial stock more fit, to eliminate the less fit, and to prevent the birth of defectives.” — Birth Control and Racial Betterment, 1919 speech.

 

10.   “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. … Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction of defective stocks—those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.” — A Plan for Peace, 1932.

 

Margaret Sanger is the founder of the organisation “Planned Parenthood” in the United States which is the largest provider of abortion services in that country. An interesting side fact is that the majority of their “clinics” are located in predominantly black neighbourhoods.

Data sourced from the US government’s “Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)” for the year 2019 shows precisely how Margaret Sanger’s mission is being accomplished.

In 2019, among all races of women who obtained abortions in the USA around 38.4% were African American while around 33.4% were White.

The distribution of women aged 15-44 was: 53% White and 14% African American.

Based on this data African American women in America have abortions 4.5 times more often than white women.

Conclusion

Much of the information provided here might suggest this is an American-centric problem and while the vast majority of abortions listed in publicly available data supports this, it is a first-world problem. This is likely due to the cultural shift in the affluent west towards self-interest and the glorification of one’s right to do whatever one wishes rather than considering others, or God. It has spawned the age of relative morality where each individual decides what is right or wrong within their own bubble without reference or regard to any higher authority than themselves.

In short, selfishness and narcissism are the new religion.

Virtually every western nation now supports abortion and perhaps the most telling anecdote supporting the conjecture is the virtual eradication of children diagnosed prenatally with Down’s syndrome in Scandinavian countries such as Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Iceland boasts an almost 100% abortion rate in such cases. This is despite such prenatal testing not being guaranteed completely accurate.

By every measurable metric the worldwide abortion issue is a genocide. It is a genocide of unprecedented proportions.

Will it stop?. Unfortunately, probably no, however in the spirit of truth and transparency it is patently dishonest to describe the practice as anything other than the greatest genocide in the history of the world and to say it is being conducted on an industrial scale is barely adequate to describe its scope.