Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  9. K. Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature? Domestic Animals and Human Slaves,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 15, no. 1 [1994], 92–94. For the sacrifice of slaves, see M. A. Green, Dying for the Gods: Human Sacrifice in Iron Age and Roman Europe (Charleston, SC: Tempus Publishing, 2001).

  10. K. Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature?”

  11. Strabo, The Geographies of Strabo, trans. H. L. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press, 1917).

  12. J. Heath, The Talking Greeks: Speech, Animals, and the Other in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 201.

  13. L. Lowenthal and N. Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 80. G. L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, Inc., 1978). T. J. Curran, Xenophobia and Immigration, 1820–1930 (Boston: Thwayne Publishers, 1975).

  14. M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. II: The New Kingdom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 144.

  15. M-C. Poo, Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes Towards Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 74.

  16. Ibid., 50–51.

  17. M. H. Fried, The Notion of Tribe (Menlo Park: Cummings, 1975). F. Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). Poo, Enemies of Civilization, 65. E. G. Pulleyblank, “The Origin and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1958): 209.

  18. O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A. Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 24.

  19. Ibid., 25–26. See “So You Want to Own a Ball Club,” Forbes, April 1, 1977, 37, cited in D. S. Eitzen and G. H. Sage, The Sociology of American Sports (Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown Company, 1977), 188.

  20. Patterson Slavery and Social Death, 47.

  21. K. Bradley, “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,” The Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000): 110. See also F. D. Harvey, “Herodotus and the Man-Footed Creature,” in L. Archer (ed.), Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labor (New York: Routledge, 1988).

  22. P. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  23. Bradley, “Animalizing the Slave,” 111. M. Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1989).

  24. F. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2005), 49.

  25. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000), 32.

  26. E. Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Afterlife (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). R. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For differences in skin color as a racial marker, see E. Bresciani, “Foreigners,” in S. Donadoni (ed.), The Egyptians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Galen’s remark is from a work that has not survived in the original Greek, but is quoted in al-Ma’sūdī’s Mūruj al-Dhahab wa Ma’ādin al Jawhar, quoted in English translation in R. Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 46.

  27. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 176. See F. M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) and F. M. Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  28. The hadith about Muhammed’s final sermon is found in the authoritative collections of both al-Bukhari and Muslim. Subhaym is quoted in B. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 28. Al-Andalusi is quoted in Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves, 49. The statement by Ibn Khaldun is from The Muqaddimah, vol. 1, trans. F. Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 301.

  29. Quoted in M. Gordon, 102. See R. Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves.

  30. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 146.

  31. W. J. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550—1812 (Baltimore: Benguin, 1969), 228–229.

  32. Information about Godwyn’s life and quotations from his works are taken from A. T. Vaughan, “The Slaveholders’ ‘Hellish Principles’: A Seventeenth Century Critique,” Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 55–81.

  33. W. Updike, A History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island: Including a History of the Other Episcopal Churches in the State (Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 2009), 211. E. G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1900), 237. Jordan, White Over Black, 228. A. Tsesis, Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 31–35. M. Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate, quoted in M. Cantor, “The Image of the Negro in Colonial Literature,” New England Quarterly 36 (1963): 452–477. A. C. Fraser, Life and Letters of George Berkeley, D.D., Formerly Bishop of Cloyne, Vol 4. (London: Macmillan & Co, 1871), 188.

  34. Jordan, White Over Black, 232.

  35. For a similar view, see Daniel C. Dennett’s remarks about “believing in belief” in his Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2007) and the distinction between “opinion” and “belief” in his Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).

