Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
The thing about pædophiles, nazis, terrorists and vegetarians is precisely that they are human. If they were not human we would not be so appalled at their behaviour. Characterizing them as inhuman or sub-human lets them off the moral hook and lets us off the hook of working out a reasoned response to them and to the behaviour they engage in.
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TGS, thank you times 100 for saying that.
It's something I keep trying to get across when some movie or book comes out and people say "oh, we shouldn't humanize (some dictator)", generally Hitler. It's so much easier if we can pretend that people whose actions we find abhorrent aren't really people at all. Then we just have to watch for the non-people, because we know we're safe from the people doing those things.
Except, of course, we don't. And we're not. Monsters wear human skins because they are human. It
can happen here, and they
can be one of us, and the self-delusion of believing otherwise is one of the most dangerous delusions there is.
That's why you have parents terrified of letting their children go outside for fear they might be molested by a stranger, but ignoring the threat posed by a family member or trusted friend. Child molesters are those bad people on TV, right? They can't be Uncle Chester. Only non-humans do that.
But they can be. And they are. And they do.
There are vile, disgusting, evil humans. They look just like the rest of us. Someone can love dogs and yet give the orders for killing millions of people. Someone can be nice to his stepson Joey and to awful things to him when we're not looking. And we ignore that at our peril.