On the 11th of July Clive Lewis, Norwich South MP, kindly agreed to talk to us about his experiences of the Holocaust Educational Trust, dehumanisation in modern society and throughout history, and what we can do to combat it.
Clive Lewis has been a Labour MP since the 2015 election and was elected as chair for the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. Before he was elected into parliament he was a BBC News TV reporter and became the BBC eastern region’s chief political reporter. Mr Lewis was also an army reservist officer, serving in Afghanistan in 2009.
We'd like to thank Clive Lewis for giving his time to talk to us. In addition to this written interview, a video interview will be published at a later date and used as part of our A History of Dehumanisation presentation.
Q: What experience do you have of the Holocaust Educational Trust and visiting sites of historic importance to the Holocaust?
I was taken by the Holocaust Educational Trust some years ago when I was a BBC journalist to Auschwitz with my political editor, who happens to be Jewish. I think I was, as I think most people are, shocked by what I saw, humbled into quietness, reflection. I've also been to Yad Vashem in Israel, which is the big Israeli memorial to the Holocaust,I think both touched me in different ways. I think the lesson I learnt from going to Auschwitz; there was a question I asked and it was that they had pictures of victims of the Holocaust but they also had, as I recall, photos of the guards and their families and I couldn't work this out. I asked why is this and they said well you have to see that these people weren't monsters, they were human beings who themselves had been dehumanised, I suppose, as well as dehumanising their victims. None the less, the reason of the photo collage was to explain that anyone, victim or perpetrator, could potentially be a perpetrator. Auschwitz wasn't guarded and enacted by monsters, they were human beings and the lesson is that it can happen again unless we are constantly vigilant, unless we understand that these weren't exceptional monsters but normal everyday human beings that had families and friends and lives outside of what they did here. I think that's really important, that is something I took away from it and I think that stuck with me quite powerfully.
Q: What forms of dehumanisation can you see in society today?
Obviously there is one definition of dehumanisation which is taking away people's humanity but I think there are gradients to that. For example, people everyday can walk past a homeless person and not look at them twice, not even think about it. That is an act of dehumanisation of sorts if we think about it because what we are in effect doing- that person could be our granddad, could be our uncle, our sister, our aunt, our mum- but because we don't know them we walk on past and in some ways a slight part of their humanity has been lost to us, I think that is a form of dehumanisation. But then there are obviously different gradients, all around the world there are acts of dehumanisation that take place, there are Muslims in Burma that are being massacred. Rwanda is another example of genocide, it didn't just suddenly occur, those who were massacred, the Tutsi and moderate Hutu, clearly went through a process that built up to it - for example on the radio - of dehumanising the victims. And if you know a little bit about the history of the area you will know that it was a divide and conquer policy by the imperialists who controlled the country, the French, and they often drew boundaries and put tribes who had, historically long before the Europeans got there, been at war with each other and had antagonisms. They put them together within a country and it would keep the divide and concur policy, but obviously those ancient antagonisms soaked up by one side spilt over into a genocidal bloodbath at one stage. That would obviously require the process of dehumanisation. If you look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some people would say that acts of dehumanisation on both sides are taking place, the act of being able to fire missiles at women and children in Israel, at some stage those people, I would suggest, have dehumanised the people they are firing missiles at, but at the same time I am sure there are Palestinians who would say the Israeli's, in some ways have dehumanised them in the acts that they are committing, as we saw in Gaza, or the retaliatory strikes that Israel makes, that must require a process of dehumanisation.
So dehumanisation takes place, it crosses boundaries, it crosses races, it crosses societies and it can happen in many ways and clearly it is often the initial stage to being able to kill someone. I was a soldier and I know that the way that we, if I'm being completely honest here, dehumanised people, often largely through language and through professionalism, through drills. So if you're shot at you 'return fire at the enemy', you don't 'return fire at those human beings' over there, there is a process that you go through, it's a learnt frame and process helps enable you to shoot and possibly take life. You don't try to think about the human being you are shooting at, you think about an enemy. If you're looking at an armoured vehicle, you see the armoured vehicle, you don't try to think of the people inside it. The problem though is once you break those barriers down, it can sometimes be difficult to re-establish them. That can lead to problems. But it's not all bad. Sometimes soldiers refuse to dehumanise one another and reassert not just the humanity of the 'enemy' but their own too in the process. There are lots of stories throughout history where soldiers have refused to dehumanise one another. There is the old historic story from the first world war when the soldiers at Christmas in 1914 sang carols and hymns together across the trenches and then began playing football and eventually the generals said 'this is not good, you are not dehumanising one another, you are being friends and comrades and singing together' so they lobbed some shells and fired some machine guns to break it up and people got back to the job of dehumanising and killing one another. It is one of the processes that you go through to be able to mistreat people and then finally, if necessary to kill them and worse still to commit acts of potential genocide. Dehumanisation obviously happens quite frequently because people are being killed all the time. I say that as a humanist who believes in the inherent good of human being beings as opposed to their negatives.That said, mass dehumanisation is often a process that comes about because of extreme political views, scapegoating is used and minority groups often suffer because of this something still very relevant to today. That's because racism is alive and well, anti-Semitism is alive and well, full blown racism against different races is alive and well and there are a variety of reasons for that.
