Dehumanization
“People fighting a war dehumanize the enemy. That makes it possible to kill with a clean conscience. But by a perfect inversion, dehumanizing people in your mind makes them all the more human in reality — vulnerable, desperate, trying to save themselves and their children and their homes.
“And truly, dehumanizing others in one’s mind dehumanizes oneself in reality. We are mutating amid our rhetoric of self-congratulation into monsters.”
Mutating Into What We Hate, by Crispin Sartwell, Baltimore Sun, May 6, 2004 (via CommonDreams.org)
this may work in the movies, but hate clouds the professional soldier’s mind and contempt dulls his senses.
You don’t have to hate someone to kill him or love him to let him live.
Comment by Walter E. Wallis — June 27, 2007 @ 7:54 pm