The goal was to dehumanize the enemy. This way the soldiers would kill them without thinking twice. But when two men are in a trench and one stabs the other, he goes through his belongings, then he finds out that the man he stabbed has a family, and a wife. And then he begins to apologize, Ya know, he says: oh I’ll write to your wife and I’ll… and he says he’ll help him, because he realized that the man he stabbed was a person just like him.
A La Jolla High School teacher on the dehumanizing of the United State’s war enemies
