Romeo Dallaire was being interviewed on Hot Type, and described trying to negotiate with the fuckers who’d organized the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He said that they had the form of a human being, but they had ceased to be human. It totally reminded me of Ann Coulter. People keep making a joke about how she’s a robot, which I don’t find funny. She’s one seriously evil bitch. One of these days, in one of these columns of her’s, she’s gonna call for something like genocide. Psychologists tell us that dehumanizing your enemy is the first step toward anything approaching genocide.

One of the haunting questions of the 20th Century is how so many ordinary people committed wartime atrocities. The philosopher Jonathan Glover has documented that a common denominator is degradation: a diminution of the victim’s status of cleanliness or both. When someone strips a person of dignity my making jokes about his suffering, giving him a humiliating appearance (a dunce cap, awkward prison garb, a crudely shaved head), or forcing him to live in filthy conditions, ordinary people’s compassion can evaporate and they find it easy to treat him like an animal or object. […]…Accompanied by tactics of dehumanization such as the use of pejorative names, degrading conditions, humiliating dress, and ‘cold jokes; that make light suffering … flip a mental switch and reclassify an individual from ‘person’ to ‘nonperson’ making it as easy for someone to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate p.273/74 & 320/21

Having seen that 5th Estate documentary on the inflammatory Right Wing, my only feeling is in their dehumanization of Lefties, and their own inability to admit that they might be wrong about stuff, they are excersizing evil. And that’s not rhetoric…

But I don’t want to make their mistake by dehumanizing Coulter … at this point, yeah, she’s inhuman, but for all we know she’ll recant in a few years like George Wallace eventually did. Wallace tried to play the race card all the way to the White House, cynically exploiting the bigotry of the South. My impression is the Coulter and Bill O’Reilly have found celebrity through a similar means of cynically exploiting American ignorance and hatred for diversity. Perhaps all of their vile spit is simply a symptom that they’re having a hard time living with themselves.

Sticks and Stones, the 5th Estate the documentary is viewable here in Real Video

The 5th Estate’s Website

Ann Coulter and right-wing stupidity

Comments on the Coulter video on Metafilter

Bill O’Reilly’s pissed with the CBC

(whoopee shit, go fuck yourself O’Reilly, or just “Shut Up!”)