Ep. 62- Dehumanization and Genocide with David Livingstone Smith

We often hear the term “dehumanization” used in a variety of contexts. For example, dehumanization a set of beliefs, or a set of behaviors?  Is it metaphorical or do people actually believe their victims are less than human?

In this episode, I talk with David Livingstone Smith about his fascinating, challenging, and insightful work on dehumanization, particularly in the context of the Holocaust.  This is an episode that will definitely make you think.

David Livingstone Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of New England.

Smith, David Livingstone. Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (2021)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.007)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we are talking about a phenomenon that is central to all genocides and obviously also central to the Holocaust. The concept, the practice, maybe both, maybe not. We'll talk to our guest about this of dehumanization. And there's just a really fascinating, an amazing book called Making Monsters, the Uncanny Power of Dehumanization.

by our guest David Livingston Smith. And David, welcome to the podcast.

David Smith (00:36.206)
Thank you, I'm so excited being here.

Waitman Beorn (00:39.183)
Can we start, as always, sort of with how did you, because you've written several books kind of in this area and you're a philosopher, right? So how did you get interested in this particular concept?

David Smith (00:54.478)
Well, there are actually two aspects to that, an autobiographical aspect and a more academic aspect. The autobiographical aspect was that I was brought up in the Deep South in the 50s and 60s. I wasn't born in the Deep South. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My family moved down there when I was a very small child.

And that was, of course, the tail end of the Jim Crow era. And I was surrounded by the most palpable racism and dehumanization of African-American people. And if you're not enculturated into that as a child, you just can't help thinking there's something terribly wrong here. Now, a bit of an explanation.

I have a hyper-Christian name, David Livingston Smith. And that's because my father came from a Christian missionary family. My mother is Jewish. And I grew up very largely in an extended family with my maternal grandparents. My grandfather was born in Belarus and my grandmother in Romania.

And their families came to the United States before the Holocaust. They were fleeing the pogroms. Now there are two aspects to that as well. One is Ashkenazi families, particularly of that generation, they all have stories about anti-Semitic persecution. And I was party to some of those stories. And of course,

the Holocaust weighed heavily upon them. My grandmother, you couldn't mention the word German. In fact, she would use the phrase the accursed hun and spit. So I got there through her. But there's something else about her that was very important, which was that she had to leave.

David Smith (03:13.922)
her education, her formal education very early after the father abandoned the family. But she was a brilliant self-educated woman and she had a particular interest in the history of antisemitism, racism, the genocide of Native Americans and so on. So she was really instrumental in helping me make sense of this strange world I was living in, in South Florida.

kind of carried that with me. And I didn't really articulate any of that in my academic work until around 2005, 2006, when I was working on a book about war. And I encountered this wartime propaganda involving the representation of enemies as less than human creatures. And I thought, my gosh, this is

really interesting. I need to read up on this and I found that the literature was very, very limited. 99.9 % was in social psychology and tended to be rather ahistorical. So it was all about the mental processes that psychologists thought and think are involved in dehumanizing others.

disagree with a lot of that stuff. And so I was talking to a friend one day and he said, David, that's gotta be your next book. Everyone's gonna have to cite you because there was no book in the English language on dehumanization. in, must have been around 2007, I started writing my first book on dehumanization.

I was trying to figure it out as I went along, trying to trace out its history, trying to theorize it, and so on. I should add at this point, although I'm trained as a philosopher, I think I missed my proper calling, which would have been to be an historian. Looking for that odd paragraph in a 400 page book that is relevant to the topic, plowing through lots of literatures.

David Smith (05:39.982)
As I began to put a picture together and my views have changed over time since 2011 when my first book, Less Than Human, was published, that is my first book on dehumanization, I discovered there's a lot, a lot to learn, a lot to figure out, a lot to find out about. And so this has become the center of my scholarly life.

Waitman Beorn (06:08.697)
And I mean, the book comes across that way too. It's incredibly thoughtful, you know, and the way you lay out the argument I think is really powerful. mean, maybe we should start kind of the way that you do, which is with some definitions. Because one of the things you note in the beginning of the book is that many of us, myself probably included, have used the word dehumanize or dehumanization, but lots of us have different sort of...

David Smith (06:36.877)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (06:37.487)
What does that mean? You know, is it a process? Is it an action? Is it thought? So can you talk, talk us a little bit? How, what do you define that terms as? And then we can move from there.

David Smith (06:47.245)
Well, let me start by articulating a bit more fully the point that you just made. So the word itself entered the English language in the early 19th century. There are predecessors. So in the late, say, 17th century, this remarkable English cleric, Morgan Godwin, used the term soul murder for what we now call dehumanization. Over time, this

new term dehumanization accumulated lots of different meanings. And we see that today. If you Google the word, you'll get millions of hits. And if you look closely at those, dehumanization can mean a whole lot of different things. It can mean cruel, integrating treatment. It can mean certain kinds of rhetorical patterns or rhetorical techniques.

the use, of animalistic language to belittle or degrade others. It can be used to mean thinking of others as akin to inanimate objects and so on and so forth. Even in the academic literature, we find this huge variation. Now, that's fine. It's not like any of these things are incorrect.

The problem with this situation is that it's very easy for people to talk past each other when they're talking about humanization and they're not specifying what they mean. I think it's very, very important to be clear about what one means because as I've tried to show, this is an extraordinarily morally weighty topic.

It's associated with the very worst things that human beings have done to one another and continue to do to one another. So to get to cut to the chase here, what I mean by dehumanization is the attitude of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. And if I may, I need to unpack that a little bit so it's crystal clear.

David Smith (09:09.377)
First of all, I use the term attitude. So I'm on board with the psychologists that dehumanization happens in people's heads. It's a way of thinking about it.

However, we cannot understand it properly by just looking at what's in people's heads. We have to look at what people's heads are in. In other words, we have to look at the social and political forces that bear down on human minds to get them, to get us, to think of others as less than human creatures. So that's the first clarification.

the attitude of conceiving of others. Let's now pause at others. This is not always the case, but in the most paradigmatic examples of dehumanization, it is the case. Others means whole groups of others and typically racialized groups of others. So we dehumanize people collectively, not just individually.

Right? So conceiving of others as less than human. What about less than human? That is really important to understand properly. By less than human, I mean of less intrinsic value than human beings. Often dehumanized people are seen as possessing extraordinary powers, which is part of

the dehumanizing process, actually. So in the case most relevant to this podcast, Nazis thought of Jewish people as being demonically intelligent. know, the Jews were ruling the world, right? They weren't seen as, you know, blocks of wood. They were seen as a very formidable enemy.

Waitman Beorn (11:01.839)
Mm-hmm.

