Exploring Inhumanity: Examining the Reasons Behind Demeaning, Enslaving, and Exterminating Others

LilacLilac: I haven’t start reading yet but the preface page scared me little. Read 1/3 so far and luv this book

United States on Oct 27, 2023

Carl Milner: Very good

United Kingdom on May 11, 2021

carla Dominguez: Great book loved it

Canada on Aug 13, 2019

Sigmund Roseth: This is a serious book and not easy reading. Mr. Smith provides an in-dept discussion of the darker said of humanity -- or should I say inhumanity.He discusses how we are able to kill -- individually and as a group,such as in wars; and posits that the ability to see the "enemy" as less than human makes genocide, such as the Holocaust or the Bosnian genocide -- only two of the many examples he uses -- possible, even easy. While religion and tribalism plays a role, it goes deeper than that. Not recommend for night-time reading; or for the faint-hearten.

Canada on Feb 04, 2018

Pumpjack: And too often, what humans do is pretty ghastly.

We seem to know right from wrong when it comes to crimes against our fellow humans. Murder and rape and torture are all, to varying degrees, prohibited. So why is it we can — at times — so casually disregard laws and morality and common sense, and set aside our own paralyzing sense of revulsion, to commit the most atrocious acts against other humans, and then put on the kettle, make a cup of tea and cheerfully go about the rest of our day with a clean conscience?

The answer is simple: we are conveniently able to suspend our better instincts by dehumanizing those we seek to damage and degrade, rendering them less than human and almost necessary targets of our cruelty. How we do that is less simple, and that’s the point of this book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others.

Author David Livingstone Smith explores the history and philosophic underpinnings of dehumanization, as well as the mechanisms — physical, intellectual, cognitive and cultural — by which it is implemented.

It is an important but not easy read mostly because some of the examples are truly ghastly — like,...

United States on Dec 26, 2017

John W. Morehead: I remember watching World War II movies with my dad growing up. One that stuck with me was "Judgment at Nuremberg," which told the story of the war crimes trials of Nazi judges who sent Jews and others to concentration camps. This film made a strong case that the Nazi leadership were responsible for horrible crimes, but also for the possibility that the rest of the world shared some responsibility for the rise of Hitler and the genocide that would come to be known as the Final Solution. From the films and similar documentaries of my childhood I’ve always wondered how the Holocaust was possible. Were the Nazis, or the German people in general, a special case of human evil and monstrosity? This is a comforting thought in that it limits such horrors to a specific people and time period. But history teaches us otherwise. While the Nazi Holocaust is the best known of humanity’s genocides, there are many others: the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rhouge in the 1970s, the Hutus and Tutsis of the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, and the mass killings in Darfur in the early 2000s. To these we could also add events in America including the enslavement and mass...

United States on Dec 01, 2016

Kathleen Cahill: Excellent

United Kingdom on Apr 27, 2015

info@hsmtraining.com: fascinating reading for anyone interested in diversity issues. easily read and opens the mind in many directions. well worth the money.

United Kingdom on Mar 11, 2014