The past two weeks of our ASTU class have been incredibly fast paced: we whizzed through a great number of texts all relating to the events of 9/11. A common theme that I found throughout these texts was that of “us” vs “them”. What I find most interesting about this dichotomy is the ability that is had to not only cause fear, misunderstanding and hatred, but it ultimately leads to dehumanization.
There are many ways in which the idea of us vs. them gets reinforced through the various texts we have read. Take Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example. The novel very clearly presents the narrator’s father as the hero, the good guy and the terrorists as the enemy, the bad guys. This is not only the beliefs of the 9 year old narrator, but also that of the author and as a result, it becomes the beliefs of the reader. The text serves as a medium to convey ideas, beliefs and opinions and just as mainstream media molds the way in which we think about us vs. them, Foer’s novel performs the same task. It is through this type of thinking, that there has to be a good guy and an enemy, that perpetuates ignorance and cruelty.
To further this point, Butler asserts that we “mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” (36). This is due to the before mentioned dichotomy. How can we mourn for lives that we didn’t even consider worth living before? How did we get here? Can humans get past this dichotomy? I really hope so because it is this stream of thinking that perpetuates and justifies wars and violence.
On a slightly different (yet very related note), it is just so fascinating to me how malleable the human brain is. We are constantly being brainwashed to believe certain things and to want certain things and we do not even realize it. Roughly seventy years ago, the enemy was Germany; fifty years ago, the enemy was Russia. Today it is the Middle East. We spend so much time in our history classes looking at propaganda, scoffing at its ridiculousness, at awe that citizens of that time actually believed such biased news and yet the same exact thing takes place today!
It sickens to think about the fact that people can be so easily manipulated, into doing things they might not otherwise do, because they live in fear. This is the main and most powerful strategy that militaries utilize: dehumanization. I found this article on my Facebook newsfeed that talks about an American Iraq veteran who is on trial for having raped a 14 year old Iraqi girl and then killing both her and her family… reading about it was so incredibly heart wrenching, disturbing and upsetting. I don’t really know what else to say about it besides the fact that it perfectly exemplifies the points I have made about about the us vs. them dichotomy.