Articles on Culture & Creativity.
A soldier stares down the barrel of his gun at a child. The brown boy’s hands are zip-tied behind his back, pressing up against the Spider-man pajamas that are still warm from bed 15 minutes ago.
Written by: Gabriel N Elizondo
The brown boy, perhaps 5 or 6 years old, screams as masked soldiers tear his parents apart, shoving them into unmarked vehicles and Budget rental trucks. The soldier watches the child beg in Spanish before he stands the brown boy up and shoves him into an SUV. The soldier understood every word. The soldier speaks the same language, is from the same country, grew up in the same culture.
The soldier goes home, takes off his gear, cleans his weapon, and falls asleep to dream of having children of his own one day. When he feels the slightest hint of guilt, he looks at his phone, at the email he got from the government he works for. The message is generic:
“Thank you for keeping your nation safe from the invaders. You’re a patriot. God bless America.”
When he imagines his children, he hopes they are lighter than he is, so one day, they won’t get torn from his hands by the new recruits coming into the main office next week.
The question is obvious: how can one human being do this to another human being?
For colonizers, the answer is simple: dehumanization.
The bizarre dualism that has plagued humanity since the inception of organized civilization is a perpetual negotiation between empathy and power. The earliest humans, 3.3 million years ago, were less inclined to exercise empathy for their fellow humans since they lacked the capacity to analyze the intricacies of human communication.
Without shared language, humans tend to rely on physical conflict to settle misunderstandings. After the conflict was settled with violence, humans returned to their subsistence survival.
It took another million years or so to develop what is known as empathy in today’s modern culture.
With the rise of human civilization came the rise of nation-states, entire groups of shared communities, that are led by single or small-group leadership. Nation-states are more stable for living standards, which means a growing population. A growing population requires more resources to sustain itself. The conclusion is a choice: work with neighboring nation-states to share mutually beneficial resources or conquer them completely.
Inevitably, mass warfare emerges among organized civilizations and dehumanization becomes normalized in human behavior.
Fast-forward to the Age of Imperialism. It’s the 16th century, and the Spanish Empire has begun its expansion across the world’s oceans. Opportunistic Spaniards join the Spanish navy to help “civilize” New Spain, modern day Mexico. The Spanish Crown is struggling to maintain its grip on global power due to a lack of funds. The discovery of indigenous wealth, land, minerals, and people of indigenous Latin America are stolen to maintain the reckless empire’s reach.
The Spanish have started an empire in the name of moral superiority and the support of the Catholic church. How can “devout” religious believers commit the atrocities needed to exploit their fellow humans?
The Spanish turn to an old and brutal answer.
The proactive effort of reframing a population's common humanity as something “less than human” in comparison to the colonizer. This process occurs after a colonizer becomes an occupying force and the threat of initial conflict is over.
For the Spanish Empire, once the military leaders of the indigenous populations were removed, the common populations were part of the resources to be pillaged in the name of God and Empire. In order to extract resources (humans) and maintain Spain’s Catholic “moral superiority” colonizers worked to reduce the humanity of the indigenous populations in order to justify the mass murder of millions of innocent fellow human beings.
The Spanish’s dehumanization effort targeted three major human factors to establish the dehumanization process.
Indigenous common populations were framed by Spanish forces as lacking intelligence in comparison to European standards. This reductionist view, and lack of respect or understanding of indigenous culture, allowed Spanish colonizers to label indigenous populations as “animalistic” or “savage” in their daily practices. The Spanish Empire’s logic asserted that indigenous peoples lacked the intellectual capacity compared to their European-centric standards, and thus, indigenous populations may be treated as animals.
Colonizers often use words that refer to cattle when enslaving human beings. The terms “wrangle”, “hunt”, “seize”, and “capture” are normalized to shift the colonizer’s perspective on their behaviors towards fellow humans to that of animals incapable of the intellectual capacity to possess freedom.
The Spanish did not believe indigenous populations experienced emotions like humans. European-centric thinking reduced indigenous populations' emotions to that of only primary emotions; emotions that are responses to external factors like violence, threats, physical harm, or survival, common among all living beings.
Spanish imperialists did not believe indigenous populations experienced secondary emotions; emotions that are responses to internal factors like joy, motivation, and the reflection of one’s self in the world.
The early years of Spanish colonization framed the indigenous individual as a “savage” that lacked the capacity for a human “soul”. Once again, leveraging religion in the name of exploitation, the Spanish were able to enslave, torture, and murder indigenous populations without a shred of guilt.
