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2006-10-11 14:25:25 · 12 answers · asked by degrassi_27 2 in Arts & Humanities Philosophy

12 answers

Look it up in the dictionary.
Think about it. How would it feel if what made you human was taken from you?

2006-10-11 14:32:18 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

Racial prejudices.

The first step to hating a racial or alien group is to turn them into something less than human. You can't hate your brother or your neighbor as much as you can hate an animal. You can easily kill an animal, but killing a human being is more difficult; this process is dehumanization.

During the Vietnam War the Americans had a hard time adjusting to the country. The Rain Forest climate, was hotter than many people had ever felt, the daily monsoons in the monsoon season were horrible, there were new disease and the people spoke a different language, that was even constructed differently than English (it is a tonal language where the same word can have many meanings based on the tone in which it is spoken). The people themselves were equally alien, and when they started killing Americans behind the lines or in the jungle it made the war tougher.

The Viet Cong were all over the countryside; they controlled all but the mountain villages and had agents in the big cities, even those controlled by the Americans. The little girl that did your laundry last week could be the one throwing a hand grenade at you today. The Americans couldn’t think of these people as people it made them much harder to kill and you had to kill quickly, even those that you wouldn’t want to kill. The Americans called them Gooks, Slant-Eyes, Slopes, and other names. They called the fighters VC (Viet Cong = guerillas) and NVA (North Vietnamese Army). This made them easier to hate and it made them subhuman somehow, which made the killing easier; it was a natural survival tactic. By doing this it helped the average G.I. survive, but it also made it possible for the Americans to massacre entire villages, to burn them out, even just to shoot them in the street.

The series MASH had an episode where a bomber pilot was shot down near to the front. He made it safely to the MASH with some minor wounds. To him the Korean War was simple. He woke up kissed his wife goodbye and went to work. He flew a plane out over some land, dropped a load of bombs and returned back to his base, his wife and his soft life. Hawkeye Pierce showed him the wounded, the bleeding and broken kids, the ones who had lost arms and legs, and the ones who had bomb shrapnel in them. He personalized the war for that bomber pilot and in one afternoon he rocked this man’s entire world. Never again would he be bombing just land, he would be bombing the people below. Since the bomber pilot didn’t think about his targets as being populated, since he didn’t think about what damage he was doing, he was able to dehumanize the enemy and live a comfortable life. The MASH staff had the humanity of the war thrust into their faces every time a casualty came in. To them it didn’t matter if the casualty was a US soldier, an ally soldier, an innocent civilian, or an enemy soldier; they were all humans. This is what made the war so hard for them. It didn’t matter if the MASH person was a cook, a doctor, a clerk, or a dentist. Everyone helped out when the causalities came and everyone had the effects of the war shoved right into their faces. This humanizing of the war is what made the series so great, and why it won awards. The actors were very good, as were the writers, but without the war their performance and their stories would have been useless.

I can’t imagine beating my neighbor with a whip until he bleeds. I can’t imagine forcing him to work for long, hot hours, in the fields, seven days a week, for only food an a primitive home. I can’t imagine actually OWNING a person. It would be so inhumane. So how did our ancestors do it? They thought of the Black Race as nothing more than animals. You can treat an animal that way, but not a man. They had to dehumanize the entire Black race before they could treat them as they were treated under slavery.

Carnival Workers, Carnies are good people among themselves, but they used to treat the public very badly. They were cruel to them and happy to cheat them. Often the sheriff came to close the carnivals down, or to close down some of the stalls because of this. How can the Carnies cheat people and still be so good with their own group of people, who they normally consider their family. The key is what they called the public; marks. A mark was just a walking wallet to them with little other value, much less a value as a person. By dehumanizing the public they could cheat them. When Gypsies run their con games they are doing the same thing.

Dehumanizing a person makes it possible for someone to do unspeakable acts against the. It also allows lumping them into categories and insulting them casually. It is a horrible way to treat a person, much less a group of people. For soldiers it is a survival mechanism so they can do what they have to do to live and to win their war. One of the biggest causes of Post Traumatic Stress in Vietnam Veterans was the realization that the Gooks, Slopes, VC, and others they killed were people. When people dehumanize each other it is the start of racial prejudices and hatred, it allows them to do things to each other that a human would never consider. It is the start of all the cruelest things that a person or a society can ever do.

2006-10-11 22:13:21 · answer #2 · answered by Dan S 7 · 0 0

There is one part of every human that no one can touch. Nothing in this world can ever take away the purity of that piece of us. This is the part of you that cries when others do and this is also that part that shares joy. This is the part that you were born with and has never been chastised.

A person if tortured enough or is shown uncanny evil can be sensitized or dehumanized. This is a tragic loss becouse this part is connected to everyone. When one person loses this we all lose it.

2006-10-11 21:29:01 · answer #3 · answered by destinrobnurse 1 · 1 0

Keep in mind what you have as constituents of human essence: when you have spurned all that you are, every moment, the here-now is rejected and yet unrejectable, needing reconciliation to the unreconcilable, you are then sub-human. Certainly all those horrible things, experiences that others have described here are possible determinants for that psychological transformation, but when your own essence has turned against you, you are lost without help from another for your conscience has become only a tool for your own condemnation.

"The human being — and only the human being — can create something inhuman. Thus, insofar as the inhuman deed has been done by a human being, it is a human deed, an inhuman human deed. ‘An inhuman human action’ or ‘an inhuman human life’, may sound illogical, but these utterances describe a certain reality with perfect accuracy. If we want to call their meaning ‘contradictory’, then this contradiction expresses the truth of a contradictory reality, a contradictory life. And it is because they convey a truth of life, that we are compelled to look at them, even if logic can't cope with them. Let us attempt to disentangle their complex underlying content."



http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/bublitz.htm

Some interesting reading.

2006-10-11 22:00:09 · answer #4 · answered by Psyengine 7 · 0 0

To deprive of human qualities such as individuality, compassion, or civility: slaves who had been dehumanized by their abysmal condition.
To render mechanical and routine.

2006-10-11 21:52:11 · answer #5 · answered by Pharmalolli 5 · 0 0

To me it means that someone has gone through something so traumatic emotionally that they sort of just shut off to protect themselves and are immune to feeling.

At least, that is how ive heard it used.

2006-10-11 21:35:56 · answer #6 · answered by Freaked out 3 · 0 0

A lack of all that makes someone human...

Fear, love, conscience, free-will, empathy, consideration, thought, all intense or well developed emotions.

2006-10-11 23:53:03 · answer #7 · answered by Courtlyn 7 · 0 0

Treating a human like an animal, making them eat food off the floor, making them live in their own feces. Get my drift?

2006-10-11 21:29:33 · answer #8 · answered by Adam 3 · 0 1

it means when we are no longer in touch with the ethics, morals, and ettiquette general society has formed for us. When we lose our basic instinct and sensibility.

2006-10-11 21:28:59 · answer #9 · answered by swaytz 2 · 0 0

Working for some soulless beast of a corporation, until they throw you away for foreign workers.

2006-10-11 21:28:26 · answer #10 · answered by Jim P 4 · 1 0

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