Extreme political ideologies don't always start out as extreme political ideologies, they often start out as what people see as quite a moderate viewpoints but they can often change and mutate into extreme political philosophies.There are also people who use those extreme philosophies to mask other problems, to justify the concept of 'the other', the outsider to mask internal problems; unemployment, economic woes, a lack of housing, a lack of jobs, I think that is why some people have a real problem with the language of UKIP. I am not suggesting for a second that many of the four million voters who voted UKIP are dehumanising racists - the vast majority of them voted with with genuine, moderate political belief in their own minds. But the problem with what UKIP, for example, are saying is that it is blaming 'the other', the outsider for economic problems which I think have been generated within our own economy by our own politicians and those making the decisions. It is a form of scapegoating and I think that is a dangerous path to be on because we have all seen from history how such suggestion, accusations, arguments, can end up. I am not saying that is where UKIP will end up but I'm saying some people's alarm bells ring when that process begins, when people start to talk about immigrants coming in to take our jobs, immigrants taking our housing. The term immigrant is a very generalised, very negative term at the moment, it is not a positive term but considering what they do for our country it should be.So language is a part of the dehumanising process. I'm not saying calling someone an immigrant is dehumanising them but as I said it's a steep gradient. If you understand a little bit about anti-Semitism then you will know that in NAZI Germany, initially it started off with some seemingly innocuous cartoons. Obviously anti-Semitism goes back a lot further, there are historical things about blood libels and Jewish people being different, killing God etc, it is often very religious based, but in NAZI Germany one of the ways that the NAZIS were able to dehumanise Jews was through propaganda, through literature, through cartoons showing Jews as subhuman - so people could laugh, so people could make jokes about Jews, about their facial features, about how they looked, stereotypical things and that's the first stage. Now, if you were there, if you didn't know the Holocaust was coming and you looked at that, someone might say 'stop being so silly, it's just a laugh, look at that, it's a joke, how can that be offensive or dangerous? It's just a silly little cartoon, a little joke.' But the power of hindsight gives us 20/20 vision and we can see where those silly cartoons ended, how they contributed, in a small part to Auschwitz and the concentration camp system. You can see it, there is a direct line that runs through them. I think that dehumanisation isn't just a black and white binary issue, it's a gradient and you can see elements of potential dehumanisation all around us.
Q: What can we do in the modern age to combat dehumanisation?
I think there are a lot of things we can do. I'm a socialist and I believe that one of the ways of being able to combat it is making sure people have the resources they need. There are enough resources on this planet for all seven billion people, there is enough food, there are enough raw materials, enough to feed and clothe everyone to a decent standard. However, there are those who will manipulate and use 'a lack of resources' - a situation that itself arises because of economic systems that fail to distribute resources fairly - to create scapegoats for their own systems failure.So one way to stop that is to have an economic and social system which is fair and just, I don't think we have that in this country and I think that can lead to unfortunate things. I think the vans that were driving around London telling people if you're an illegal immigrant to 'go home', were a very dangerous, slippery slope that I think the government should never have entered into. That is why it caused such outrage - because many knew those vans were a new, dehumanising low.
So what shall we do? Well first of all we shouldn't have vans going around with 'get out of our country, go home', for a start. We should also have a fairer social and economic system. I think education is also a part of the solution and I think the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust is fantastic in that it reminds people of what we have the potential within us to do and to commit and I think that is important. I also think the other side is about people meeting each other and being good to each other, talking to one another. The fact that we have a society where we can meet so many different people from so many different cultures, whether through technology or face to face is a wonderful thing. I think that is really important in breaking down those barriers, understanding different cultures, understanding those cultural differences. We are not aliens, we are all human being and we all have different takes on how we interact with one another and the things that we do and say and how we say them, but that's where human empathy shines through. So social and economic justice, education and empathy are all key to ensuring dehumanisation and the negatives which come with it are far less likely to occur.
Clive Lewis
Labour MP for Norwich (South)
@labourlewis