David Smith (11:17.015)
but an enemy who have far less intrinsic value, value all in themselves, essential dignity, you could use that sort of language, than the Germanic people. And finally, creatures, less than human creatures. I notice I didn't say animals. I said creatures, and that's because

I think it is normally the case that when people are dehumanized, they're not simply seen as lice or rats or bloodthirsty predators, but as monstrous or demonic beings, know, embodiments of evil. And this is very important for understanding the relationship between dehumanization and violence, because of course, if you're combating monsters,

nothing is too harsh, right? The call for mercy, the call for kindness, the call for respect, it's gonna fall on deaf ears because monsters do not merit those attitudes. So that's what I mean by dehumanization.

Waitman Beorn (12:32.111)
And there's a great point, and we're skipping ahead a little bit, but I want to make sure I mention these things when they pop into my head. mean, because there's a great point that you make in the book that there's also this, when people are dehumanizing other people in terms of how they view them, we look at how they behave towards them. And some of the things that we design as people to subjugate, oppress, degrade other people only work if we have some idea that they

are not animals, right? Because animals, you know, my dog will not be ashamed if I go throw him in the pond, right? But if I put a person in the pond, you know, then that hits differently, right? Because there's a recognition that what I'm doing will, you have to be somewhat, you have to have somewhat human capabilities to be offended, be degraded by the behavior that I'm choosing to do to you, right? I probably butchered that argument a little bit, but.

David Smith (13:06.423)
Yes.

David Smith (13:22.572)
Yes.

David Smith (13:27.159)
No, no, you didn't. you got it right, really. So one of the... I guess I need to make the point, which you remarked on when we were chatting before the recording started, that in my view, dehumanization isn't merely metaphorical. It's not just a way of comparing.

Waitman Beorn (13:54.137)
Hmm.

David Smith (13:54.776)
people to subhuman creatures. It should be understood in a literal sense that in genuine dehumanization, the dehumanizer thinks of those whom they dehumanize as really and truly less than human creatures. Now, it's not just a way of talking. Now, of course, that is not to say that people don't

merely rhetorically describe others as animals or demons or whatever that happens to. I don't consider that genuine dehumanization. That's using words to hurt. It's using words as weapons or to inspire violence. It doesn't reflect an actual belief about those individuals. Okay. So that said,

One of the critiques of my concept of dehumanization, which in fact goes back to that wonderful text I mentioned earlier from the late 17th century, boils down to this. You don't call a rat. You don't say to a rat, you're just a rat. know, rats can't be humiliated. Cockroaches can't be humiliated. So.

Waitman Beorn (15:14.265)
Right.

David Smith (15:22.653)
Some skeptics about humanization argue that, well,

Dehumanization can't be real.

simply because you don't do that, right? If you actually think that another person or a group of people are animals, you don't bother verbally degrading them.

And that reflects a fairly simplistic notion of what goes on in dehumanization. Now, it's a simplistic notion that I fell prey to in my first book on dehumanization, where I was just trying to figure it out. I didn't really know where I was going and really and truly what I was doing. So what's really important about dehumanization?

What's crucial for understanding is that when we demonize others on the one hand,

David Smith (16:29.889)
We do indeed think of them as less than human animals.

But we also simultaneously and contradictorily think of them as human beings. So there are two sort of superimposed images. The other is human, totally human and totally subhuman. Maybe later we can get into why that occurs and how that works. And that transforms the other into a monster. If I can illustrate using Nazi propaganda.

Waitman Beorn (16:56.226)
Mm-hmm.

David Smith (17:06.445)
There are several examples of Nazi visual propaganda involving the representation of Jews as rat-like, but not just as rats. I'm thinking of one, a Danish poster, which shows a creature with a rat's body and a caricature of a Jewish man's head. And the caption is in Danish,

Rats destroy them. That's not just a rat. That's a rat person. Right. Now, we might have all kinds of attitudes towards rats. You know, if you're a psychologist, there things to run in mazes. My daughter had pet rats. My grandmother, who grew up in a rat infested slum, was terrified of rats. But there's a lot of variation. But a hybrid creature like that, a rat human,

Waitman Beorn (17:42.179)
Yeah.

David Smith (18:05.895)
is uniquely horrifying. All right. And as I said, there are several, perhaps many such examples in Nazi visual propaganda conveyed.

Waitman Beorn (18:17.101)
Well, one of things that you do, I think you do really well is to also sort of, it's okay for dehumanization to be illogical at times. mean, like, you know, there does, it doesn't need to have an internal logic, logical consistency, which you just illustrated with this idea of someone can believe that that person is not actually a person, but also simultaneously in some ways see them as a person. And, but this is okay because, I mean, fundamentally, I think we would all argue that

David Smith (18:41.196)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (18:45.647)
that racism and dehumanization are irrational, illogical beliefs in the first place. And so like, I like the way that you're able to sort of square that circle by saying, there are internal consistencies that are all irrational, unscientific, illogical and logical, but then there's some that are that are illogical, you know, within themselves.

David Smith (19:07.513)
Absolutely. Yes, yes. And philosophers have a bit of a problem with this because, you know, they're suckers for logic and they correctly say, it's logically impossible for something to be human and subhuman simultaneously. And it is logically impossible, but it's psychologically quite possible. We're creatures of contradictions. We're perfectly capable of entertaining the most

Waitman Beorn (19:24.142)
Yeah.

David Smith (19:35.745)
grotesque contradictions of which this is an example.

Waitman Beorn (19:39.887)
Yeah, and so I want to I want to before we get too far down the road because I have we can go down all of the really interesting things that you talk about. But but first, I want to I want to talk to something else, which I think is useful for everyone. And that's the concept of race, because one of the things that I really appreciated, you know, again, you say you like to do to do the reading and do the research and it definitely shows because you are covering science and history and philosophy, you know, and it.

you're bringing them all together. And I think we should probably take a minute to think about the concept of race. obviously, academics know this and many people in the public that race is a social construct. It's not actually sort of a thing that exists. But of course, to talk about logic and illogic, doesn't mean that the behaviors that people exhibit towards other races are no less real.

David Smith (20:33.783)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (20:34.593)
So maybe, can you talk a little bit, first of all, just maybe a little bit about, you know, what is race? And then a concept that goes throughout your work is this idea of the folk theory of race, which I thought was interesting because you suggest that, that it is its own science. know, it's not a scientific science, but it's its own science with its own set of sort of rules. And if you buy into that,

David Smith (20:47.969)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (21:01.343)
sets of rules, then it makes the dehumanization process, the process of seeing other races as less human possible.

David Smith (21:05.727)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So philosophers have thought a lot about this since around the 1980s. That's when philosophy of race really kicked off. And one of the central questions has always been

does race exist? And if it does exist, what kind of a thing is it? And there are basically three positions. And of course, philosophers love to split hairs, so there are lots of more, you know, granular positions. But let's concentrate on the three big ones. The first one, biological realism, is that race is real and it's biological.

