What is less than human?

Mar 21, 2019

When President Trump made a statement about immigrant gang members being “animals” the U.S. Media went wild with criticism. Of course, their rationale was political and their goal was to paint the President as a racist. The President was still wrong in his choice of words. Calling human beings “animals” is a failed confession for a person claiming biblical faith. People may act like animals and throughout history have done so with nightmarish consequence. Those barbaric actions demand condemnation but even the worst villain is still a human being, made in God’s image no matter how deeply tarnished or abused.

U.S. Representative Omar recently made a public statement declaring that Donald Trump is not human. The exact moment of that quote, clearly given to a reporter on the record is here.

The obvious question is, where is the equivalent outrage in the U.S. media? This story has received almost no attention from any news outlets or sources. Please save this blog and the audio file of Rep. Omar’s statement because it is likely to disappear altogether.

But equal outrage is the shallow view of this question. The much greater concern is this: when we begin to talk of other people as less than human, we are on very dangerous ground. When people in leadership begin to use this language, alarm bells should be ringing across the land. The process of “de-humanizing” an opponent is a step in the direction of totalitarianism. The German Socialists and the Soviet Socialists were experts at this strategy. What began with “de-humanizing” words ended in death camps and starvation and genocide for tens of millions of people just a generation ago.

Words carry ideas and recent history proves again that ideas have consequences.