Dehumanization and Racism in War

A LESSON IN SELECTIVE RACISM

A couple years ago, I stumbled across a short film that earned its fame at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. Titled "Planet of the Arabs", the film is a compilation of clips from Hollywood movies, showing popular stereotypes of Arabs. When I first saw the film, I was skeptical. Yes, I knew that the vast majority of Arabs are not terrorists, but didn't Arabs--at least the Muslim ones--need to own up to the fact that terrorism is predominantly an extremist Islamic phenomenon, and that it's only natural for Hollywood to make movies about it?

A second film made me reconsider. My wife--who worked at an alternative high school with a large proportion of African-American students--brought home a copy of Birth of a Nation, Hollywood's first blockbuster, which is still widely hailed as one of the great films of history. It is also one of the most overtly racist movies ever made. White actors in dark face paint play the roles of rioting "crazed negroes" and a murderous former slave who preys on white women. The film is racist on almost every level, but what caught my attention most was the acting. I suppose the white actors were trying to "act black", and in the process they conveyed the depth and crassness of their racist stereotypes. Apparently this technique was not uncommon; according to Wikipedia, blackface was an element of American theater and film for more than 100 years. After I watched Birth of a Nation, I remembered Planet of the Arabs and watched it again, with new eyes. I was appalled by two things: (1) by the stereotypes American actors conveyed when they tried to "act Arab" and (2) my own blindness to those stereotypes before.

RACISM IN WAR

This is a blog about war and peace. Why write about racism? When national leaders go to war, they must generate convincing myths, or narratives, to explain the war and sustain domestic support. The phenomenon is as old as Thucydides. In War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges writes, "... in mythic war we imbue events with meanings they do not have. We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human. We view ourselves, our people as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects--eventually in the form of corpses."

This process of demonization goes hand-in-hand with racism. Hedges writes, "Most national myths, at their core, are racist." Over the years, I've been amazed to discover how selective we are about our racial sensitivities. The majority of Americans are well-educated about the evils of slavery and racism against African-Americans; they reel at the slightest hint of racism towards blacks. These same Americans, however, might never think twice about using "hajji" as a racial slur or wrapping towels around their heads on Halloween and chanting "Allahu Akbar!" As nations mobilize for war, their myths dehumanize the enemy and reinforce racist stereotypes. When myths collapse and old wars are forgotten by new generations, these racist stereotypes are exposed for what they are. I was horrified when, as a small boy, I heard my great-grandfather used the word "Jap." A word that was unremarkable to his generation was appalling to mine. But history is littered with racial slurs against enemies, and all the stereotypes they entail.

In today's world, where the international community faces a radical Islamist insurgency, Arabs or Muslims (which are not the same, but are frequently confused) are often viewed through such a racist lens. The early language of the Global War on Terror--which is now thankfully almost extinct--was "mythic" in the sense that Chris Hedges uses, pitting the forces of absolute good against absolute evil. While the Bush administration carefully stated that the US was not at war with Islam, society at large was less discerning. Many Americans were admirably tolerant of Arabs and Muslims living within the US (although there were notable exceptions), but when it came to Arabs and Muslims abroad--in places like Afghanistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia--cartoonish stereotypes prevailed. We dehumanized our enemy, and in doing so dehumanized potential allies and the average Muslim on the street--whose loyalties are the real center of gravity in the war on terrorism.

RACISM'S PRAGMATIC COSTS

Apart from racism's obvious intrinsic evil, it is also unpragmatic and counterproductive to both our military goals and our national interests. Some might argue that dehumanizing the enemy is necessary to convince soldiers to fight. Counterinsurgency turns this logic on its head, because success depends on respecting, trusting, and building relationships with the local population. It also requires understanding insurgents as human beings: knowing their reasons for fighting, the subtle differences between their factions, the incentives or threats that might convince them to lay down arms. Our early strategy in Iraq failed largely because it lacked this subtlety; our narrative pitted American forces against a monolithic "enemy", who we made no effort to understand. It took months or years for many Americans to understand that Iraqi insurgents were comprised of many different factions, many of which despised each other, and that success in Iraq would require a strategy sophisticated enough to treat each one differently. As Iraq's conflict spiral tightened in 2005 and 2006, for example, more and more Sunni and Shiites were drawn into violence simply to defend their communities and survive.

An Air Force interrogator wrote an article in the Washington Post the other day, in which he said, "Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond."

Dehumanization did not put us on a path to success. Quite the opposite. Dehumanization blunted our strategy, caused us to underestimate sophisticated enemies, and led to abuses like those at Abu Ghraib--which were devastating to our foreign policy goals. Thankfully, our senior commanders reversed this course of dehumanization, opening the door to our biggest strategic gains. The counterinsurgency intellectuals taught soldiers to live among and respect the Iraqi and Afghani people. General Petraeus took the bold and controversial move of supporting the Anbar Awakening--empowering many Sunni fighters who had previously fought against American forces and the Iraqi government. Our military has not turned soft--our commanders are waging a relentless war against enemy fighters who cannot be reconciled--but they have the insight and subtlety to know who to fight, who to engage with, and how. In all cases, formulating effective strategy requires that we understand others as human beings, not as racist stereotypes.

Racism and dehumanization are detestable in all their guises. War should offer no exceptions.