The Devil is in the Details

Part 1 - Animal Pain

On April 17, Chris Van Hollen, a democratic senator from Maryland went to meet with El Salvadorian deportee, Abrego Garcia. The meeting with Garcia was demanded in response to the Trump administration’s defiance of the court’s order to facilitate his return to the United States. Originally, Senator Van Hollen was denied a face to face with Garcia, however, they flipped on that the next day. The Trump admin and President Bukele likely saw it as an opportunity to improve the public opinion of CECOT and the El Salvadorian prisoners conditions.

The United States near unanimously agrees on the issue of sending immigrants to a third country gulag without due process. “You gotta get scared that people who are not criminals are getting lassoed up and deported”, very earnestly said the right-wing podcaster, Joe Rogen, “That’s horrific”.

The Trump administration’s messaging surrounding immigration reform has largely followed the style of nazi propagandists.

Permission

Anti-Semitic Propaganda poster from Nazi occupied Denmark

Rotten, Udryd Den - Rats, Destroy Them (Denmark, 1940)

Drawn is a large rat, lurking in the shadows. The rats head replaced with a Nazi caricature of a Jewish man’s face, the poster captioned, “Rats, Destroy Them”. In this instance, the dehumanization is blatant, literally depicting the Jews as animals, rodents specifically.

Dehumanization is a key tactic for fascist regimes. Humans see animals as a second class of life: humans are the top of the pyramid, followed by animals, vegetation is the lowest tier. Rats are a good example of this, probably why they were chosen for the poster. If a restaurant has rats, that poses a threat to human health. In that case, it is completely acceptable to exterminate the rats. The humans life matters more, why?

Humans see themselves as unique from animals because of the capacity of our minds, where animals are sentient, humans have both sentience and conscious. “Denying another’s mind, particularly their capacity for experience, undermines moral concern for them and has been claimed to facilitate extreme violence”, The Denial of Mind: Disparaging Dehumanization and the Perception of Minds in Others (Alexander P Landry et al., 2022). All animals, minus sea sponges, have nervous systems. This means that the rat is capable of experiencing pain, no one is disputing this fact, the animal’s ability to interpret the pain is where things get muddy. “There is no coordinating self which can recognize that ‘I have had two pains’. Even in the single pain, there is no self to say ‘I am in pain’— for if it could distinguish itself from the sensation… sufficiently to say ‘I am in pain’ it would also be able to connect the two sensations as its experience.” The chapter Animal Pain, in C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain. A soul and the mental capacity to have a “self” are what make us capable of having an experience and since the assumption is that animals do not have a self or soul they can not experience pain. “A succession of perceptions” but no “perception of succession”, as Lewis says.

If a humans personhood exists because of our cognitive ability, taking that cognition into question by animalizing them opens the mind up to committing previously unthinkable acts of violence. Even the simple term “illegal alien” strips someone of their humanity. “Alien” dehumanizing the group in the same way calling them rats would. “Illegal”, they're only crime, being where they don’t belong - sneaky rats, crawling their way into our kitchen. If you had just stayed outside where your kind belongs we wouldn’t have a problem. But since you’re not where rats are supposed to be we must get rid of you. Having rats in the kitchen is dangerous, we could get sick. “So, we have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem. ... Many of those people will probably have AIDS, and they’re coming into our country. And we don’t do anything about it, we let everybody come in. ... It’s like a death wish for our country.” Trump consistently animalizes the Haitians in particular, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats…”. An authoritarian regime reducing an undesirable groups’ perceived mental capacity to that of an animal allows the rest of the population to passively permit the regimes acts of violence against them. Just like they accept that exterminating the rats is a necessary evil for the health of the superior group.

Part 2 Coming Soon…

The Devil is in the Details - The Enemy Within

How and why Trump and MAGA use propaganda to cast immigrants as the “enemy”