So it's not too often that I get pissed off at Digby, but goddamn was this awful. I will certainly allow that given how dreadful the subject matter is, hyperbole and angry initial reaction is understandable. But for fuck's sake.
The bill in question deals with the (seriously) horrible practice of teachers and school administrators dealing with unruly students by physically restraining them. Like, tying them to chairs. At best. And many of the students in question have developmental or mental disabilities, leading to the further awesomeness of a student who doesn't understand that he's done something wrong strangling to death because a poorly trained or reactionary administrator hogtied and gagged him. So this is horrible, and a federal law banning this is just flat-out unambiguously good. 153 representatives voted against the bill (145 Republican, 8 Democrat), which is certainly morally reprehensible. So far, I'm in my normal "yep, right on, tell it, sister!" mode when reading Digby.
Then she referred to the voters in question as "non-humans". At which point my fists balled up and only heavy restraint saved my Ikea laptop stand from flying across the room, lappy and all.
See, here's the thing. I just finished reading Richard Evans's three-volume history of Nazi Germany. The phrase "non-human," or some variant (pest, bacillus, animal, etc.) comes up a lot. Dehumanizing one's enemies is a fundamental aspect of fascist or genocidal regimes and parties, and is a major way they legitimize their killing. It's a lot easier to kill another person, or several thousand other persons, when you've been told for years that their sort aren't actually human, but are instead some form of lower animal. It even comes up in societies that aren't openly fascist, when justifying torture, or endless imprisonment, or the need to eliminate a political viewpoint. Glenn Beck does it when he says liberalism is a "cancer." Hell, one of the main critiques of World War II flicks from Saving Private Ryan to Inglourious Basterds is that they use Nazis in the same "hey, they're evil and inhuman, we can kill lots of them" way as Resident Evil uses zombies. It's an unfortunately not uncommon aspect of modern American culture.
And you know who's made a great deal of mention and garnered a great deal of traffic by pointing that out? Yeah, Digby. Linking to Neiwert's work on eliminationism, writing about the corrupting effect of the torture regime... Shit, she even does it in the exact article that's got me fuming: "This vote is yet another sign that this rightwing assault on basic decency toward your fellow man is inexorably defining deviancy down. If you can defend a vote to allow the continued torture of special needs children you can defend anything." So the response is... to dehumanize the people who are dehumanizing special needs kids? What kind of perverse fucking logic is that?
Are the 153 members of the House who voted against this bill wrong? Yep. Are they at best questionable in their moral priorities? Oh hell yeah. Should this level of casual indifference toward the suffering of their fellow humans be seen as a sign of their unfitness for national office? Again, I'd say yes. But they're human. They're all too human. Driven by fear, hatred, superstition, greed, or whatever nasty little failure of morality led them to this vote.
The saint martyred for his belief, the mother defending her children, the lawyer defending the wealthy murderer, the congressman voting for a war, the guard leading prisoners to a gas chamber... Human. Every single one of them. The minute we forget that, the minute that we start seeing our political opponents as non-humans... It doesn't end pretty. To finish, I'll quote a man whose book I bought because it was recommended by a blogger I greatly respected:
"Escaping the downward spiral of eliminationism means seeing those who indulge it as human beings, as our fellow Americans- affording them the very recognition they would deny us."
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