Tuesday, September 27, 2022

The bureaucratization of the killers and the dehumanization of their victims

I noticed this phrase in a City Journal article about the Russia vs. Ukraine war: "Russian atrocities against Ukrainians rely on the bureaucratization of the killers and the dehumanization of their victims." Re-read that carefully. Read it again. Let it sink in. In a less bloody form, that's the battle we are experiencing in the U.S. A huge bureaucracy, wealthy, powerful, masked and murky is battling their imaginary foe made up of their brothers and sisters of the same culture, history and language with demeaning, dehumanizing name calling like "deplorable," "racist," "terrorist," and "you-name-it phobics." More recently and with just a veneer of benign slurs, Colleen Shogan, Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (the agency going after Trump), was questioned about a paper in which she disparaged every two-term Republican president since World War II as being not too bright--perhaps too stupid to run the country. See the slant? Demean and diminish. Divide and conquer. Just a change in flag and uniform. Methods are the same.

"In all these cases, in circumstances as distinct as those in Germany, Rwanda, Armenia, or Ukraine, we find a machinery of barbarism with no particular relation to one or another culture. It has been perfectly demonstrated and analyzed during trials for genocide, particularly in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The barbarism always stands on two foundations: the bureaucratization of the killers and the dehumanization of the victims."

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