QOTD -- Dehumanizing Ukrainians

"It is an obscene irony of the war in Ukraine that Russian leaders use the charge that Ukrainians are 'Nazis' to dehumanize them, just as the Nazis used dehumanizing accusations against their own enemies. While ostensibly attacking fascists, Russian propagandists use methods that pay tribute to German fascism. In the process, Russian officials have become the spitting image of what they pretend to condemn. [snip]

"... There are recent reports of mass civilian graves — numbering in the hundreds — in Manhush near Mariupol. Bucha’s streets were left covered with executed and mutilated bodies. More than 100 bodies have been found in Makariv. 'They laid them on the ground face down,' one resident said, 'and shot them in the back of the head.'

"This method for the mass killing of civilians was one way the Nazis disabled the normal revulsion that most people would feel for civilian executions. 'The human face,' David Livingstone Smith wrote in 'Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization,' 'is by far the richest source of social information and the most intimate channel of connection between people. … When we gaze into a person’s eyes, we cannot help responding to that person as a human being. We cannot help but see them as human — to automatically regard the face’s bearer as one of our own kind.'” -- Michael Gerson, in the Washington Post, on the how the Russian tactic of dehumanizing Ukrainians plays out when it's time to kill innocent civilians.  Bastards.