Indigenous populations were seen as “naturally adept at physical labor” by the Spanish imperial forces. Indigenous men were forced to carry massive loads of equipment for miles under the threat of physical violence or death. The Spanish saw this as “natural” since the indigenous populations had no pack animals and relied on physical human labor to transport goods to begin with.
The Spanish used this excuse to further exploit indigenous populations in silver mines, agriculture, personal servants, porters, and slaves.
Spanish colonizers worked to reduce indigenous populations to less than human in order to maintain control over their newly acquired resources. A systematic approach to reducing intelligence, emotional capacity, and reframing physical capacity, created a disassociative factor between the Spanish’s humanity and the indigenous populations’ humanity.
Redefining what makes an entire population human based on one’s own standards creates a system of control without the guilt or personal accountability of harming fellow humans. For colonizers, soldiers, and authoritarians, this process works to serve their greater goals.
Dehumanization is required to uphold colonization expansion, exploitation, and control. All humans are naturally inclined to seek autonomy for the basic right of survival. This natural instinct to exercise one’s will over their own life is a direct threat to colonizer forces and occupation. To maintain their grip of control on indigenous populations, colonizers use a system of dehumanization to justify immoral, irreputable, and irreversible harm on their fellow humans.
A mass extermination of populations requires those carrying out the violence to disassociate themselves from the humanity they are killing. Dehumanization allows oppressors to tolerate the cognitive dissonance that comes with indiscriminately murdering human beings on a mass scale.
Even though colonizers pride themselves on their loyalty to the empire (nation), there is still a natural connection between themselves and the oppressed populations. Dehumanization uses state-sponsored propaganda to justify the mass murder colonization requires.
Labor is required to sustain colonial expansion efforts. More expansion means more resources. This cyclical nature of colonization requires colonizers to enslave populations for the sake of maintaining conquered territories.
Colonizers rarely have the numbers to maintain an expanding empire, let alone have the motivation and work ethic to cultivate stolen land. Dehumanization allows colonizers to extract free labor and benefit from the sweat, blood, and death of indigenous populations while maintaining their “innocence” by way of acting on orders from government and religious authorities.
Dehumanization enables colonizers to rape, sexually exploit, and actively remove the very bloodline of indigenous populations by forced procreation.
Colonizers attempt to remove the threat of rebellion in future generations by assimilating, or in some cases, forcing their own bloodlines into the oppressed populations. This forces the systemic removal of the indigenous population over time by reducing their direct genetic lineage with colonizer genetics.
The result of this process leads to a cultural identity crisis that manifests when one looks in a mirror and sees the image of their ancestors colonizer. The impact of this generational dilemma is exponential and transcends time, place, and the violence that shapes colonizer-oppressor culture.
In the modern era, it has given rise to nationalism.
Many populations descend from indigenous roots but have had their history and lineage erased, modified, or entirely removed from forced settler colonialism. The result is a lack of identity and cultural heritage in the guise of being part of a new nation.
Many American populations share ancestry with North American and Central American tribes but lack the evidence of their direct lineage. This absence of tribal connection forces indigenous descendants to accept colonizer identity and mentality, reinforcing submission and servitude to colonial institutions and the nation-state.
Colonizers revise their history, erasing their violent exploitation and replacing it with a narrative of “divine expansion” and “educating savage populations”. A story of “civility” and “order” is crafted by racist institutions eager to redefine their role in dehumanization as “dedication to building a great nation”. In reality, it's an attempt to maintain power by creating colonial institutions to perpetuate colonizer propaganda.
Without ancestral history, lineage, or connection to their past, many indigenous descendants pride themselves on being part of their colonizers nation. State-sponsored propaganda indoctrinates populations with colonizer ideology through colonizer institutions such as governmental, political, financial, social, educational, and religious bodies.
This state-sponsored apparatus of power and influence shapes the way indigenous descendants view themselves. This shift replaces an individual’s cultural narrative of oppression with a narrative of national pride, servitude, and the active oppression of their own people.
Socially reinforced behaviors further colonial indoctrination by inciting division, hatred, exclusion, and prejudice among indigenous populations and their descendants. The result is voluntary submission, assimilation, and active discrimination of one’s own people in the name of a nation-state.
For many 3rd and 4th generation Americans whose roots extend to indigenous populations or Latin American populations, the gap between who they are and where they come from has become impossible to reconcile.
This cultural ambiguity is a constructed result on behalf of colonizing powers to remove the cultural and historical identity of a population who deserves to know where they came from…and to reclaim the life that was stolen from their ancestors.
Sign up to receive updates on new content and future events.
