Crazy Stable

Hediya, age 9, enslaved by ISIS for 6 years. Photo: Adam Ferguson for the New York timesJan Kizilhan, a prominent Kurdish psychologist, works heroically with Yazidi refugees brutalized by ISIS. "I will never forget the story of one 8-year-old girl,” Kizilhan told the New York Times. “She was raped hundreds of times by dozens of men. She was so young and so small.”

The children kept asking him: Why does ISIS do this to us? He didn’t have an answer, so he later went to a couple of prisons outside Kirkuk to interview captured fighters. "Over and over again, the fighters told him: We kill them because they are not human."

Because they are not human.

This. This is the answer to every "how could they" of our blood-drenched times. The "othering" into sub-humanity.

Awaiting death at Auschwitz. Image copyright Yad Vashem.How could they throw children into ovens in the camps?
Well, they were only Jews, you see. And gypsies. And mental defectives. They were "life unworthy of life." THEY WERE NOT HUMAN.

The lynching of Laura Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 19How could they sell human beings like cattle, torture them and string them up for sport?
They were blacks. THEY WERE NOT HUMAN.

How could the Japanese, a culture suffused with respect and delicacy, have made sex slaves of Korean women in wartime?
They weren't our women. THEY WERE NOT HUMAN.

Daniel Lee, white supremacist murderer on Death Row. Photo: Dan Pierce, The Courier, via Associated Press

How do we justify executing prisoners?
Do you know what they've done, those guys on Death Row? They are monsters. Animals. THEY ARE NOT HUMAN.

Human child, 20 weeks gestation. Photo: Lennart Nillson.How does an abortionist dismember a late-term unborn child limb from limb, count up the pieces in a pan, and wash up for the next procedure?
It's legal. As long as they dwell within their mothers' bodies, THEY ARE NOT HUMAN.

How can we ignore the suffering of children in border detention, when such conditions would be unthinkable for our own children?
They're not like our children, not really. They are poor, and innumerable, and brown. They're human, but not...AS human.

And how will we start to justify euthanizing the terminally ill, the profoundly disabled, the comatose?
They are without hope, without consciousness, and surely that's what makes us most fully human. And they're terribly expensive to maintain, with scarce resources. It's almost like THEY ARE NOT HUMAN. Not anymore, right?

In honor of all those deemed "unworthy of life," perhaps we all need to ask ourselves from time to time:
Who do you manage to view as just a little less than human?