Hitler was a human being, to begin with.
He was born as a squalling human infant to two human parents, raised through all the stages of young human life, and proceeded through his adolescence and adulthood biologically indistinguishable from other humans.
He did not need a special doctor or special medicine or special clothing or anything special to accommodate him, because he was a human being.
Like Genghis Khan, or Tamerlane, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or like billions who lived before and after him, he was fully human in every way.
Yet like Genghis Khan, or Tamerlane, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, who among us would flinch at calling him a monster?
Because he was indeed monstrous. His spirit and his soul were fully human, and he is more likely than not roasting in the icy absence of God for all time; but his will and his acts and what he made of himself were monstrous.
A monster is a creature, as we are; yet it is by definition not a human being. It is a creature less than a human being, for it is either by nature alien to humanity or has somehow traded some of its humanity for something alien to it.
A vampire is a monster, for the essential quality of humanity has been perverted by being mixed with that of a corpse, or perhaps a demon. A dragon is a monster, for it is an unnaturally large reptile that destroys all before it.
English is a delightfully fluid tongue, not by structure but by the willingness of its users to absorb and adapt ideas and words from other languages to its use.
"Monster" comes to us from French, and in turn from Latin, from a root meaning "omen, portent, danger." A monster is a sign of imbalance in things, a reckoning, a vengeance for a world disturbed.
We have many words for when people who do bad things: Criminals, sinners, miscreants, murderers, rapists, scoundrels, rakes, rapscallions, malcontents, terrorists, thieves, rogues, scalawags, etc.
We have very, very few words for people whose acts go beyond shocking the conscience to horrifying it.
Because we have so few words for what they are, we have a hard time grappling with their acts; and because we have a hard time grappling with their acts, we have a hard time naming them.
The further problem is that until relatively recently, we were prone to calling things by their apparent and undeniable nature. A man is a man, a woman is a woman, a baby is a baby, a human being is a human being.
Indeed, the fundamental character of a human being is indelible; no matter what atrocity or miracle of charity one performs, one's humanity cannot be erased or replaced.
So when Tamerlane or his ancestor Genghis piled the skulls of children in front of the ruins of a city that refused to submit; when Stalin sent men, women, and children to hoe permafrost while barely clothed; when Hitler diverted war material to genocide, they wore human skin.
This forces us to deal with human beings doing things beyond what the super-overwhelming majority of us can even begin to fathom doing; even to describe the acts is to cause our souls to blanch.
They are not actually, literally monsters. They do not grow fangs, they do not sprout batlike wings, they do not sleep in their burial Earth and rise from their tombs at sunset to prey on the life of the living.
They laugh and smile and dandle children on their knees; they pose for paintings or pictures before beautiful mountains; they drink or dance or clap a happy tune; they cleave to loved ones and do the fun things people do, too.
And they murder the innocent on a scale that minds cannot easily grasp, and they do so in truly awful ways. They defile the bodies. They flaunt their inhumanity as easily as they flaunt their humanity.
I am as down on other people (and myself!) as is reasonably possible short of suicide or constant depression, but a simple review of statistics shows that genocide isn't one of those things that happen on the third Tuesday of every month.
Indeed, the worst domestic (and now Irish!) atrocity humans manage is to slaughter children, the most defenseless of all people, at their most vulnerable stage of life; and to do so, the humans engage in a thousand verbal and semantic evasions that collapse under any scrutiny.
So they rigorously avoid the scrutiny and seek to banish it to the outer darkness, precisely because the truth peeks through the cracks constantly.
Grappling with those who revel in the deaths of whole swathes of human beings, rather than trying not to look at it as the snuffing is underway, leaves us without the words we need for this.
There is no word for "a human whose actions are so awful beyond humanity that despite myself, I pray that God as Eternal Judge of the Living and Dead puts him to torture and torment my mind cannot even imagine for the awfulness of his acts."
And so instead, we call him a monster, or an animal.
I have thought on this a great deal lately and I've concluded I'm unconvinced that this is somehow on a par with calling innocent men, women, and children "vermin" or the equivalent.
In the latter case, we are not grappling with something beyond our understanding and latching onto words that bridge the impossibility before us and our own world. We are instead actively denying reality by pretending obvious humans are not human.
A sin is an intent and an act; an intent to perform the act, knowing that it is wrong, with the understanding of why it is wrong. Calling someone one can clearly see is human a cockroach merely as a means of pretending away his humanity is a sin.
Calling someone a monster or an animal because he has done something so evil we cannot fathom a human being doing it is not a sin, it is an attempt to reconcile linguistically what our minds cannot reconcile emotionally or mentally.
It is not a sin precisely because the intent is not to deny the person's humanity; the intent is to grapple with enormity.
Thus, I can say "The Irish are monsters," not because they aren't human -- I'm descended from some, and my wife's paternal line is as Irish as they come -- but because they have with no prodding or threat chosen to begin slaughtering their young en masse.
Donald Trump can describe MS-13 as animals not because their species -- biological or metaphysical -- is different, but because their behavior and acts are not those of even ordinarily bad human beings.
Linguistically, it is a facially fine line; but the nature of language is one of fine lines and careful renderings.
