The Objectification Of Humans Is A Requirement For War

It’s hard to shoot the enemy when you can see their eyes.

When I was a young man I was told not to hate people. They told me to get to know people for who they are, not for how they look or for what other people say about them. Don’t objectify them. Know them. I understand that to be the truth today, but when I look to the mainstream media, that is not what they’re telling us to do. At least not with regard to a group of people known collectively as “Muslims”.

I bring this issue up today in response to the ISIS attacks in Paris and to raise an interesting point about war, because, if you listen to the mainstream media, they’re egging us on into another war. President Hollande of France says that the attacks were an act of war. Jeb Bush, just chomping at the bit for another war, says that “this is the war of our time”.

Whoever owns the mainstream media has a business interest in war that most of us don’t share. You know, those people who are members of the economic class known as “the 1%”. Yeah, them. Why they want to get us into another war, really, is beyond me. I’ve had enough of war and I would like some peace and quiet. That’s why I’m writing this article.

I want to draw your attention now to another article, “Propaganda and Islam: What You’re Not Being Told”. It’s an interesting account of the generalizations that have been made by people in social media about Muslims. In every case, these generalizations do not tell the truth about Muslims and objectify Muslims as being less than human. In every case, a stereotype is being cast upon the Muslim people as if all of them are this way or that.

My favorite example from that article is this one: “All or most Muslims are terrorists.” The author then proceeds to do the math to compare the number of people estimated to be in the ISIS forces to say, the forces fighting them in Iraq and then to the worldwide population of more than a billion Muslims. The number of Muslims engaged in terrorism is not even close to 1% of the total population of Muslims. But if we listen to mainstream media, we are being asked to equate Islam with terrorism.

That is how objectification works. We equate one or more humans to an object to make them less than human in our minds. Then it’s far easier to justify war. “Hey, look at that. We can control those things and we can destroy them so that we won’t be…