Human Animals

 

Jeffrey St. Clair

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”

– Yoav Gallant, Israel Defense Minister

+ According to Johannes Steizinger, “human animals” was a term frequently used by the Nazi race theorists about Jews, Slavs, gypsies, and blacks, who held that “only some groups of people “groups of people meet the metaphysical criterion of being human. Members of these groups are considered as essentially and hence fully human. However, other groups are reduced to the biological sense of being human. They simply lack the metaphysical essence of humanity and are thus characterized as human animals. These creatures are human only from the naturalistic point of view, but not human from a metaphysical point of view. Thus, they are regarded as subhumans who are not fully human.” (Johnannes Steizinger, The Significance of Dehumanization: Nazi Ideology and Its Psychological Consequences, 2018.)