Richard Rorty

In a report from Bosnia, David Rieff said, "To the Serbs, the Muslims are no
longer human. . . . Muslim prisoners, lying on the ground in rows, awaiting
interrogation, were driven over by a Serb guard in a small delivery van." ¹ This
theme of dehumanization recurred when Rieff said:

A Muslim man in Bosansi Petrovac . . . [was] forced to bite off the penis of a
fellow-Muslim. . . . If you say that a man is not human, but the man looks like
you and the only way to identify this devil is to make him drop his trousers --
Muslim men are circumcised and Serb men are not -- it is probably only a short
step, psychologically, to cutting off his prick. . . . There has never been a cam-
paign of ethnic cleansing from which sexual sadism has gone missing.

The moral to be drawn from Rieff's stories is that Serbian murderers and rapists
do not think of themselves as violating human rights. For they are not doing
these things to fellow human beings, but to Muslims. They are not being
inhuman, but rather are discriminating between true humans and pseudo-
humans. They are making the same sort of distinction the Crusaders made
between humans and infidel dogs, and Black Muslims make between humans
and blue-eyed devils. The founder of my university was able both to own slaves
and to think it self-evident that all men were endowed by their creator with cer-

From On Human Rights: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 by Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, editors.
Copyright © 1993 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus
Books, L.L.C.

-263-