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On October 18, 2023, the Brazilian writer Eliane Brum published a column in this newspaper titled
The dehumanization of animals
, which began by quoting the statements of the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, after the terrible attacks carried out by Hamas on October 7. October 2023: “I have ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
With great lucidity, Brum immediately denounces the rhetorical strategy implicit in animalizing the enemy;
She also pointed out that to make this dehumanization work, a prior intellectual maneuver is necessary: depriving animals of dignity and moral consideration.
Obviously
you cannot be humane with animals because they are not human.
But this obviousness, Brum reminds us, is the product of a “Eurocentric perspective” that clashes with many other worldviews in which other living beings are conceived as people and “humanity” is not what distinguishes us but rather what unites us with they.
To escape the horror caused by the dehumanization of animals (both our species and those of others), she raises the need for “the radical decolonization of thought.”
Four months after the start of the siege, the “dehumanization” of Gaza continues.
With honorable exceptions, the world is not determined to stop it.
Someone could tell me: well, one has to attend to other issues, such as writing about the Latin American environment, which you should be doing in this column.
Yes, that imaginary voice is right, and I swear I'm about to evoke the American fauna.
In 1900, an American named Benjamin Corbin published a “Guide for the Wolf Hunter” (
Corbin's Advice
), in the introduction of which he says (the translation is mine): “I am a born hunter, a true Nimrod of old [Nemrod is a mythical Bible hunter].
My father hunted redskins with Daniel Boone, he made notches in the barrel of his gun, a notch for each scalp.
These lines are a stuffing of myths that continue to operate today: the belief in predestination (
born
hunter ), identification with the biblical past (an old Nimrod) and genocidal dehumanization (hunting redskins, identifying American towns with wild animals).
From there, Corbin's dedication to exterminating wolves is completely "natural."
The extermination of native species and peoples has been parallel in many colonizing processes.
In Tasmania, the extinction of the thylacines (the “wolves” of that island) was slightly later than that of the original settlers: Fanny Cochrane Smith, the last person of Tasmanian ancestry, died in 1905, and the last thylacine died in 1936 in a zoo.
In North America, the extermination of the bison was a means of defeating the plains peoples who depended on them.
The government and railroad companies paid bounties for their pelts (photographs of mountains of bison skulls are infamous).
Once the natives had been defeated, the next obstacle to colonization was the wolf.
Corbin and his readers were very successful in his venture.
In less than a century, wolves had already been almost completely eliminated in the United States and Mexico.
In the 1970s there were only five wolves of the Mexican subspecies left, which were captured in Chihuahua and Durango to recover the species in captivity.
The link between wildlife eradication, Latin America, and colonization can also be found in the diaries of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a writer and activist recognized as one of the founders of modern political Zionism.
The intensified anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe (especially in the East, where pogroms proliferated) convinced Herzl and many others that their people would only be safe from millennial persecution, segregation, expulsion and extermination, if they managed to establish a national state.
In 1895, Herzl began keeping a diary about this then-seemingly utopian project.
“If we were to go to South America,” he noted on June 11, “which would have much in its favor due to its distance from militarized and sordid Europe, our first state treaties will have to be with South American republics” (I translate from the English version of Harry Zohn from
The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl
).
At that time, Palestine belonged to the Ottoman Empire and Herzl did not rule out the option of settling in some distant place, territorially extensive and with a population less reluctant to Jewish immigration (the country that he mentions most frequently in his diaries is Argentina. ).
Aware of how inhospitable the South American nature would be for the settlers, Herzl writes in his diary the next day (06-12-95): “If we move to a region where there are wild animals to which the Jews are not accustomed , large vipers, etc., I will use the natives, before giving them employment in the transit countries, for the extermination of these animals.
High rewards for viper skins, as well as their young.”
The species chosen by Herzl as an example of Latin American wild animals unfortunately resonates painfully with the current situation.
In 2014, Ayelet Shaked, now former Minister of Justice and the Interior of Israel, broadcast a speech in which journalist Uri Elitzur called the Palestinian attackers “vipers,” and called for the destruction of their families and homes to prevent the breeding of future “ “little vipers.”
On November 21, 2023, in an interview on Channel 13, Shaked stated: “We need two million to leave.
Honestly, that is the solution for Gaza.”
The displacement and extermination of populations of our species, or of other species, are justified again and again on the basis that
we
, but not they, enjoy a special, superior condition, a divine predilection that makes us genuinely “human.” , in such a way that others lose their humanity when they commit violent acts, while our humanity is not questioned by our own aggressions.
This incongruity, this double standard, is an unequivocal sign that the “humanity” invoked in these contexts is nothing more than an ethnocentric myth from which we urgently need to emancipate ourselves.
Jorge Comensal
is the author of The Mutations, Junkies of Letters and This Boiling Vacuum.
He collaborates with Socio-Environmental Conflict Transformation, AC and the condor reintroduction project in Baja California, Mexico.