“They’re Not People!”

The denial of personhood as a prerequisite for atrocities

This essay traces a recurring pattern in human history: before a group can be harmed, it must first be stripped of personhood. From Auschwitz to Rwanda to modern speciesism, the same mechanism appears again and again - a linguistic and legal erasure that makes exploitation seem natural, even inevitable. 

This website edition includes light framing and internal links to help readers explore related essays on personhood, justice, and the moral status of nonhuman animals. The main text remains as originally published. 

It’s instantly recognisable. The entrance to Auschwitz, Poland, where over a million human beings were murdered by the Nazis between 1940-1945.

The Auschwitz concentration camp was actually a complex of sites. Auschwitz-Birkenau - the killing centre - was located two miles from the main site, and there were numerous subcamps.

The Holocaust

The word ‘Auschwitz’ today has become synonymous with the Holocaust - slaughter on a massive scale. Eighty years after it was liberated and shut down, the word still evokes a sense of horror.

The death toll included tens of thousands of Poles, Roma (Gypsies), and Soviet prisoners of war, but by far the majority of those murdered here were Jews.

The killing was indiscriminate. Men, women and children were all ‘processed’ and destroyed mercilessly. Auschwitz-Birkenau even had its own ‘family camps’.

Of course, Auschwitz wasn’t the only death camp. In total, around 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945.

In the decades since then, countless people have wondered how such an atrocity could have happened. How could so many ordinary Germans have been complicit in such a heinous crime, on such a huge scale, over such a long period?

The Denial of Personhood

Propaganda, fear, and desire to conform all played a role. But central to Hitler’s plans for this ‘final solution’ was the tactic of describing Jews, Roma, and Slavs as ‘untermenschen’ or ‘subhuman’.

In using such derogatory language, the Nazis effectively stripped their victims of personhood. Once someone is stripped of personhood, deemed to be sub-human or a non-person, then their imprisonment, abuse, torture, and death isn’t only justified - it no longer even requires a justification.

Of course, the Nazis weren’t the first regime to do this, nor the last.

The Rwandan Genocide

During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Hutu militias murdered around 500,000 and 662,000 ethnic Tutsis over a span of just 100 days or so. Like the Nazis, they did this through dehumanising their victims, referring to them as ‘inyenzi’ or cockroaches.

As Kennedy Ndahiro said in a New York Times article of 2014:

All Tutsi men, women and children were no longer citizens of a nation but cockroaches… Equating Tutsi with cockroaches meant that few would think twice about killing and attempting to exterminate something so vile, dirty and sneaky.

When an entire population, or section of a population, is objectified in this way, the worst atrocities become not only possible but almost inevitable.

The Dred Scott Case

In my previous article, The Brutal Truth About Slavery Nobody Wants to Hear, I talked about the court case of Dred Scott, four years before the American Civil War.

Scott was an ex-slave who had been awarded freedom after his ‘owner’ moved to Illinois (a free state) and then Wisconsin (a free territory). However, upon returning to Missouri where slavery was still legal, Scott was considered property once again, along with his wife, Harriet, whom he had married whilst a free man.

Dred and Harriet Scott filed lawsuits in Missouri on the grounds that their residence in a free state and a free territory had released them from the bonds of slavery.

The Supreme Court, however, dismissed the case, ruling in essence that African Americans could not be considered ‘citizens’ of the United States because they were not even considered ‘people’.

Essentially, the court was saying what slave-owning societies had said for thousands of years - that it’s an illusion to believe slaves have any experience worthy of moral consideration. They were property. They were commodities to be bought, sold, and exploited.

If you think examples such as these couldn’t happen today in our society, you’d be very wrong.

Israeli/Palestinian Genocide

Over the past year or so, many stories have appeared in the media about the way in which Israeli officials have repeatedly referred to Palestinian men, women, and children as “human animals” or “beasts”.

By dehumanising them like this in the national consciousness, they attempt to strip them of personhood and thus remove the need to justify any atrocities committed against them. And we have all seen the atrocities committed in Gaza.

From the outside, such dehumanisation looks abhorrent, but when a society is constantly bombarded with such de-personification in everyday language, it changes the collective perception of the objects of such propaganda.

The Importance of Legal Personhood

Laws are there to protect people. Businesses are afforded legal personhood so that they have protection under the law. Even rivers and forests have been classified as legal persons.

Deny somebody’s personhood and you deny them the protection of the law.