Waitman Beorn (21:39.619)
historians too probably.

David Smith (21:54.668)
races are biological categories, genuine biological categories. Now that's been pretty well exploded scientifically. There are still a few respectable philosophers who want to argue that position, some version of that position. But mostly nowadays, it's, well, I'm going to say something and then modify it a little bit.

It's the position taken by the far right neo-Nazis and so on. And the qualification is it's also sort of the default position of the general public, right, that there are these few biologically distinct kinds of human beings and everyone who's ever lived is either a pure specimen of one of these or a mixture of two or more of them.

This is inconsistent with everything that science has shown us about human variation. Genetically, it makes no sense. And phenotypically, in terms of the outward appearance, it also makes no sense. So what are the other two positions? Well, social constructivism or social realism is one of them. And that's the view that

Yeah, race is not biologically real. It's an invention. And as we all know, that some inventions are real, right? Like, you know, the microphones that we're talking to each other with, those are inventions and they're perfectly real. Marriage is real. Dollars are real. Books are real. And these are all inventions. And the idea here is that

social practices have brought race into existence. Race is real, according to this view. But it's brought into existence and sustained by social practices. And, and, and this is a point, I don't agree with that, but I do agree with this point, races have been manufactured at certain points in human history.

David Smith (24:16.109)
in situations where it's advantageous to justify the oppression by one group of people of another group of people. So races are made and they're unmade as well. Okay, let's set that to the side and go to the third position. The third position has various, it's most commonly called racial skepticism or eliminativism.

I call it anti-realism. That's the view that race is an invention. I agree with that. But some inventions are not real. Harry Potter isn't real. Some inventions are fictions. So this view is that races are fictional. Now, why might one think that rather than social constructivism? Well,

There's, in practice, social constructivism doesn't work. When you try and set out the necessary and sufficient conditions for some group of people being made into a race, there are just too many counter examples. Right? So now I'm kind of at the far extreme, my spouse too, by the way, who is a philosopher of Jamaican origin.

is with me on this, the far extreme of anti-realisms. I don't simply think that races are fictions. I think they're evil fictions. If we, you know, put in the balance the harm that the notion of race has permitted, just say over the last couple hundred years, it's extraordinary. I the Holocaust is a very salient example of that, but we can

pile on to that, you know, the Rwanda genocide, can pile on the ongoing genocide in Sudan, we can pile on the horrors of King Leopold's colonization of the Congo and on and on, millions and millions of deaths, unbelievable suffering. So this isn't entirely pertinent to your question, but I feel the need to say it.

David Smith (26:43.701)
I really do think we need to get over it. We need to get rid of this awful idea. That's not to say we need to get rid of ethnicities, cultural identities. That's different. That's something different. And I totally accept the reality of ethnicities.

Waitman Beorn (26:47.855)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (27:05.646)
I mean, it's interesting because one of the things that you do is you sort of, if we can sort of date the invention of race, you know, I think conventional wisdom or public would sort of say, this is sort of a 19th century with Darwin and Linnaeus and Mendel, these kinds of things that you talk about, but you actually dated earlier. I thought, and without, I'm gonna let you talk about it, but you know what?

I thought what you did was kind of interesting and sort of saying that, again, it's a we don't need the actual science to explain a thing. We can still we can still quote observe it. And again, this is this is in the illogic of the logic of of races. And so you actually pull it, you pull it back. Can you talk a little about about sort of how you when when do you view the idea that we started thinking of ourselves in human as humans with different?

different ration.

David Smith (28:01.709)
Yeah, well, so there's a lot of disagreement among scholars about when race was invented. Indeed, many people think the 19th century, because I think they have a rather limited view that we need scientific biology to undergird the notion, however false it is, of race. But others

claim it's the 17th century and it emerged out of colonialism and the need to justify the big business of transatlantic slave trade. That position, by the way, ignores the trans-Saharan slave trade, which also involved racialization very considerably earlier.

Geraldine Hang, whose work I really respect, dates it to the high middle ages. And her prototype actually of race is the racialization of Jews. Now, as you said, and I disagree, sorry, I agree, I disagree with some other people, race does...

The notion of race as it actually lives and lived in the world rather than, you know, the stuff that academics cook up in their seminar rooms does involve the notion of biologicity. know, the whole idea that race is inherited, for instance, involves the biological. But you don't need biological science to have biological ideas. If we go, say, to the 13th century,

One of the ideas that was around in Christian Europe was that Jewish men menstruate. This was supposed to be punishment for the murder of Christ. But that's a biological notion. You just can't get around that. It's not a scientific biological notion, but it's a biological notion. that and Heng's arguments, I think, are really persuasive.

David Smith (30:23.785)
about racialization in the high middle ages. But I don't think we need to stop there. Aristotle's distinction between Greeks and barbarians, I consider to be a racial notion. Now, some people come and say, yeah, but it doesn't involve differences in phenotype, in appearance. But even much more modern notions of race.

don't involve that. The Nazis had to put yellow stars on people for a reason, right? And although they had notions of stereotypical Jewish appearance, they were well aware that many Jewish people were like my grandmother. She had the palest of pale skin, the bluest of blue eyes, the blondest of blonde hair. I mean, she would be a poster girl for the Aryan race.

Waitman Beorn (30:58.295)
Mm-hmm.

David Smith (31:20.397)
if she did not have the wrong sort of ancestry. So the origins of race, who knows? It's in all likelihood lost in the midst of time. It certainly goes much further back in the 19th century.

Waitman Beorn (31:37.795)
I mean...

And again, think one of the things that you point out is, again, when I say observed, obviously, I mean observed in kind of a racist sense, but you know, that, you know, I can see an apple fall from the tree and I know something's making the apple hit the ground without knowing the physics behind it, right? And so like people in pre-modern eras would see, I'm using scare quotes here for the audience, you know, would see racial differences.

David Smith (31:55.266)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (32:09.215)
And attribute to them whatever they're attributing them. They may not know what genetics is, but there is sort of a again conventional wisdom, you know, that this is how this is how the world works. They may not have the quote scientific expertise to explain it, which happens later, right? But it's still a racial thinking. And you talk about this with the Limpiazza di Sanga. the blood.

David Smith (32:28.077)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (32:37.539)
the blood laws of more Spain, Or guess Catholic Spain, you know, but this idea that what makes one Jewish, what makes one Christian, Spanish, non-Jewish, you know, is in the blood. And so this is, can you talk a little bit about this? Because I think that the blood plays a central role in your book because it becomes, and in your theory as well, because it becomes a way of explaining away exactly what you just mentioned, which is the problem of, you know, someone who doesn't quote look Jewish.

you know, or loving who, you know, the American who looks completely white, except he's, he has a black relative in the midst of time, and is considered black. And so can you talk a little about sort of how blood, what the role of blood plays in this?

