The 5th Stryker Brigade Proves the Language of Dehumanization Isn’t a Just a Historical Issue
By: Lisa M. Hayes
During an immigration roundtable at the White House with administration aides, political leaders, and California law enforcement officials Trump said something that set the internet on fire.
Here’s the transcript:
Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims: Thank you. There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.
President Trump: We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.
These aren’t people. They are animals.
When you hear it you cringe. It’s dirty. It’s unsettling. And it isn’t new.
Trump and conservative media outlets have suggested the comment was taken out of context because he was talking specifically about members of the gang MS-13. However, the reason that’s less than believable is that Donald Trump has a track record of denigrating, berating, and dehumanizing immigrants that goes back long before he even launched his presidential campaign. That level of vitriol in his speech is par for the course coming from a President that fuels his base with hate speech on a regular basis.
It’s not just Mexican immigrants. In January Trump was quoted as saying, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” referring to places like Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries. Trump distances himself from and de-humanizes people he perceives as “other” from other places he doesn’t like.
Calling undocumented people or any people “animals” as the president just did is gravely serious. It’s not just an offensive word. The dehumanization of entire populations is a precursor to the kinds of atrocities we don’t want to have to imagine. In a modern context, though, it’s hard to believe it could happen here – now. However, that brand of gang mentality dehumanization has played out in a recent historical context that illustrates just how powerful a tactic dehumanization is.
In 2011 there were court-martial proceedings that involved members of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington. The details that emerged from that court-marshal were grisly and terrifying. A group of soldiers from the Army distanced themselves from by calling them a rouge “kill brigade” committed some of the most egregious and unthinkable acts of war on record – and we know this because they documented those acts with photos and kept trophies.
These soldiers did things like dismembering bodies and carrying fingers of their “kills” with them in baggies. They severed heads of “kills” and played with them by putting them on sticks making puppets of the dead. They posed and took scores of photos of people they killed at close range. Many of the photos show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view. They bragged, laughed, and made it clear the enjoyed the mission – not the officially sanctioned security mission – but the mission of bagging “savages”.
The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals,” one soldier explained to investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.”
Among the soldiers of Bravo Company, the idea of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations before they acted. Each of those conversations distanced them further from the humans they fantasized about killing. They spent a lot of free time musing about the possibility. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages”. They talked about the probability of getting caught and what would happen if they did. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year in 2010, it quit being conceptual and they decided to pull the trigger, literally.
The details of what happened next are not entirely clear. The court-marshall proceedings uncovered a torrid and unsavory culture of violence and brutality. Many believe the Army made every effort to cover up what they could and failed to take responsibility for a larger cultural attitude that allowed this to happen, if not encouraged the energy that precipitated it. Even the commonly used language in the proceedings “kills” doesn’t accurately represent who or what these people were. They were victims of a crime. Most people believed the behavior was not isolated to one unit.
The word savage was a calculated part of the nomenclature and it had been for a long time before the killings began. The soldiers didn’t think of the people they were killing as sons, husbands, wives, mothers, or even humans and their behavior illustrated how dehumanized the Afghans had become.
Words matter because they carry meaning and sometimes that meaning isn’t clear to everyone. We hear the words “dog whistle” politics more and more frequently for a reason. Figuratively, a ‘dog whistle’ is a coded message communicated through words or phrases commonly understood by a particular group of people, but not by others.
Some of us hear the word animal in the context Trump used it and we are alarmed. Others hear it as a rallying cry. There is no clearer dog whistle for racists than the language of dehumanization. When the President of the United States of America blows a dog whistle like that, people hear it and it has consequences.
The FBI reported hate crimes spiked to a five year high in 2016 before Trump was even elected. It’s easy to draw a straight line from those numbers to Trump’s angry hateful campaign rhetoric.
Hate crimes targeting U.S. Muslims rose 15% in 2017, the second year in a row for a sharp rise. A recent study shows when Donald Trump writes anti-Muslim tweets, anti-Muslim hate crimes spike.
Hate crimes in our nation’s 10 largest cities increased by 12 percent last year, reaching the highest level in more than a decade. Crimes motivated by race or ethnicity bias are consistently the most common type of reported hate crime, and African Americans are the most targeted group, representing 23 percent of all hate crimes reported in major cities in 2017. Jews are consistently the most targeted religious group and represented 19 percent of all hate crimes reported in major cities in 2017.
As alarming as these statistics are there is cause for greater alarm on the horizon. While hate crimes show a growing willingness to act on hate, they also show a significant increase in tolerance for hate driven attitudes in the population at large. Those attitudes are being driven by a President that seems to have an agenda.
Before enslavement Africans were called “apes”.
Before colonization, the British referred to Native Americans as “savages”.
Before the Holocaust Jewish people were called “rats”.
Before the Rwandan genocide Tutsis were called “cockroaches”.
There have been countless comparisons made between the run-up to Nazi Germany and this period of history in the U.S.. The most significant thing that separates us from that reality is we are not isolated in the world with this President. The internet has made the world a very small place. The power of the people is a real thing. This is why when the internet erupts in fury over an off-handed or completely calculated comment made by our President at a forum in Fresno California, we should all take note.
I recently had a discussion with a friend about how some cultures refer to others very liberally as family members. They sprinkle with words Sister, Brother, Auntie, Uncle, and even mother generously around their community and with people with barely know. Those communities are stronger for it because there is meaning in words. A family becomes a larger body than just those related by birth or marriage. There is no stronger way to humanize than to see someone as family. Maybe it’s time we adopt that cultural attitude to counter the rising tide of cultural otherness. Donald Trump is not the only one who has words to use. There are more of us than there are them.
More by Lisa:
Homelessness Facts: Helping Houseless People Starts By Humanizing Them
Lisa Hayes, The Love Whisperer, is an LOA Relationship Coach. She helps clients leverage Law of Attraction to get the relationships they dream about and build the lives they want. Lisa is the author of the newly released hit book, Score Your Soulmate and How to Escape from Relationship Hell and The Passion Plan.
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