Deny a population’s personhood for long enough and it becomes almost inconceivable to suggest such individuals are people whose rights should be given equal consideration and protection to our own.

The denial of personhood has been a successful strategy used by the dominant classes throughout history to support the exploitation, imprisonment, slavery and slaughter of entire races of people.

But humanity has deployed an even more grotesque and insidious masterstroke than this - the denial of personhood to anyone who is not human.

Speciesism and the ‘Other’ Holocaust

The examples given above - cockroaches, human animals, beasts - reveal a fundamental assumption that to relegate someone to the status of nonhuman is to strip them of any rights or protection in law. So all-pervading is this assumption that we rarely question it.

We have separated ourselves from other species to such an extent that we no longer even consider ourselves animals. There are people and there are animals. We are people. Animals are not people.

Yet such a view, ubiquitous as it might be, is merely a construct. It’s a view propagated and bolstered by propaganda so effectively and for so long that few of us can even consider the possibility it might be false.

We have exploited, imprisoned, hunted, enslaved, and slaughtered nonhumans throughout history. It is integral to our culture. It is integral to our entire global economy.

To do that, we have successfully stripped anyone who is not human of their personhood. Other animals have been relegated to the status of objects, property or commodities.

This has been done on a scale not seen in any other context throughout the history of human society.

How else could it be that tens of billions of sentient individuals are currently imprisoned in death camps all over the world (we euphemistically call them ‘farms’) and slaughtered in their millions every single day… and nobody bats an eye?

Personhood in Other Animals

Pigs are more intelligent than a three-year-old child. Whales, dolphins, elephants, and even parrots call each other by name (and that’s just the species we know about). Chimpanzees and cockatoos use and manufacture tools (and even complimentary tool sets).

Anyone who has lived with a dog knows that they can recognise human emotions, whilst elephants, whales, dolphins, magpies, and other animals can recognise themselves in a mirror, indicating a degree of self-awareness we would like to pretend only humans possess.

Nonhuman animals, just like human animals, have their own fears and desires just like we do, they enjoy their pleasures, and they suffer pain just as we do - perhaps sometimes more so.

They have families whom they love and often live in complex societies with rituals, friendships, social hierarchies, and a depth of experience that parallels our own. Elephants, giraffes, orcas, chimpanzees, and dogs mourn the deaths of their loved ones.

Yet we have stripped them of personhood to such an extent that we can happily feast on the grilled flesh of their bodies without a single thought crossing our minds about the life we have taken.

As property, they have no rights under the law, and anyone who has the temerity to refer to other animals as people is derided, ridiculed, or demonised.

Yet the fact that the law does not recognise someone as a person does not mean they are not, in reality, a person. Nobody would argue that Dred and Harriet Scott were not people, despite what the law said at the time.

What Constitutes a ‘Person’

Philosophers and lawyers have long argued about what constitutes a ‘person’. Amongst the attributes put forward are self-interest, autonomy, desires and motives, agency or will, the quality of being a conscious, thinking being, the capacity for rational thought or relationship with others.

Philosopher Thomas I. White sets out the criteria for a person as someone who is alive, is aware, feels positive and negative sensations, has emotions, has a sense of self, controls their own behaviour, recognises other persons and treats them appropriately, and has a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities.

Few would disagree that many, if not most non-human animals fit these criteria. But the forces opposed to the recognition and acknowledgement of other animals as people are powerful.

The Struggle for Justice

These forces include not only the vested interests of giant, multi-national industries like big agriculture and big pharma but also the inner forces of our psyches that help us avoid the tremendous emotional pain of recognising that those we exploit, kill and eat are sensitive, vulnerable people who wanted to live, just like us.

Nevertheless, if we are to move forward and evolve as individuals, and as a society, we must face the pain of acknowledging the truth of nonhuman personhood. To do so is not a matter of kindness but of justice.

The journey out of our ingrained systemic and cultural blind spot requires a sustained conscious effort to challenge - and change - deep-rooted unconscious prejudices. It requires that we change the way we think about and talk about other animals on a fundamental level.

Such a revolution in thought will lead to a shift in consciousness that will not only change who we are as individuals but will surely have profound benefits for billions of sentient individuals all over the globe.

Because when we no longer collude in the denial of personhood, we take away any excuse for committing atrocities.

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Further Reading

The Brutal Truth About Slavery

The Forgotten Holocaust - Human Rights, Animal Rights and Oppression

Other Animals Are People, Too