David Smith (33:15.585)
That's right, yes.

David Smith (33:21.491)
Right, yeah, it's really important. So if you, as I often do, speak to young people, I'm speaking to my undergraduate students, I teach a course on race. And yes, well, what is race? The knee-jerk reaction is, race is the color of your skin. But that's...

That has to do with the particular history of the United States where people of African descent are the paradigmatic racial category. Of course, in central and Eastern Europe, that's not the case. It's Roma and Jews that are the paradigmatic racial categories. even in the case of United States, it doesn't make sense. So we had the one drop rule, the rule of hypo descent.

which stated that basically you weren't white if you had a single black ancestor anywhere in your lineage. It didn't matter how you looked, right? What mattered was your ancestry. Now why? Why was that the case? And we can very easily move from there to the Nazis, right? The Nazis defined races

define Jewish people in terms of ancestry. We find that right there in the Nuremberg Laws. And one of the Nuremberg Laws, of course, was called the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, which, by the way, was inspired by American Jim Crow legislation.

So why should that be? Well, I need to kind of move to the side and then come back again. Let's play a little game. Let's pretend that you are a dyed in the wool SS man. And I'm a Jewish guy, which I am. And you look

Waitman Beorn (35:33.529)
Just for the purposes of our audiences, a coincidence, I'm not actually an SS man. were just going to... That's right. That's right.

David Smith (35:38.496)
Yeah, yeah, we know that. You that, maybe. You were not definitely not a You would be drummed out of the regiment if you were in SS. You would be a miserable failure as an SS. Okay, so let's pretend. And you look at me and you think, well, in every outward respect, I'm indistinguishable from anyone you would consider a member of the Heron Folk.

Waitman Beorn (35:50.735)
That's correct. Yes, thank you.

David Smith (36:08.405)
the master race, right? I have blue eyes. When I had hair, for the benefit of your listeners, I shave my head now to banish the few remaining hairs left. And, you know, I'm bipedal, I wear clothes, I love my children, and I put up the umbrella when it rains. All these human things. But you looking at me...

considered to me to be an ultimantia sub-human. How can that work? It works because of something that psychologists have studied a great deal over the last several decades, which is called psychological essentialism. That is the view that we are disposed psychologically to think that what makes any individual

a member of a kind, like a kind of person, is not their appearance. The appearance is only as at best symptomatic. It's something on the inside, something that is unobservable. And that often manifests in appearance, but doesn't have to.

And of course, in the Nazi case, part of the Nazi take on Jews is that Jews are the masters of disguise, right? They could very easily pass as genuine, you know, racially killed. Exactly. They're so insidious. Yes, yes. Right. So there's something on the inside. Now, how do you get that something on the inside? Well, we've already touched on that.

Waitman Beorn (37:35.064)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (37:40.589)
which also elevates their threat level, right? Because it makes them even more of a threat.

David Smith (37:56.526)
through descent. We saw that in the one drop rule. And we saw it in the Nazi, what was called the ancestral proof. In Nazi Germany, there were these little ancestry passports, ways that you could validate that you were racially pure on the basis of genealogy. And lot of people made a lot of money doing this sort of genealogy back in the 30s.

So the idea must be then that this essence is passed down biologically from parents to offspring. That's the only way to make sense of all of this.

And that brings us to blood because by far the most common way cross-culturally of understanding this is that the essence is carried in the blood. That's, you know, that's blood and soil. That's that there was a lot of talk about blood in Nazi rhetoric and they meant it. Right. It wasn't merely figurative. I'm arguing.

blood and race so closely tied together. Now I said it's not the only way. There's one variant was that you got the essence through milk that you consumed as a baby, breast milk. That didn't, that wasn't a Nazi thing, but there was a Nazi thing that the essence could be transmitted in a different bodily fluid, semen. Julius Stryker,

thought this, he thought that if an Aryan woman had sexual intercourse with a Jewish man, his semen would somehow meld to her biology and her blood would be permanently poisoned. And any child she had with any future sexual partner would, in fact, be Jewish in virtue of that blood poisoning.

Waitman Beorn (40:06.959)
Yeah, I mean, and moving with that, one of the things that, you know, we always find sort of ironic, of course, about the Nazis is that, you know, they claim at a certain level to be sort of this very scientific group of people and they have they have their eye charts and their hair charts and all of these things. But of course, they don't have a can't test for Jewish. Right. Obviously, right. Because because there is no sort of genetic marker really, you know, for that.

Certainly not at the time. so and they knew that because they they were trying to do this as well. So how is this one of those scenarios where the illogic and the logic live together? Because on the one hand, they have to know scientifically we can't prove our race, our scientific racial theory. But yet you're arguing, of course, that they still deeply believe that there is a biology, that this is a genetic thing.

David Smith (41:00.557)
That's right. Yeah, they were so committed to the notion of race. mean, everything revolved around race for them that when they realized that measuring heads and noses and so on was not going to cut it, they tried the new science at the time of serology, the study of blood. Maybe there were distinctive markers in the blood.

you know, in light of what we were just talking about, that's pretty obvious move that would be. But of course, there weren't any. They could not find any biological markers. So the final, the final move was to say, well, you can make an inference from the from the alleged behavior and cultural attributes of these groups that they possess somehow.

this essence inside of them, which would manifest as, for instance, Jewish ruthlessness and decadence and so on and so forth. In other words, they were holding tight. The notion of race simply could not be questioned within the paradigm. There had to be some room for it, some justification.

mean, interestingly, in Hitler's last statement on this dictated to Bormann, he said very presciently that Jews are a spiritual race. In other words, we can't look to biology for these identifying features. We need to look at Jewish culture.

to understand the Jewish enemy. If we just knocked race out of it, it would be a pretty sophisticated statement actually.

Waitman Beorn (43:05.935)
Yeah, I it's one of things that's, I think, just so fascinating about that particular moment, you know, is, and again, it's this idea that you mentioned at the beginning of human, subhuman, but also superhuman, which you kind of talk about the very end of the book, but this idea that it doesn't work to just be, you know, sort of an animal because you have to have a threat, a threat level to it.

And one of the threats for the Nazis in their imagination of Jews, again, as you said, is this ability to disguise themselves as parasites, that the argument is they can sort of burrow into societies, but they're very good at that. And it's the only way that you can square the circle of how the Germans are the master race.

yet the Jews, which are inferior, not even human, are an existential threat to them. Which again is illogical from a of straight logic perspective. And so you have to kind of square that circle. How are we having these two things simultaneously true at the same time?