  36. Genesis, 9:19–27.

  37. D. M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). For Son of Ham shows, see M. W. Robbins and W. Palitz, Brooklyn: A State of Mind (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2001). For a good fictionalized account, see K. Baker, Dreamland (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

  38. Quoted in Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 67.

  39. Ibid., 66–67.

  40. T. Waitz, Introduction to Anthropology, trans. J. Frederick Collingwood (London: Anthropological Society, 1863), 13.

  41. Ibid., 351.

  42. See note 43.

  43. Lawrence is quoted in T. F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schoken, 1965), 57. For Darwin’s views on race and slavery, see A. Desmond & J. Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Nineteenth-century racist writings often had almost unbelievably wordy titles. B. H. Payne, The Negro: What Is His Ethnological Status? Is He Progeny of Ham? Is He a Descendant of Adam and Eve? Has He a Soul? Or Is He a Beast in God’s Nomenclature? What Is His Status as Fixed by God In Creation? (Cincinnati, 1867). C. Carroll, “The Negro A Beast”; or, “In the Image of God”; The Reasoner of the Age, the Revelator of the Century! The Bible as it Is! The Negro and His Relation to the Human Family! The Negro a Beast, but Created with Articulate Speech, and Hands, That He May Be of Service to His Master—the White Man! The Negro Not the Son of Ham, Neither Can It Be Proven by the Bible and the Argument of the Theologian Who Would Claim Such, Melts to Mist before the Thunderous and Convincing Arguments of this Masterful Book (St. Louis, 1900). For an excellent discussion of this genre, see E. G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1900). For violence against African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see D. A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), E. Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (New York: Basic Books, 2007), and H. A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans fro
m Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006). For a superb account of the pre-Adamite theory of race, and its connection with the monogenecist/polygenecist controversy, see David N. Livingstone’s magisterial Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

  44. Quoted in A. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Mariner, 1999), 166.

  45. M. Keller, “The Scandal in the Zoo,” New York Times, August 6, 2006. See also P. V. Bradford and H. Blume, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: Delta, 1992).

  46. Quoted in Bradford and Blume, Ota Benga, 182.

  47. “Pygmy Chased by Crowd,” New York Times, September 9, 1906.

  48. D. Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 32.

  49. A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Eastford, CT: Martino, 2009), 1.

  50. A. C. Grayling, “Paradox at the Heart of Our Warring Psyche,” The Australian, February 23, 2008.

  51. H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994).

  52. S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 6.

  53. “TRIALS: My Lai: A Question of Orders,” Time, January 25, 1971.

  54. H. C. Kelman, “Violence without Moral Restraint.”

  55. Ibid., 48. See also H. Fein, Accounting for Genocide (New York: Free Press, 1979), 30.

  56. A. Bandura, B. Underwood, and M. E. Fromson, “Disinhibition of Aggression Through Diffusion of Responsibility and Dehumanization of Victims,” Journal of Research in Personality 9 (1975), 266.

  57. Ibid.

  5. LEARNING FROM GENOCIDE

  1. E. Litvinoff, “To T. S. Eliot,” in H. Schwartz and A. Rudolf (eds.), Voices Within the Ark (New York: Avon, 1980), 715–716.

  2. D. J. Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 191–192.

  3. D. D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 25.

  4. Ibid., 31.

  5. Ibid., 45. For an informative discussion of the monstrous races in relation to the colonial project, see P. Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (New York: Routledge, 1990).

  6. Pliny, Natural History, Book II, quoted in S. T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33.

  7. D. Gilmore, 65.

  8. D. L. Jeffrey, “Medieval Monsters,” in Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early Records and Modern Evidence, eds. M. Halpern and M. M. Ames (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980). Quoted in Gilmore, Worse Than War, 60.

  9. S. Drakulić, They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague (London: Abacus, 2004), 168.

  10. L. Goldensohn, The Nuremberg Interviews (New York: Vintage, 2005), quoted in S. K. Baum, The Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders and Rescuers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 74.

  11. M. Sageman, Understanding Terrorist Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 135.

  12. F. Kafka, The Metamorphosis (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 1.

  13. Quoted in S. Hornshøj-Møller & D. Cuthbert, “‘Der ewige Jude’(1940): Joseph Goebbels’ Unequalled Monument to Anti-Semitism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12, no. 1, 42.

