blacksheep
Oh, so sorry. Right. Osama bin laden is one fine example of a human.
Actually, I never said he was a fine example of a human being. I just said that it takes away from our humanity to call other human beings subhumans.
I should have said something that might hurt his feelings. Or the feelings of the "human" who sawed of Nick Berg's head. That Islamofascist is still a person with feelings...I never said that I was worried about the feelings of people who do such things. I said that calling them subhuman led to escalating violence. The Islamofascist is, of course, still a person with feelings, as is anyone who commits an atrocity. I don't think that we need necessarily need to concern ourselves with those feelings, although some people will still feel compassion for them. I know that I personally feel rather sorry for the American soldiers who abused the Iraqi soldiers. Through their dehumanising of the alien "other" they have now hurt themselves, their families, their country, and have a shadow on the rest of their lives, and on their souls. The beheaders of Nick Berg also undoubtedly thought he was subhuman, or they couldn't have done what they did. But this is where it always leads to think of other humans as subhuman. The Turks thought the Armenians were subhuman, Hitler thought the Jews were subhuman, the Jews think the Palestinians are subhuman, and so on. Of course it hurts others if we think they are subhuman, and it makes them murderously angry, and we are right to be scared of them when we think that about them. But what concerns me even more is how much it hurts us to think of others as subhuman. We can so easily become the people we despise.
