But he tells us little about dynamic character of the distinction between human and
inhuman, or of the processes which shape each of the concepts. Within discussions
about humanitarianism, many of the Red Cross movement’s more controversial,
neutralist positions, for instance on the Biafra crisis, have been rehabilitated in
recent years. Yet one particular instance of failure is persistently mentioned,
namely the failure of the Red Cross to engage in a satisfactory way with the
extraordinary human suffering of the Nazi Holocaust. Concerning this episode, Rony
Bauman argues that the Red Cross was “guilty of not having taken into account the
fact that the very notion of humanity already had been abolished”.^58
The idea of inhumanity, containing both the acknowledgement of humanity
and its negation, goes further than cruelty in capturing something vital about the
suffering that, for humanitarians, no human should experience. One clear
manifestation of inhumanity in the literal sense of a deliberate negation of the unity
of humanity, is persecution through the process of dehumanisation. Otto, a rescuer
of Jews during the Holocaust, reflected to Kristen Monroe on a discussion he had
with a Nazi guard who had told him, in relation to the killing of Jews: "You know,
they were not human anymore." Otto went on to note:
That was the key: dehumanization. You first call your victim names and take
away his dignity. You restrict his nourishment, and he loses his physical
beauty and sometimes some of his moral values. You take away soap and
water and then say the Jew stinks. Then you take their human dignity
further away by putting them in situations where they even will do such
things which are criminal. Then you take food away. When they lose their
beauty and health and so on, they are not human anymore. When he's
reduced to a skin-coloured skeleton, you have taken away his humanity. It is
much easier to kill non-humans than humans.^59This process of dehumanisation, so characteristic of the Nazi Holocaust has, of
course, been described by many others, most eloquently perhaps by Primo Levi.^60
At the risk of not doing justice to an important debate on the commensurability of
58
59 Brauman, "From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism": 403-404.
Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice During the
Holocaust 60 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 88. Italics in original.
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (with The Truce) (London: Everyman's Library, 2000).