  14. J. Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, 1939–1941, transl. and ed. Fred Taylor (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983), 23.

  15. Quoted from Elke Fröhlich’s German edition of the Goebbels diaries by S. Hornshøj-Møller, “The Eternal Jew—A blueprint for genocide in the Nazi film archives,” working paper GS 05, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 6. This is a slightly different translation than that appearing in Goebbels, 1983, 36. B. Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2002).

  16. Quoted in Goldhagen, Worse Than War, 386.

  17. In the German:

  Wo Ratten auch auftauchen, tragen sie Vernichtung ins Land, zerstören sie menschliche Güter und Nahrungsmittel. Auf diese Weise verbreiten sie (die Ratten) Krankheiten, Pest, Lepra, Typhus, Cholera, Ruhr u.s.w. Sie sind hinterlistig, feige und grausam und treten meist in grossen Scharen auf. Sie stellen unter den Tieren das Element der heimtückischen, unterirdischen Zerstörung dar, nicht anders als die Juden unter den Menschen.

  18. I. Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936, Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), 66.

  19. J. Y. Gonen, The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler’s Utopian Barbarism (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), 29–30.

  20. H. Himmler, “From a speech by Himmler before senior SS officers in Poznan, October 4th, 1943,” in Encyclopedia of Genocide, Vol 1, ed. I. W. Charny (Washington, DC: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 241.

  21. O. Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 116, 127.

  22. R. Campbell, “Autumn,” in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, ed. P. Larkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 336.

  23. Goldhagen, Worse Than War, 319.

  24. Stanton’s analysis is available at the website for Genocide Watch at http://www.genocidewatch.org/8stages.htm. D. Moshman, “Us and Them: Identity and Genocide,” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research 7, 2007: 121. See also, for example, L. M. Woolf and M. R. Hulsizer, “Psychosocial Roots of Genocide: Risk, Prevention and Intervention,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 1, 2005: 101–128, N. J. Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror (New York: Plenum, 1996), H. Hirsch, Genocide and the Politics of Memory: Studying Death to Preserve Life (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and D. Chirot and C. McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 80.

  25. A. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 31.

  26. H. Bley, South-West Africa Under German Rule 1894–1914 (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1971): 97. Quoted in M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  27. H. Dreschler, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herrero and the Nama Against German Imperialism (London: Zed, 1980): 167–8, n. 6. Quoted in M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  28. H. Dreschler, “Let Us Die Fighting,” 154. H. Bley, South-West Africa Under German Rule 1894–1914, 97. D. J. Schaller, “From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa,” in D. Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008). The account of burning is from Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany, quoted in Goldhagen, Worse Than War, 181.

  29. W. F. Ramsay, Impressions of Turkey During Twelve Years’ Wanderings (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1897), 206–207.

  30. V. N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 1996), 159. The letter is quoted in Kiernan, 406.

  31. V. Dadrian, “The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation,” in America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915, ed. J. Winter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). V. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahan Books, 2004). V. Dadrian, “The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1(1986): 175. M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 160. T. Ackam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Macmillan, 2007). Y. Aurun, “The Holocaust: Responses of the Jewish Community in Palestine,” in Encyclopedia of Genocide, ed. I. W. Charny (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 1999). J. Bourke, “Barbarization vs Civilization in Time of War,” in The Barbarization of Warfare, ed. G. Kassimeris (New York: New York Universities Press, 2006).

  32. “Memorandum des SD-Amtes,” to Heydrich, quoted in C. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 2003), 246. N. H. Baynes, Hitler’s Speeches (London: Oxford University Press, 1942).

  33. A. Musolff, “What Role Do Metaphors Play in Racial Prejudice? The Function of Antisemitic Imagery in Hitler’s Mein Kampf,” Patterns of Prejudice 41, no. 1 (2007): 25.

  34. Ibid. T. Mommsen, History of Rome 3 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).