Dehumanisation inspires only hatred
Published: 3/04/2014 at 01:04 AM
Writer: John Draper
Many images of human suffering came to humanity from the Vietnam War. Two are well known worldwide, and they both involve fire.
In the first, Thich Quang Duc is seen sitting calmly in a road in Saigon. The date is June 11, 1963. He is a monk, and he is burning. It takes 10 minutes for his body to completely burn, and he does not once move from the lotus position in that time.
In the second, nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc runs down a road covered in napalm. The date is June 8, 1972. According to the photographer who took the picture, she was actually screaming two words, over and over again: “Too hot.”
Such photographs — and the free US media — are credited with helping to ""humanise"" the Vietnam War — a war the US certainly had the firepower to win, if it chose to do so. In the end, it chose not to win — it made the decision that the cost to itself, to its reputation and world position, outweighed the benefit.
Thailand has its own photos. Hok tulaa — the Oct 6, 1976 massacre. Images of students, hung from trees, being dragged by their neck along the grass, arranged in rows on the ground for inspection. And in the end, lying in piles, on fire. And in this case, it is certainly true that, ""First, they came for the Communists"". The anti-royalists. The foreigners. However, many who died were not even political. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And we have more recent photographs — taken on Feb 22 this year — of Korawit, four, and Patcharakorn, six, blood dripping from their dead bodies as their father, Tayakorn, hugged them.
The recent beating of a monk — Phra Prat Supavirut on March 24, 2014 — or of anyone with no plan to hurt another is indefensible. However, it is explicable. The monk was seen as ""dehumanised"" by the attackers. The attackers have been dehumanised externally, through group interactions and their own version of the media, and dehumanised themselves internally, through their mental processes, to the extent that they can imagine the beating as acceptable. How do they do this? They say the monk is not a ""real"" monk.
This dehumanisation process is working both ways in the present conflict. Saying that people would have been shot dead in the present situation if it had been another country is dehumanisation.
Being ordered to fire M79 grenades using a launcher at a far-away stage is dehumanisation because the targets are too far away for the attackers to clearly see their faces.
Cheering a man on a stage who has happily announced the killing of other people is dehumanisation. Cheering a man on a stage who announces he likes the fact that armed guards have shot at policemen behind a wall of shields is dehumanisation.
In other words, there is currently a cyclic, systemic failure to see each other as human, based on interpersonal and intergroup factors such as political ideology, previous experience, media intake, and racial or class backgrounds.
Calling someone ""red buffalo"" is saying that they are subhuman and is echoing the war cries of the Village Scouts, of the Red Gaurs. It is also not a coincidence that there are no ""Bangkok buffaloes"". ""Red buffaloes"" are primarily associated with the Thai Lao ethnic minority of the Northeast. This is dehumanisation through racism.
Saying that someone’s vote is worth 1/50th of another's is always incorrect. It is correct to say that the children of ethnic minorities are less well educated than the children of Bangkok in core subjects. This is proven by breakdowns of national and international testing such as the O-Net, Timms and Pisa.
However, this is not their fault. There is a systemic problem with the education system, and it is not right to call someone uneducated when all of Thai society is responsible. Otherwise, the logic is to call them stupid, mentally defective. This is dehumanisation.
Paulo Freire, one of the 20th century’s greatest educators, invested much of his time in adult literacy in order to help people to realise the world that they wanted. He chose not to see those with power and wealth as oppressors. He chose to see them, through the lens of love, as part of a systemic problem that needed an awakening; a rehumanisation by normal people taking control of their own future through reading, writing and organising solutions to social problems. He was called a Marxist, a Communist, but he rejected these labels and rejected, in the end, violence in any form.
There is a reason why the Nazis came for the Communists first. The Communists had an alternative ideology, and many of them were intellectuals, teachers, professors. And, the Nazis were not tolerant of debate and needed a war and so, an enemy.
Second, and not so well known, the Nazis came for the incurably sick, the mentally defective, those they labelled stupid. Then they came for the Jews, who they saw as foreigners in their midst. Then they came for the real foreigners — beginning with the Poles. And this was all a deliberate dehumanisation process of the entire German people, born of the mind of a man who came to embody the word ""evil"".
No Thai politician is at this stage. No general, no police officer, no citizen. All are victims of a system. All are still a mother’s child, and all know they were taught love first. Some might have forgotten this temporarily, but it is still there. It must be.
Because the alternative is that Thailand cannot remember. It is that Thai society cannot organise peaceful solutions to its most serious problems. It is that Thailand might only awaken after seeing an endless stream of photographs. And this should not be acceptable to any rational, thinking Thai who understands that the dehumanisation of both sides must be reversed, not allowed to spiral out of control.
John Draper is project officer, Isan Culture Maintenance and Revitalisation Programme, College of Local Administration, Khon Kaen University.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/403191/dehumanisation-inspires-only-hatred
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