“Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.” ― Audre Lorde
In the season three Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire, in the near future a new military recruit named Stripe (Malachi Kirby) engages in his first field missions, cleaning up a raid on a vagrant village on the edge of an unknown border, and tracking down the roaches who did it. The roaches, we are initially led to believe, are some sort of ghastly mutated humans that resemble something like a cross between a vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series. But after killing two of the roaches, Stripe is flashed by a device one of them had and his implant–a device ostensibly used to display tactical information and enhance the soldier’s perceptions–begins to malfunction.During his second mission, the implant fully fails during an engagement with another set of roaches and while his companion Hunter (Madeline Brewer) continues killing, he sees the roaches for what they really are, fully human. Stripe manages to save a couple of them, a mother and her child, for a brief time before Hunter catches up to them and ultimately brings Stripe back to their home base. There, Arquette (Michael Kelly, House of Cards) the base’s psychologist and in charge of managing the soldier’s implants explains what’s going on.
The name of the episode, Men Against Fire, is taken from a real-world book by Brigadier General and military historian S.L.A. Marshall, in which he claimed that 75% of U.S. troops in combat in World War II never fired at enemy combatants for the purpose of killing. Marshall was far from the first to note this trend. During the Civil War, Southern General Stonewall Jackson noted of Mennonite conscriptees, “There lives a people in the Valley of Virginia that are not hard to bring to the army. While there they are obedient to their officers. Nor is it difficult to have them take aim, but it is impossible to get them to take correct aim.”
In the episode, Arquette explains that Marshall argued that the Army should find a way to increase soldier’s willingness to shoot to kill. Being a Black Mirror episode, that method was the implant, which besides enhancing perceptions, also twisted and deformed them, showing the “enemies” as the grotesque creatures Stripe first encounters at the beginning of the episode. Arquette continues his explanation, noting that these humans they’ve labelled roaches are more prone to diseases and crime, and concludes, “Humans. You know, we give ourselves a bad rep, but we’re genuinely empathetic as a species. I mean, we don’t actually really want to kill each other. Which is a good thing… until your future depends on wiping out the enemy.”
This idea seems to be prevalent in our culture, that strength entails overcoming empathy or emotion to protect us against them. But the technology element here, the implant, Black Mirror’s raison d’être, is merely window dressing over a decision already made to view other humans as less-than, as animals. This decision has been made before in the real world many times and implemented through language. The Nazis called Jews vermin. The Hutus called Tutsis cockroaches during the Rwandan genocide. Africans have been called monkeys stretching back to at least the middle ages through the centuries of slavery and into the modern day. Even an early Christian church father, Saint Isidore of Seville, referred to pagans as apes in the 4th century.
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump referred to members of a violent international gang made up primarily of Hispanic Central Americans known as MS-13 as animals and promised to step up deportation efforts (which extend far beyond only focusing on members of the gang). More specifically, he added an opening qualifier rejecting their humanity, saying, “These aren’t people. These are animals.” And then earlier this week the White House released an official statement, titled “What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13,” which repeatedly, directly calls them animals throughout the document.
Many of the crimes committed by MS-13 members are unconscionable, and those actions need to be called into account. It’s also not the first time President Trump has called an enemy an animal. He has previously referred to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as an animal. But the statement from the White House has not only doubled down on what could have at best charitably be read as a strongly-worded metaphor, it has brought the direct dehumanizing language into official use of the U.S. government.
The LA Times proposes that it was deportation efforts that grew the size and scope of the gang (which began in Los Angeles in the 80s) in the first place, which recontextualizes the proposed solution to its violence as the very thing that helped create it. And the clear lesson we have from history–recounted and retold in history books and dystopian stories like Black Mirror’s Men Against Fire episode–is that when we begin labelling others as animals, as subhuman or not human at all, we are treading in dangerous waters. We are at risk of committing the same type of violence we claim to be shocked at. We deny to those we call animals any agency, ascribing to them the characteristics of beasts, unable to be anything but poor or sick, in the case of criminals unable to restrain themselves from raping or killing, unable to express remorse or be redeemed.
When I first saw Men Against Fire, I didn’t pay much attention to it, feeling it was a recycled and tedious twist on a trope that had already been told a hundred different ways. And I even suspected that by making the two primary characters a black man and a woman, and the “roaches” Caucasians, it was trying to hint at the idea that the human capacity for dehumanization isn’t limited to rich, powerful, white men. But after the past week, I’ve reevaluated the need for such a tired story, to remind us all that we debase ourselves and our own humanity when we deny the humanity of others. And as the poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote, “the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”
