HUMAN DIGNITY
If you undermine something such as a feeling or a system, you make it less strong or less secure than it was before, often by a gradual process or by repeated efforts.
At its most basic, the concept of human dignity is the belief that all people hold a special value that's tied solely to their humanity.
Human dignity is based on the superior value of the human being, endowed with reason and therefore freedom. We call “conscience” this properly human concern to act well and to reflect on one's own goodness or moral faults. (Wikipedia)
Hitler and the Nazis understood that undermining Human Dignity, especially the Jews, and the Homosexuals, the Gypsies, would help him persuade his population of misfits that a larger enemy loomed and to protect their fragile human dignity that they (the German people), should lose any dignity for those demographics. Eventually, and relentlessly the majority of the German population, accepted the idea, that they were ideal, and anyone who was not them had no human dignity.
Dehumanization can occur discursively (e.g., idiomatic language that likens individual human beings to non-human animals, verbal abuse, erasing one's voice from discourse), symbolically (e.g., imagery), or physically (e.g., chattel slavery, physical abuse, refusing eye contact).
In the American South Blacks could drink out of white-only water fountains, Blacks could not enter certain arenas or theaters, or if they did so, they had to use the back entrance. Blacks could not sit in the front of the bus. In Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the town of Bucha, On March 4, Russian forces returned and largely took control of the town was what Russian soldiers on intercepted phone conversations called “zachistka” — cleansing. The Russians hunted people on lists prepared by their intelligence services and went door to door to identify potential threats. (pbs) In America 2023, the Republican Party decided to DEHUMANIZE the Gays, the Lesbians, the Drag Queens, and the Trans People, by singling them out as threats to some invisible Christian book of morals. And now in Israel, HAMAS has DEHUMANIZED mainly Jewish families and babies by either burning them in their homes, or slaughtering them, women by raping them, and old and young by making them captives.
Dehumanization is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. This can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide. (Wikipedia) Losers, Authoritarians, Criminals, Immoral’s Self Loathing, are just a few examples of the people who use the tactic of DEHUMANIZATION as an act of war.
