If I didn’t do it ... a coda

A personal addendum to a personal article

In the foulée of a recent article, I penned this response to a contributor and consider it worthy of publication in its own right, for those who care to read it. Here is the article in question:

I don’t know if that was a world-shattering epiphany. But it shattered me in the moment, and so I wrote about it.

Much of what I write is not written in order to distribute some innate wisdom that wells up within me. It is the act of writing per se that sometimes reveals to my inner self certain things that, if not true, are at least worthy of consideration. I think the shooting of Brian Thompson has caused many to retreat within themselves to question their own morality: some have emerged from this self-challenge unchanged, resolute in their values and what they hold to be right, or wrong, as the case may be; others have had their prejudices confirmed; and others still continue to do battle with their own consciences.

The concept of dehumanisation is one that had passed me by, to tell you the truth. It was a word that came very much into vogue with the October 7th attacks and the Israeli reaction to them. Commentators referred to the demeaning treatment of Palestinian Gazans as dehumanising and, for the first time, I had to wrestle with what that meant. My concept of killing in terms of warfare had grown with me out of my parents’ experience of the Second World War, and of the control efforts made to bring order to Northern Ireland, and the UK’s endeavour to recapture the Falklands from Argentina. It was all about being okay to kill the enemy, especially if the enemy wants to kill you.

Justified killing was predicated on the enemy’s desire to kill me. But now the paradigm has shifted. In Edward Bond’s A Short Book for Troubled Times, he wrestles with how an airman can drop bombs on Germany and kill children in their homes, and yet return and hug his own children when his mission is completed; or how people can advocate nuclear weapons, but would shirk from taking a blow torch and burning to death with their own hands the people who would be fried to a crisp by an atomic weapon. The distance between our approval of a death and the mechanical means by which it is procured is frightening: close to, we would hesitate; when enacted through an official policy, we egg on the killing. Distance from the act of killing dehumanises us every bit as much as the propaganda fed into our ears by killer governments dehumanises those whose deaths we then wish for.

Virtually immediately after October 7th, I was presented in the headlines with daily examples of what it meant to be dehumanised. Vermin, animals, constant moving from safe area to safe area, offhand and desultory treatment of prisoners, rape, disregard for the youngest of society, man-made hunger and disease.

The dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israelis is patent, is obvious, is so blatant as to carry with it a label: We don’t care what you call it. It’s not your call. It’s ours. And, with that attitude, the dehumanisers have effectively dehumanised themselves.

So, the epiphany, if it transpires to be one, is whether every killer becomes dehumanised by his act of killing, which is itself the product of his having dehumanised his victim. And there is terrain ripe for exploration here: are mercy killings simply wrapped up in some moral fancy paper? What of revenge killings by the provoked over years? Nat Turner? Is an innocent who reacts to an attack and kills her assailant thereby dehumanised? Is it possible to kill somebody you truly love?

Whether or not we like it, there are deaths outwith our scope of influence of which we are glad. And there are those for which we are sorrowful. And the criteria that determine which of those is which are not always clear even to us ourselves. We let our gut decide, and that is no criterion.

But a death that is within the realm of our own power of decision will always be rued by him who commits it, for it will always, for ever more, play upon his conscience, because he will know that, by that act, he has rendered himself dehumanised. And, if he does not, he will have been dehumanised in any event: except he will have been to such an extent as to not even be conscious of the fact. A psychopath.

Much terrain to explore, and not all pleasant.

Someone with a flame-thrower burning innocent women and children. By AI.