We-Are-Brothers

 An essay on dehumanization and war

How psychopaths get people to blow other people up

by Steve Cook

The genocide in Gaza has thrown into focus a fascinating phenomenon:

To the degree that people see other people as human beings like themselves, it becomes harder to get them to wage war on one another.

In order to get sane human beings to accept blowing up other human beings, blow the legs off their children and so forth, the psychopaths engineering war must first dehumanize the target population.

De-human-ize.

If the target population are seen as somewhat less than human, or less real as living, breathing, feeling human beings with hopes, dreams, loves, fears and so on, it becomes easier to mobilize one's tame population to kill them.

Hence the major effort of propaganda is to dehumanize the target people, to get them seen as sub-humans, as animals, as evil incarnate, as less noble, less clean, less worthy of trust, less loved by God and thus more deserving of whatever is to be done to them.

There are many tricks used to bring this about, including false flag events but they amount in essence to (a) lying viciously and (b) cutting communication, as communication in its myriad forms between people is how people become real to one another as human beings.

Thus, through the barriers of distance, compounded by deceit and propaganda that dehumanizes, it becomes possible for a perfectly decent human being to countenance the maiming and killing of other human beings he has never met and has no quarrel with, without batting and eyelid or turning a hair.

We see this at play currently in Palestine where the Zionist propaganda machine has been in overdrive for a long time relentlessly dehumanizing the Palestinians in the eyes of many Israelis, to the point where otherwise decent people can contemplate or engage in with some enthusiasm, the slaughter of the Palestinian "animals."

And, of course, Jews themselves were once victims of similar dehumanization at the hands of the Nazis.

Perhaps in part because recent history has given Jews a reality on being at the receiving end of such viciousness, it has not worked as well as the psychopathic clique in charge of Israeli had hoped. Even within Israel itself  there is growing protest against the atrocities because "too many" Israelis have not quite bought the propaganda and see the Palestinian people as fellow human beings.

The Zionists have run into a problem common to occupying powers: over time their soldiers, through simple proximity and familiarity, are prone to beginning to see the occupied peoples as human beings too and therefore they become less willing to kill and maim them. Thus they make "terrible soldiers" in the eyes of the ruling psychopaths. Hence we witness a propaganda machine in relentless overdrive leaving no device unexplored in its effort to maintain the deception that the Palestinians are animals and thoroughly deserving of everything that is done to them and even "God says it's okay".

The psychopaths, themselves sunk perhaps irrevocably below the humanity of the rest of us, have a problem: unless they can maintain the dehumanization of their victims, the people will lose pride and belief and their whole colonial project will fail - and hopefully be replaced by something more civilized and befitting all the human communities of Palestine.

This phenomenon explains the wonderful phenomenon of the global uprising against the Zionist atrocities. There has probably thus far been nothing like it in history, this broad recognition of our spiritual connection and common humanity, although I suspect we are going to see much more of it from here on out.

What has happened is that, perhaps for the first time in history, technology coupled with a shift of human awareness has made the victims real as human beings, a realness that Zionist and Western propaganda have not managed to expunge.

There have been many genocides throughout history, many targetings of civilian populations (such as the carpet bombing of Baghdad, the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia, Hiroshima, the carpet bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam war, numerous genocides in Africa and so on and on ad nauseam.

But for most of the population of the planet what was happening was, if they know much of it at all, not quite real. Or not quite reaching them in ways that made it and its victims real. The news was sanitized, false flag and "terrorist" events were utilized, the strangeness of language appearance and custom were emphasized, numerous tricks that made what was happening palatable enough to a distracted citizenry that the psychos responsible could get away with it.

But in these last few months we have been seeing on our screens real children dismembered and maimed in real time, proliferating reports from distressed people have reached us, busting through the force screens of censorship thanks to the magic of the internet. And so millions of people across the planet are seeing the uncensored, un-sanitized reality of what is being done to their fellow human beings who are now very real to them as human beings.

And they do not like it, for there is our native kinship and brotherhood fueling our disgust and revolt.

The Genghis Khans, Calligulas, Pol Pots and Hitlers of this world are in trouble as we enter a new era.

The vast majority of the human race are not psychopaths, murderers, torturers and maimers of children.

They are brothers.

And they know it.

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