Thread by @ReginaldOhLaw

A person has to overcome his natural instincts in order to kill another person.

So, how did the NZ terrorist so easily and almost casually take the lives of innocent human beings?

Because to him, the Muslims he killed were not really human.

Thread

It is so difficult for a person to kill another that the military has to "train" soldiers to be able to kill. One tactic they use is dehumanization.

Dehumanization is the process or treatment of another person or group of persons as less than human, even subhuman.

Studies have shown that dehumanization is a key step in the infliction of harm and violence on a dehumanized group.

So, the military systematically dehumanizes the "enemy" for its soldiers, thereby making it easier for them to overcome any moral restraints on killing humans.

For the NZ terrorist, the ease in killing dozens of people in cold blood while live streaming his onslaught suggests that he had thoroughly dehumanized Muslims.

Yes he was killing, but, it was perfectly fine in his mind, because he wasn't killing real "humans.*

In his mind, he was killing subhuman animalistic creatures, not other fellow human beings.

How did he end up seeing Muslims in such a dehumanized way?

He likely espoused dehumanizing views of Muslims and shared his beliefs with others like minded.

Also, given that the dehumanization of Muslims is pervasive in national and global political culture, he's absorbed such views simply by living in a post-Trump United States.

Political discourse today is thick with rhetoric and disinformation dehumanizing Muslims.

One example-actor James Woods posted a tweet with a link to a video of Muslim boys playing soccer with a decapitated human head.

The message? That Muslims are savages who worship an alien religion. That they aren't like us. They're not human.

That rhetoric has been amplified & giving the weight of "truth" because the president himself has given support to, and actually engaged in, dehumanizing rhetoric.

Trump's aggressive pushing of anti-Muslim policies like the Muslim travel ban also reinforces dehumanization.

Within this climate of pervasive dehumanization of Muslims, what's perhaps more surprising is that there haven't been even more terrorist acts waged against Muslims, in the U.S. and across the globe.

Moving forward, instead of just giving "thoughts and prayers," we need to think hard about the steps each one of us can take to reduce or mitigate the dehumanization of Muslims, in the larger political culture and specifically here on social media.

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