Hello keen readers!

For this blog I’m going to focus primarily on a quote from Judith Butler’s Frames of War in the chapter, “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. The quote refers to the relational aspects of dehumanizing our enemies, “Those we kill are not quite human, and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear national or religious similarity to our own.” (42) The quote stands out so strongly to me as I can relate it to so many situations in history. It’s saying how we dehumanize our enemies, they become statistics before we’ve even killed them. In our eyes they’re practically already dead and we’re just doing our duty by finishing the job.

Genocides consist of the devaluing and the dehumanizing of a certain people or religion, that’s what makes it so scary. An example is the Holocaust when Nazi Germany attempted to actualize their “Final Solution” and exterminate the Jewish race. They did not see the Jews as humans, they saw them as potential statistics. To them they were already dead, they just had to find out how to get rid of them once and for all. Butler puts it more eloquently herself earlier in this chapter, “When a population appears as a direct threat to my life, they do not appear as lives”(42).

The dangerous thing about vulnerability and fear is that the mind can be easily manipulated to think that certain things are threats when they aren’t. Powerful, intelligent, and malicious leaders have been known to declare people as threats in such convincing ways that the population believes them. The peoples definition of threat, and the fear that that threat can instil, is a powerful and dangerous thing. When you see someone as a threat they no longer become a human, they become a target, an enemy, an assignment, and most of all a statistic.

Does this makes you re-evaluate what you consider a threat? How may you have been manipulated into deciding who your enemies are? How might your enemies have chosen you as their threat? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves and our societies if we want coexistence and progression to be effective.

Thanks for reading,

Isaiah

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Print.