Where Does it Lead? When Leaders Call Others Vermin

Over the weekend Donald Trump referred to his opponents as “vermin”. This was a term frequently used by Hitler and the Nazis to dehumanize their opponents in such a manner that ordinary Germans and the men assigned to exterminating them would have fewer qualms about their actions. Such people included the lawyers who wrote the laws allowing this, the judges who consigned people to sterilization or to be euthanized for being physically or mentally disabled, or who had long term medical issues, the doctors who “treated” these conditions by sterilizing them or euthanizing them, the men assigned to the Einsatzgrüppen, and the Concentration Camps, and everyone involved in the process.

The definition of vermin is: noxious, objectionable, or disgusting animals collectively, especially those of small size that appear commonly and are difficult to control, as flies, lice, bedbugs, cockroaches, mice, and rats, an objectionable or obnoxious person, or such persons collectively.

A picture from Julius Streicher’s Nazi propaganda tabloid “Der Stürmer”

The equation of human beings with animals that often bring death and disease is particularly dangerous. It has been used all to often. The term “cockroaches” was used by the Hutu perpetrators against their Tutsi neighbors during the Rwandan Genocide. The Turks used called their victims in the Armenian Genocide of 1915 “dangerous microbes”, while many militaries have often labeled their enemies as “animals”. Many colonial powers, not all European have referred to their opponents as “subhuman.” Sadly, the United States has done that in reference to Native Americans, Blacks, Mexicans, Filipinos, other Asians, and Arabs. Current Russian leaders and thinkers have referred to Europeans and Jews as vermin.

As for Trump, his use of vermin was an escalation of previous comments. in 2018 he referred to the citizens of Baltimore, Maryland as “rats”, and in 2019 to undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants as “animals”.

The psychology of calling people vermin or subhuman is designed to strip away the humanity of people so they can be abused, deported, imprisoned, or exterminated more easily. It is designed by leaders to make it okay in the minds of their followers to carry out things that they would not normally do.

In his book, How Fascism Works, the Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley wrote:

“The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.”

This is exactly what Donald Trump has been doing long before he was elected President. When he ran for office, was elected, and since his defeat, his propensity to dehumanize his opponents has increased exponentially.

When successful, Fascist leaders, to which we must now consider Donald Trump and many in the Republican Party, are able to convince their followers that doing the immoral, the illegal, and the unthinkable are okay. The Fascist leader not only depends on the obedience of his followers, but of people in the courts, the judiciary, the police, the military, professions, and businesses to cooperate with his wishes. They don’t even have to be party members to do it. SS-Police General Heinrich Müller was never a Nazi party member. He was a career soldier and policeman who was apolitical, yet he was the Chief of the Gestapo, the Secret State Police, and a participant at the Wannsee Conference which coordinated the Final Solution of the Jewish problem. Historian Richard Evans wrote of him:

"Müller was a stickler for duty and discipline, and approached the tasks he was set as if they were military commands. A true workaholic who never took a vacation, Müller was determined to serve the German state, irrespective of what political form it took, and believed it was everyone's duty, including his own, to obey its dictates without question."

The tyrant of any kind depends on people like Müller, that is why anyone, especially those in the judiciary, law enforcement, and the military need to be more committed to defending the Constitution and the institutional guardrails that keep tyrants from fully implementing their plans. In Germany most of those men and women simply rolled over and either cooperated or simply did nothing.

In the 2000 movie dramatization of the Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi War criminals there is a scene where Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz was called as a defense witness for the surviving head of the SS, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The scene begins with the examination of Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, followed by propagandist Julius Streicher, the head of the Reichsbank, Walther Funk, and finally ends with Hermann Goering being questioned by American psychologist Gustave Gilbert. They depict the mindset of men who fully bought in to the idea that the Jews were not human, even rats and vermin.

Another look is seen through the 2001 film Conspiracy which is based on surviving notes of the Wannsee Conference.

I won’t be writing for a few days as I need to catch up on my current until of doctoral program work.

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