Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality

Abstract

In a report from Bosnia, David Rieff said, “To the Serbs, the Muslims are no longer human. … Muslim prisoners, lying on the ground in rows, awaiting interrogation, were driven over by a Serb guard in a small delivery van.” This theme of dehumanization recurred when Rieff said: A Muslim man in Bosansi Petrovac … [was] forced to bite off the penis of a fellow-Muslim. … If you say that a man is not human, but the man looks like you and the only way to identify this devil is to make him drop his trousers – Muslim men are circumcised and Serb men are not – it is probably only a short step, psychologically, to cutting off his prick. … There has never been a campaign of ethnic cleansing from which sexual sadism has gone missing. The moral to be drawn from Rieff s stories is that Serbian murderers and rapists do not think of themselves as violating human rights. For they are not doing these things to fellow human beings, but to Muslims. They are not being inhuman, but rather are discriminating between true humans and pseudo-humans. They are making the same sort of distinction the Crusaders made between humans and infidel dogs, and Black Muslims make between humans and blue-eyed devils. The founder of my university was able both to own slaves and to think it self-evident that all men were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. This was because he had convinced himself that the consciousness of blacks, like that of animals, “participates more of sensation than of reflection.”

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