David Smith (44:04.908)
Yeah.

David Smith (44:08.908)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

David Smith (44:15.031)
Well.

David Smith (44:18.305)
This is very typical of dehumanization. if you look both at the rhetorical moves that prominent propagandists use during the Third Reich, people like Goebbels, and you look at the visual propaganda that you get in, der Stürmer, very commonly,

Jews are presented as demonic. They have fangs, they have claws. They are terrifying. mean, they're things out of horror films. And one of the best illustrations of this is in this little booklet that was published in 1942 by the SS publishing house, Unten Mensch, The Sabjummer. And it reads, frankly, like a plot of a horror film.

You know, there are these creatures that dwell in filth in the swamps and they kind of appear human, but they're not, they're really disguised as humans and they want to destroy everything that's good and wholesome in humanity. It could be a zombie apocalypse film or something like that. If you just entertain the thought, as too few people do, that Nazis took this really seriously.

you can see why they would be in a conceive of themselves as being in a life and death struggle with this very marginalized minority, a tiny proportion of the German public were Jewish and even less after they got people to deport themselves. More in Poland, of course, and that has interesting historical explanation.

from persecutions in the 14th century. Jews fled east in any case. So here's the thing. How do we explain this? How do we explain the monsterification? How do we explain how marginalized groups, Jews, but also say African Americans in the Jim Crow era?

David Smith (46:42.553)
It's very, very common if some marginalized groups, Rohingya in Myanmar, same marginalized group, who really have very little power and influence are seen as these formidable, dangerous creatures. Well, in my view, we have to go into something which, and your listeners may not know this, but it's a real thing called monster theory.

There's an academic sub-industry concerned with monsters. What is a monster? What role do monsters play in human culture? And so on and so forth. And the monster theorist that has particularly influenced me is a philosopher named Noel Carroll, who wrote a book. gosh, I'm blanking on the title. What is it? It'll come back to me.

It's a great book on horror fiction. Now, most philosophy books, let's face it, they're kind of boring. can put you to sleep. You read them at night, it'll put you to sleep. This is a page turner. And one of the things that, it's philosophy of horror, that's the title, that he discusses is what's the job description? Like what makes a monster? He says there are two necessary characteristics.

One is the monster has to be seen as physically threatening. So monsters aren't nice, right? They want to eat you or kill you or harm you physically in some way. But so do other things, right? That's not enough. A monster has to be what I call, now I'm switching from his terminology to my metaphysically threat.

Waitman Beorn (48:25.807)
Okay.

David Smith (48:35.947)
A metaphysically threatening thing, creature, is contradictory, right? They're kind of fusions of two incompatible kinds of things. And this is very easy to see in the horror fiction that we're familiar with. zombies are alive and dead simultaneously. Werewolves are wolves and humans simultaneously.

Now, how does this pertain to dehumanization? Well, as my grandmother would say, to make a long story bearable.

David Smith (49:18.475)
We homo sapiens are hyper social animals. We're extremely social. There's no mammal that's anywhere near as social as we are. And one of the things that that implies is that we're exquisitely sensitive to indications of humanness in one another, particularly the side of the human face, human eyes. That's why it's easier to kill people at a distance.

when you're not confronted with those cues. That's why executioners often cover the head and the eyes of those who they kill or attack them from the back, cutting the throat. The side of the human face humanizes. At Auschwitz, there was a practice, the guards of not looking Jewish people in the eyes. And I think for that very reason, it humanized them.

David Smith (50:14.635)
We're exquisitely sensitive to humaneness, but at the same time, another feature of human culture is that we defer to experts, people who are supposed to know, people that are placed socially in positions of authority. Now that could be, I grew up in the deep south, that could be the sheriff or the pastor or your parents, or it could be a Nazi race expert, could be Dr. Goebbels.

It could be a far right radio host. If we see them as experts, we will defer to them, even if that contradicts what our eyes tell us. So for instance, the desk in front of me looks to me like it's without gaps. But of course, any microphysis is going to tell me it's mostly empty space, David. It doesn't look like it, but I accept that because the physicist is

I place that physicist in the position of a person who is supposed to know. So what happens when we confront members of one of these dehumanized groups? We respond to them as human, but we're told by, let's say, Dr. Goebbels, that they're not human. They're more akin to rats or lice. Well, this gives us a contradictory picture. Human? We can't get rid of that. It's a...

Waitman Beorn (51:13.615)
Thank

David Smith (51:40.854)
It's a gut response and less than human. And the superimposition of one of those images on the other transforms them into monsters. however dehumanization starts, it tends to collapse into the monstrophication, the demonization of the dehumanized group. And then that

is really the core of the extreme kind of cruelty and violence that dehumanization so often brings in its wake.

Waitman Beorn (52:20.503)
Yeah, I mean, and this touches on something that that you touched on a little bit in the book, but I think it again, it bears conversation. I had Dittemaree Muncheristic on here, you know, and again, your book and her book are both ones that sort of really like caught me and sort of me take a step back and think, which is a good thing. You know, and one of the questions, of course, is, you know, question that I posed to her, but I can pose it to you as well. You know, why do why do killers have

emotional reactions, you know, to the act of killing, right? And, you know, of course, sort of again, conventional wisdom that scare quotes here, you know, is that, that betrays, it betrays a deep seated, perhaps even subconscious morality, right, or subconscious recognition that what I'm doing is quote wrong against, you know, whether it's moral or ethical or religious, you know,

boundaries, but if the people actually are believing literally that the person they're killing is not human, is not worthy of life, how do you square that?

David Smith (53:30.465)
Yeah, so I love her work, by the way. I've read it from before she wrote her wonderful book on perpetrator disgust. So there is this famous disagreement between Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen about this sort of thing. And Goldhagen thought, that these reactions that many, not all, but

but many perpetrators experienced, and they're both talking about the Holocaust cases, but we can extend it out much further, was basically aesthetic. You you've got brains splattering on you and so on. And of course, that's going to be disgusting and horrifying. And Browning took a more moral stance that the act of killing offended the moral sensibilities.

Waitman Beorn (54:16.911)
Mm-hmm.

David Smith (54:29.203)
of some of the killers, say, in the Holocaust by bullets. And indeed, the conventional wisdom goes more towards the Browning end. And there's a whole little industry of the idea of moral injury, that people who kill are sometimes appalled and traumatized by the act of killing because it violates deeply held

moral beliefs. I reject that. I reject all these positions. I think that the response, the responses of horror, a term that's too infrequently used, disgust I think is too limited, horror I think captures this better, is a pre-moral response.

That is, it's a psychological response that's generated by the overriding of inhibitions against acts of lethal violence, which are part and parcel of recognizing the humanness of others. So if I can expand just a little bit on that. As I said, we're social animals, and we're highly, highly social animals.

