The Dehumanisation of Ourselves - an Impromptu Post

I need to ask you something

Photo by Catalin Pop on Unsplash

I need to ask you something.

Do you feel like you have dehumanised your ownself?

I watch and read about what is happening in Palestine. It puts me in a deep depression. I cannot see the images daily; it overwhelms.

I knew that I would always be willing to take the place of someone else in Gaza. If I could swap my life for theirs; if they could escape death and have me take their place, I swear I would do it. If they could live a life outside the cage of Gaza, I would take their place a thousand times. I would do it in a heartbeat.

But ask me to take the place of someone being tortured the way the Israelis torture? No, I could not go through with torture. I could not take such depraved, unnatural abuse; the sodomy by dogs or till death, the breaking of my bones and then being forced to crawl on broken limbs. I could not take being given urine to drink and faeces to sleep on. I could not take the stress positions or watching some woman or man r*ped or beaten to death in front of me. I could not take the deep, guttural laugh of the tormentors as I saw children cut and burnt, my hands tied behind my back, stripped n*ked and forced to watch them treated in a manner the most perverted of devils could not have conjured up. I could not do it. I could never do it.

But today was different. Today, I woke up, and knew I could.

Today, I woke up so disassociated towards my ownself that I no longer cared.

Today, I woke up and knew, that if it meant that someone else was not feeling that vicious torture, I could, I would take their place. I would do it. I would take it all for them.

It was a shocking and terrifying change. It came from out of nowhere. There is no courage nor bravery in this hypothetical. It seems instead borne out of a deep despair that I cannot watch the genocide any longer: I would rather be victim than witness, because at least then I do not have to answer the question on any Day of Deliverance, why I did not stop it.

I have read that victims of r*pe may find themselves in the same position again, sometimes seeking it. They court the nightmare they endured because they are so disassociated from their ownselves, that their bodies no longer feel truly theirs. Psychologists claim it is to try and reassert control, and it is, because dissociation is the ultimate lack of control: it is when all harmony between mind and soul and body has been disrupted; cut to pieces, these survivors trying with all their might to tape the pieces back together again. When your natural inner harmony is gone, the basic building blocks of being human are left floating adrift and there is nothing you can do but grasp at them; trying to unite them once again. You have been successfully dehumanised, just as your r*pist wanted.

Disassociation is dehumanisation but by the subject themselves. A cutting of the threads of what makes them human; detachment of their bodies from their minds; their souls lost in the ether of confusion.

The last few days I have been in a quiet I have not felt for a long time. The whole world is roaring with noise, and I cannot hear any of it. I have not been able to eat. I do not feel hungry. I see food and my hand does not reach for it, whatever sounds my stomach may make. I don’t feel its grumblings; they are just noises in the air. I do not understand what my body craves, for it is no longer mine.

It is like I have disassociated from my own body. I am no longer part of it; I just reside in it: it is no more like a foot in a sandal, or like a man in a cage. It is the dehumanisation of myself.

Is this just me?

Or in watching the Palestinians bleeding and weeping to their graves, are we all dying the same way?