Dehumanization and "otherization"

     I've been doing debate for nine years now.  I have always loved it and thought it was the perfect way to persuade people to care about things I thought were important.  Yet within the last two years I have been disillusioned.  Constantly reading about the problems of the world and outlining impacts to real or potential situations can start to desensitize any individual to these situations.
     For example, last tournament I was told that just saying dehumanization was an impact was not enough.  I needed to explain why dehumanization was bad.  In another round I needed to better link dehumanization to otherization.  I was confused by this.  Wasn't the thought that making someone's life worth less bad enough? Why did I need to explain why that was so bad?  In addition to fully impact the empirics of the situation would take ten minutes in and of itself.  This is due to the fact the people are seriously mislead when it come to the Holocaust and the realities of genocide in our modern world.  If you site the example of Hitler's Nazi Germany as an empirical example of the effects of dehumanization most will naively wave you off as melodramatic.  This is because nothing even remotely close to that would ever happen again, especially in the United States of America...or would it?
     For all those who want me to internalize the impacts of dehumanization and "otherization" this is for you.
    In 1915 an unknown amount of Armenians were killing during the Turkish process of ethnic cleansing.  The number is still unknown due to the fact that the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge that such a genocide ever happened.  During World War two millions of Jews and other "undesirables" were systematically murdered.  In 1944 thousands of undesirable minorities died during the soviet's forced deportation.  After World War II thousands of Germans were killed and many more displaced in their expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in an attempt to exact "justified" revenge. Again in the 1990's there was an attempt to purify a nation within the Yugoslavian wars.  These are just a few select examples of genocide and ethnic cleansing within the twentieth century alone and, even then, these cases are limited to Europe.
     Obviously the problem of ethnic cleansing, genocide, dehumanization, and otherization is a modern problem (as modern as the 1990's in the "civilized" world).  But where does this dehumanization link in.  Why does it matter if we put people in this category of "other"?  Isn't it a long leap from other to murder?  Sadly the leap is not that big.  I'm going to focus mostly on the Nazi extermination of the Jews because this is the genocide most are familiar with, but do not think that this is the only case you can apply this link to.
     Genocides do not start as mass killings of one peoples group.  They start smaller and grow.  Hitler began with the thought that Jews needed to be removed from Germany, contrary to common belief he did not begin by advocating the execution of Jews (although it might be be safe to say he would not have morned a Jewish death).  Prior to the concentration camps, the death camps, the death buses, and the Jewish Ghettos there was the otherization of Jews.  This type of sentiment was not centered in Germany.  Anti-Semitic thought was popular across Europe and into the United States.  In fact, most people though Hitler was a great man throughout most of the world (and he did not keep his anti-Semitic sentiments on the DL internationally).
    These sentiments manifested themselves first in the form of state rights.  Jewish individuals had their rights taken away and eventually their citizenship as a whole revoked.  This was not in an attempt to kill them but to drive them out of the German Nation.  When this did not have the desired affect Jewish Ghettos were created and the Jewish population was driven to these areas in mass numbers.  Within the ghettos Jews were not forbidden to leave, in fact they were encouraged to leave the country still.
     Mass execution of Jews were not fully legitimized until 1941, this is still before the German government had decided to murder all the Jews.  At this time Hitler was still toying with the idea of sending the Jews to Madagascar.  It wasn't until after the United States had entered the war and there were little to no signs of stopping that the state decided the Jewish problem must be permanently solved (in other words death).
     As you can see this idea was not one man's brain child.  This was an effort by masses of people built up under a simple ideology which grew into absolute hatred for what they deemed the parasite race.  Murder was the end product but it was the product of years of anti-semitic thought, a growing Germanic national identity, and a total world war.  The best part is that it all began with the otherization of a single nation.  Similar sentiments can be found in the study of almost any modern genocide.
     To finish it all up Genocide is the direct product of dehumanization in its most sever of situations.  If you don't buy this you can at least see that dehumanization leads to the devaluing of a life and when a life is worth less you can do anything to it without feeling much pity.  This anything could range from murder to rape to assault.  When a person is worth far less than your own value what is there to stop you from treating them like an animal or a simple thing?
   For all of those who wanted me to internalize dehumanization I ask to consider what I have written.  Please don't think that I have written everything.  It has taken me only half hour to type all of this up and I have included only a skeleton of the haunting facts.  If these aren't enough please go read Fire of Hatred by Naimark.  He does an excellent job of laying out the facts in a very non biased way.  Yet even without the theatrics or bias the facts of such events are heart breaking.  They inevitably offer up a warning to our modern world.  Genocide and dehumanization are not inevitable and we must prevent against such things.  Ideology is very easy to build and install yet nearly impossible to destroy.  Such a tool in the hands of the state can be dangerous and, in some cases, fatal.