Waitman Beorn (55:47.981)
Yeah, sure.

David Smith (55:57.014)
Now, social animals must have inhibitions against lethal violence to members of their community. But for the obvious reason, you can't carry on a social existence if you're ripping each other's throats out. Now, normally these inhibitions apply only to the local breeding groups. So we find it in ants, we find it in chimpanzees, we find it in mare cats, we find it in all social animals. Human beings

are extremely social. Those inhibitions have to be quite powerful and they're much more extensive. So we know, for instance, from deep into prehistory, human beings were trading with other human beings living far away. It wasn't just the local breeding group. And to trade, of course, you have to be on cooperative terms with those who you're trading with. So there's something very

potent there. I argue they're potent, pre-moral inhibitions. This isn't matters of principle. These are gut reactions to the overriding of inhibitions. think historically what happened probably, I'm guessing,

this coincided with our leaving a forging existence and settling down in large sedentary groups, is that human beings began working out ways to disable these inhibitions through ritual practices, through the consumption of intoxicants, through eventually the invention of long-range weapons like the longbow in the 14th century.

and through demonizing propaganda, right? But the propaganda, all of these methods, they're always incomplete because we are just as social animals equipped with these powerful inhibitions. I think that's what's clicking in when people respond the way that they do. And, you know, often it's not at the moment. Often it will be

David Smith (58:14.859)
later on, the fact. So I do think that the act of killing for most people, not for everyone, some people don't give a crap, is a traumatic experience, not because of moral or religious principles, primarily, although that can come into it.

but because of simply the way we're wired as social animals.

Waitman Beorn (58:47.299)
And of course, in support of that, most of the people in the context of the Holocaust, and I think probably in most other genocide as well, they figure out a way to get over it if they're doing it repeatedly or, and the thing that, and of course I'm a Browning student, and so obviously I'm very partial to his explanation as well, but there's also the piece of these men, and in my work as well,

David Smith (58:59.98)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (59:16.419)
they'll say stuff like, well, I refuse to shoot. So I just I said I would just do the guarding. And of course, that's a distinction in some sense without a difference, because they are still basically directly involved in in facilitating the murder of these people. You know, and what they've done is just kind of they removed as you as you point out, you know, they've removed the the messy part of it in exchange for, you know,

David Smith (59:25.676)
Mm-hmm.

David Smith (59:31.669)
Indeed.

David Smith (59:40.62)
Indeed.

Waitman Beorn (59:45.104)
a part that's equally important because if nobody was guarding them they could run away, but that doesn't involve sort of the hands-on piece.

David Smith (59:52.205)
They don't have to get blood on their hands. Exactly. Yes. Yes.

Waitman Beorn (59:56.6)
Yeah. I I never I never found in, you know, and I wrote a book on on German soldiers in the Holocaust, you know, in Belarus at the at the small unit level looking at this. And I never found anybody that refused to participate in like the the guarding or the marching or the rounding up. You know, there were there were definitely guys even in the the Vermont who sort of said, I'm not going to I'm not going to shoot or I shot once. And it was not for me kind of thing.

David Smith (01:00:03.469)
Hmm.

David Smith (01:00:13.165)
Hmm. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:23.019)
But nobody was like, and I said, I'm not having any role in this. Just put me back in the barracks and let me sit there until this is over. Everybody sort of was able to situate themselves in a place that is not sort of morally aloof from what was going on.

David Smith (01:00:37.773)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's something at that gut level, there's something very particularly powerful about intimate violence. the folks who say, yeah, just guarding, they're removing themselves very slightly from that intimate violence of, you know, a bullet to the back of the head. And that makes a difference.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:04.343)
And it's, know, as I always sort of say, you know, when, when I'm trying to explain this to students or whatever, you know, like, if I had, if I had to, I would rather not have to kill a cow and butcher it and go through all the process to get my hamburger. I'd much rather just go to the McDonald's and get the hamburger. But the fact that I would find it, you know, gross and probably traumatic to butcher a cow doesn't mean in any way that I'm sort of morally opposed to eating meat, et cetera, you know.

David Smith (01:01:32.235)
Yeah, no, and you would find it, I'm sure, easier to lead a cow to the slaughterhouse than to actually kill it. So an important point here is if we widen our scope, it's actually quite common cross-culturally for people who kill, say, in battle to be considered tainted by the spilling of blood.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:37.825)
Exactly. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:00.708)
Yeah.

David Smith (01:02:02.318)
And very often they have to undergo purification rituals. Even the Romans did this notoriously, militaristic culture. In the Middle Ages, Christian knights going off to the Crusades, they had to do penance when they came back as a condition for re-entering society. mean, the culture helped them there.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:24.835)
Well, one of the things you mentioned in the book is that actually a lot of cultures, when they kill animals, when they're hunting, You mentioned this, it's a brilliant point that the animals are giving themselves up for us. And so again, it's not exactly killing them. It's kind of like a cooperative relationship.

David Smith (01:02:48.189)
Yeah, exactly. Yes. But it's a way of dealing with what I call the problem of killing. And my theory would predict that in those cultures, dehumanization does not occur. That's a testable hypothesis because, see, we for a very long time had a different solution to the problem of killing, which is the notion of hierarchy. There are higher and lower beings. And if a being is lower,

on the hierarchy. Of course, we modestly placed ourselves just below the angels and after the death of God at the very top of the hierarchy and everything else is lower. The lower thing is the more killable, the more exploitable it is. The cultures where we find this idea, which is equally loony in my view, that an animal offers itself to the hunter to be killed have found a different solution to the problem.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:22.723)
Right.

David Smith (01:03:47.358)
And because in dehumanization, the dehumanized population is seen as less than human, dehumanization requires a hierarchical model.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:02.052)
I mean, and this is, again, there's so many rabbit holes that you go down in the book that are just amazing and fascinating. mean, this sort of calls back this idea of the great chain of being, That animal life is hierarchical by definition, which I think a lot of us, sort of conventional wisdom again, which would be like, like a chimpanzee is better developed than an earthworm or whatever.

Um, but actually, as you point out, you know, it's actually fit for purpose, you know? And so like a thing, a thing can be a virus can be a perfect being, you know, because it's perfectly designed to do what it's, what it's supposed to do. But yet the problem is we put ourselves, you know, in that, in a hierarchy. And then, you know, as you point out, then we translate that to all the humans also. Like it's not, it's not human beings and other things. It's different races of human beings.

David Smith (01:04:33.417)
Exactly, yes.

David Smith (01:04:39.735)
Sure, I mean...

David Smith (01:04:57.953)
Yeah, and we found that in the 18th century, that's when this idea of the great chain of being, you with God and the Christian version, we find versions of this all over the world. I the conventional history of ideas notion that it was a distinctively European development out of Plato and Aristotle. I think that's really incorrect because we find it in pre-contact, say, Latin American traditions.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:58.528)
because we're sort of, yeah.

David Smith (01:05:26.445)
West African traditions and in Chinese traditions and so on. It's very widespread and it's very widespread because it's way of solving a basic existential problem that human beings everywhere have to have to confront. So in the European version there's God, the archangels, the angels, us and then various animals, plants right down to the know the minerals. Everything's included in this.

And then the 18th century with colonialism, we have the races as sort of a sub-hierarchy within the category of the human. Europeans place themselves, of course, at the very top. And at the bottom were either Africans or Laplanders or Native Americans, depending upon, you know, the colonialism of the moment.

And whoever is at the bottom is just a hair's breadth away from the subhuman, right? And so there's an easy transition there from this kind of racism, which you see there, it's actually embodied in the notion of race itself and dehumanization. You just push it a little bit further into the subhuman.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:25.539)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:41.743)
Well, mean, and that's an interesting distinction too that I'd like you to of riff on for a second, which is this idea of a subhuman or a non-human. mean, like, how do we, you know, because one of the things you talk about, I think you do a really cool job in the book of, it's kind like you can't be a little bit pregnant. Like either you're human or you're not human.

David Smith (01:06:56.173)
Mm-hmm.

David Smith (01:07:06.945)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:09.825)
And subhuman is kind of like a liminal space that shouldn't really exist.

David Smith (01:07:16.501)
Yeah, so what tends to happen, so let's think of why that is what you just said. Human or non-human? Well, that's part of the logic of essentialism. Essences don't come in degrees, right? They're digital. It's on or on off. So it's not that some people are kind of human and kind of not human.

Rather, the way this pans out in the history of ideas and human practices is they are human up to a certain point. Now, they are humans of lesser value. That's the key thing here. So if you demote, say, Native Americans to the bottom of the category of the human, they're still in the category of the human, but they're lesser humans. And being a lesser human,

Waitman Beorn (01:08:03.247)
Mm.

David Smith (01:08:16.781)
is miles away from being less than human. So there's a crucial threshold. And when you cross it, it flips, right? You are wholly to oversimplify, you know, taking into account what I said earlier about humanization, that we can't really escape the recognition of others as human. Wholly non-human.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:45.743)
Yeah, I mean, yeah. And I guess I guess I'm curious if we can sort of talk a little bit about maybe where we are today in this, because one of the things you you talk about in the book is is that sort of ideologies and that's a whole other discussion, which is really interesting thinking of ideologies in a certain way. But they sort of they sort of come around and then it's they sometimes fade away. But they, you know, it's kind of like a virus that lives in the soil. You know, they can come back.

David Smith (01:08:54.186)
Mm.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:14.739)
you know, again, and this is where I think you draw a nice connection. So that we're not doing this, is it situation or is it, is it ideology? I mean, obviously these things are symbiotic and they sort of operate, infilite each other. You know, where are we today and where do you see dehumanization happening, you know, in today's society in the same way?

David Smith (01:09:37.805)
Yes, I do, both internationally and in the United States. So I guess where do I want to go with this?

There are, you're absolutely right. And I do argue that ideologies have, tend to be incredibly robust. Ideologies in my sense, ideology is one of these words kind of like dehumanization that means lots of different things. It's notoriously semantically promiscuous, right? There are like more than 20 meanings just in the

you know, the academic literature for ideology. So I take pains to say what exactly what I mean by ideology in the book and then proceed with an analysis on that basis. So I understand ideology as systems of belief and associated practices, which are reproduced because they advantage one

group of people, or at least are perceived as advantaging one group of people.

Now.

David Smith (01:10:58.975)
Ideologies are very often culturally foundational. Let's move now just right to the Nazi case. The oppression of Jews, as you know, has a very long history in Christian European thought and practice. Christians define themselves

in relation to Jews. There's a marvelous fairly recent book by Magda Tater called Christian Supremacism, Understanding the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism, which makes this case very, very powerfully and beautifully. So, antisemitic ideology, Jews are Christ killers, so on and so forth.

And even the very specific tropes which emerged in the Middle Ages have had a remarkable afterlife precisely because they're foundational to European Christian culture. They go underground for long periods of time, but it just takes a little crisis and bang their back. They're like kindling waiting to be ignited. So we saw this after World War I, right? The political antisemitism that emerged in the aftermath.

World War I, which fueled the nascent National Socialist movement in the 20s, was a revival, in essence, of medieval notions, complete with the demonization, by the way, which there's some very... I recently wrote a paper called Sacred Leaders and True Believers.

And it's about the religious aura that so often surrounds fascist leaders and which explains the devotion of their true believers. People like, you know, Magda Goebbels would kill her children because the world was no longer worth living in with national socialism defeated and Hitler dead. So.

David Smith (01:13:23.229)
So, yeah, really, really powerful. And there are rhetorical techniques that people use, and I promise you I'm getting to the point, that are extremely potent in exploiting these sensibilities. Now,

Waitman Beorn (01:13:31.439)
Bye bye.

David Smith (01:13:44.998)
One of these is a pattern that Hitler used in his rhetoric, Hitler and Goebbels, but for simplicity's sake, let's just talk about Hitler, which was described in a remarkable 1941 paper by a remarkable man, a psychoanalyst and philosopher. And actually he had a second PhD in anthropology, man named Roger Monte Carlo, who was invited by a British diplomat to visit Germany in 1932.

a feverish election year where Hitler is flying around in airplanes and descending from the clouds, giving five or six speeches a day. And Monte Carlo was in the audience for some of these speeches. And he says, well, look, here's what Hitler did. And other contemporary commentators have made the same point, just not have not given the same depth of analysis.

His first move was to induce a sense of hopelessness and depression in his listeners. We've been exploited, we're humiliated, you know, the great race, our great nation has been brought to its knees, the Treaty of Versailles and all this kind of stuff. And as Monte Carlo put it, once they're all rolling around in an orgy of self-pity, he changes his tune and says, well, but it's not you, it's not your fault.

It's the Jews and the communists and the social democrats. They're the enemy within. They're the source of the stab in the back that was the cause of all this terrible trajectory of the German people. And then the concluding note is this call for unity and saying, join the National Socialist Party.

We will triumph for a thousand years, blah, blah, blah. And of course, if you've been taken in by the depression and the terror, you're a sucker for the call for salvation. Now, I mentioned that simply to say something which one day is going to get me into trouble. Not yet. I'm too far down on the hit list. When our current president made his first political speech,

David Smith (01:16:09.809)
in 2015, throwing his hat into the ring for the, for the Republican nomination. I was listening to it and he followed that sequence to the letter, absolutely to the letter. You can, you can find the text of the speech, depression, paranoia, salvation. And he repeated that in rally after rally after rally.

So I was extremely alarmed because I understand the power of that rhetoric. My good liberal friends would, figuratively speaking, pat me on the head and say, silly boy, this is just some amusement. No. It's in that second moment of the pattern, the paranoid moment. In that first speech, was Mexico's not sending the best, their murderers and rapists, dehumanizing rhetoric, pushing those

culturally foundational ideological buttons comes into play.

my god, I think we're in deep trouble now.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:25.207)
I it's, you know, I think I agree completely. I mean, and I think also if I were to kind of encapsulate it in a certain sense, I feel like the anti-trans stuff is a great example of the dehumanization. mean, there's this idea of like, you know, that the trans people are almost that they're not they're not human, but they are they're deep. They're threats, right? Because they might go in the bathroom and, whatever, which is all projection.

David Smith (01:17:40.909)
Yes.

David Smith (01:17:52.79)
And they're metaphysically threatening, right? Because the people who have these anti-trans attitudes think a man's a man and a woman's a woman, right? And these are essentialized categories. So when you get a figure that they regard as ambiguous, that makes a monster, right? It makes a monster just like in the T4 program, these children were seen as looking

Waitman Beorn (01:17:54.521)
But yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:04.728)
Yeah.

David Smith (01:18:21.517)
kind of like human beings, but in that case, they were dehumanized by, you know, it was very common for the Nazi physicians to say that they've got nothing inside, there's no soul, there's no ends there.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:34.159)
Yeah. I mean, and it's also, I mean, again, we're coming to the end here a little bit, but I mean, just as also the the sheer projection, you know, it's like, you know, it's not just one political group or the other, but, you know, it's not trans people that are molesting children. I mean, you know what mean? that's like empirically not, you know, at scale, absolutely not true, you know, but the

David Smith (01:18:52.631)
No, no, no, no,

David Smith (01:18:57.397)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would think.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:59.779)
But every day it's another person who's a pastor or a priest or a conservative or whatever who is arrested for these kind of things.

David Smith (01:19:07.213)
Absolutely. I mean, they're pretty low down the list of people who are a danger to anyone at all.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:13.913)
But I again, I guess it's not exactly in the same lines of the dehumanization piece, you know, but it's almost like the scary things are inversions of sort of qualities that, you know, the sort of dominant race or dominant group, you know, is looking for. Yeah.

David Smith (01:19:31.511)
Yeah.

David Smith (01:19:35.085)
Yeah, everything they wanted in the song. Yeah, yeah, the projection is certainly involved here. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:41.647)
Gosh, we ended in a depressing place, but I mean, guess that's the thing that happens. But we don't end. That's right. Yeah.

David Smith (01:19:48.119)
Listeners, listeners, don't be depressed. We've identified what we need to resist.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:54.234)
That's right. I mean, but I think it's true. And I think, and again, I grew up in Virginia and my belief system needed editing after I left there at 18. You know I mean? I had work. So I understand some of this stuff as well, right? Because you have to be willing to sort of think through it and...

and be exposed to other people and other beliefs and other systems, you know, to sort of get out of the...

David Smith (01:20:25.353)
Absolutely. And you know, when I'm writing about racism and humanization and so on, methodologically, what I try to do is find it in myself. Find some echo, some place where it has purchase in myself. And that helps me to try and kind of get into the heads of these folks. as we're about to wrap up, one,

I think really important point is in getting into the heads of these folks, we need to them as people. It's very tempting to dehumanize, say Hitler was a monster. He wasn't a monster, he was unfortunately a human being. And he holds up a mirror to what human beings are capable of. And I think that's the proper attitude because if we say they're monsters, it's like they have nothing to do with us.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:23.471)
Well, absolutely. And if they're monsters, they have nothing to teach us. of course, that, you know, they I mean, this is I'm this is my I bang this drum all the time, you know, that we need to have empathy for historical actors in the sense of, you know, I'm trying to imagine how they must have felt not sympathy or I don't feel sorry for them, you know, but because 99 percent or whatever, I mean, I make that number up, but the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are.

David Smith (01:21:23.617)
But of course, they do have something to do with.

Exactly. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:52.514)
psychologically normal people. They're not sociopaths. We're not incapable of recognizing, you know, the suffering of others, etc. You know, that's actually that's actually far, far more frightening than that. These are all deranged psychopaths, you know, because because that means that we're all capable of and of course, we never want to imagine ourselves as as being the bad guys, but.

David Smith (01:21:54.977)
Exactly.

David Smith (01:22:07.404)
Indeed.

Waitman Beorn (01:22:14.849)
Statistically, we're far more likely to be the bad guys. And particularly if we're if we're white Americans, you know, we're far more likely to be the bad guys or the bystanders than we are the victims of the rescuers. And again, I think that's always the message that that I try to sort of, you know, leave people with, which is, we have a lot we have a lot to learn from the perpetrators in the sense of what not to do, but how they got to where they are.

David Smith (01:22:42.273)
I completely agree.

Waitman Beorn (01:22:44.301)
And I think sometimes that's even more useful than learning how victims survived or were able to resist, et cetera. I mean, think those are obviously massively important topics for historical study and things for us to understand. But we should really focus on never having to have victims in the first place by understanding what makes the perpetrators tick. But we'll have to leave it here. But before we let you go.

because we could go on for a very long time. please, I really highly recommend the book, Making Monsters, because the things that David has gone through here very kindly, I've only scratched the surface of the depth and specificity of the argument. And I've learned all kinds of just really interesting things along the way, along with the larger points that he's making. But before we let him go, obviously, our last question is always, what's one?

book on the Holocaust that you found useful, inspiring, know, worth sharing, I guess, for the rest of us.

David Smith (01:23:49.049)
well, that's an easy one, actually, and it links to what we're just talking about. I highly recommend Johann Czaputow's book, The Law of Blood, Thinking and Acting as a Nazi. It's a brilliant exploration, ostensibly of Nazi legal philosophy, but it really gets into the Nazi framework very powerfully and effectively.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:13.955)
Outstanding. Well, thank you for that for everyone else. Just a note I think I am moving to a bi-weekly rather than weekly podcast just because Gosh, you know, there's a lot of amazing people out there and I want to I want to try to get all of them So we're probably gonna go, you know once every once every two weeks instead of once a week But I hope that that will be be okay with you

Again, thank you for listening. Please take a moment to like, subscribe, share with your friends who may be interested in this. hope it has relevance. Unfortunately, I think it has a lot of relevance to today. And once again, David, thank you so much for coming on.

David Smith (01:24:58.52)
Thank you so much for inviting me.