Worst Aeon article ever?

Aeon has an article by an anthropologist, Dr. Sam Dubal, who worked for a year with former fighters in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. 

He writes-

The experience compelled me to spend a lot of time thinking about humanity as a philosophical idea. The LRA is a group of people whose humanity has often been questioned, and sometimes denied. A rebel group fighting a spiritual rebellion since 1986, the LRA have waged war in ways that others see as horrific, brutal or otherwise outside the pale of the human – forcibly conscribing their soldiers; ‘sexually enslaving’ young girls; hacking or beating to death government collaborators and disobedient soldiers; and living like animals for years in the wilderness.

His conclusion is-

The legacies of racism and colonialism pressure us to resist ascribing animality to a violent African group living in the wilderness, and to instinctually reclaim their humanity as a way of resisting their barbarisation.

In other words, it's so not cool to call black people monkeys or to offer them a banana. On the other hand you should definitely offer this Indian firewater, the more of it the better.

But to recast LRA rebels as humans denies the ways in which they transcended the human, taking on the feared traits of wild predators while also living alongside and with the supernatural powers of holy spirits.

It is sensible to deny something that is egregiously false.  The human can't be transcended by human beings. It isn't really true that if you sacrifice a sufficient number of virgins to Hecate that you will gain supernatural powers. Also, Transcendental Meditation doesn't really work. You won't actually be able to levitate after paying a lot of money to take the course. 'Yogic flying' won't bring peace to the world. The thing is a con. Joseph Kony may be genuinely mentally ill. But other leaders have used child soldiers to terrorize the settled population and to make money for themselves.

As gorillas, they were fierce and respected soldier-animals, using the crafty tactics of wise apes to avoid capture by enemy soldiers.

This is false. They used the 'crafty tactics' of human beings. I suppose S.A.S commandos and other Special Forces trained in Jungle Warfare do the same. In battle, they make mincemeat out of these 'gorillas'.

As holy warriors, they carried out God’s will while maintaining virtuous lives free of alcohol, adultery and other perceived social ills.

Does this guy really believe this shit? It isn't even 'emic' coz the vast majority of Acholis think these guys were shitheads doing stupid shite.

Here, we might cautiously agree with civilians that rebels were no longer human – but not because, as civilians thought, they had fallen out of the sacred condition of humanity into a depraved state of animality.

Why might we do anything so stupid? What would be the point? Humans are humans. Do a DNA test if you aren't sure. It is merely a metaphor, a figure of speech, to speak of some people as beasts or devils or angels or sweety-pies. Why take a metaphor for a concrete fact and build another metaphor on top of it? Why say Humanity is a rung upon a ladder. One can slip down from it to a depraved state of animality. One can rise up, by some transcendent act, to a level where one works God's will. This is a meta-metaphor which may have some imperative or rhetorical force. But it isn't true. 

Rather, they had transcended humanity to reach extraordinary animal and divine forms of being.

No they haven't.

Their humanity does not need to be saved; it is a limiting condition they meaningfully surpassed.

They may need to be re-educated to behave in a humane way. They will find themselves better off if they do so. Also, they may have their heads bashed in if they don't. Don't forget the LRA was set up after Museveni's  NRA had used brutal methods against the Acholis. But Museveni too was reacting to atrocities. It was Idi Amin, whom the British used to get rid of Obote, who set off this cycle of violence in a beautiful and agriculturally rich region.

There are lessons we can take from the LRA. The next time we decry the imprisonment of Latinx kids at the border without adequate space, food or healthcare as dehumanising, or attempt to defend their humanity, let us remember not only what humanity recognises but also what it erases or obscures. That is, let’s remember why they are there in the first place – even when we are not. If humanity were in fact an adequate barometer of morality, ‘humane’ treatment might consist less of baths and edible food and more of large-scale reparative justice for more than a century of anti-democratic US foreign policy interference in Central American political economy.

There is a good reason to decry 'the imprisonment of Latinx kids'. We should be educating them and then making money off their labor so as to be able to retire in comfort. It doesn't matter which side of the border they are on. What matters is that they are in the pipeline of School to College to Working Their Asses off and raising families so that everybody is better off. Nobody gains from incarcerating these kids.

When we decry the conditions of children held in cages as dehumanising, are we not replicating a form of thinking that treats them like abused animals – where being ‘humane’ means not letting them sit in their own urine or be infested with lice?

Humans are valuable coz they can make cool stuff or provide useful services. We may kill or incarcerate people who are a threat. But, unless that is the case, we shouldn't be wasting money putting kids in cages.

To ask that migrants be treated humanely is to claim some very basic forms of equal treatment – access to toothpaste, diapers and medical care, for example.

It is better to treat migrants as a factor of production. It is pointless to treat them as having rights for which there exists no incentive compatible remedy, under a bond of law, customary or otherwise. There is asymmetry of information between poor migrants and the Governments of target countries. The latter should use appropriate signalling and screening mechanisms to ensure that no 'tragedy of the commons' type situation arises. Hypocrisy is positively mischievous in this regard. Merkel played the saint, saying 'come one come all', but promptly closed the borders causing much more, not less, misery to desperate people. They learnt their lesson. Last month, when Erdogan- as a negotiating tactic- swore to let refugees swarm into Europe, his goons had to force refugees onto buses to take them to the Greek border.

The problem with virtue signalling by academics and clerics and so forth is that politicians feel obliged to jump on the bandwagon. Thus people get fooled that a genuine entitlement exists which will be honoured come rain or shine. When Bernie Madoff does this and those who trust him +end up ruined, we say the guy was a crook running a Ponzi scheme. Madoff goes to jail. But when politicians do the same thing and the State reneges on the commitments they had so airily made, nobody goes to jail. The State has sovereign immunity. Savers & Pensioners may end up taking a haircut, kids may end up in rundown schools, Government Hospitals may turn to shit, unwinnable wars may break out- life for almost everybody can turn to shit just because a bunch of wankers wanted to shit higher than their arseholes and talk earnestly of universal Human Rights and Social Justice and the fight against Fascism.

It is silly to pretend that there will be 'equal treatment' for people who haven't paid into a social insurance scheme and those who haven't. The thing isn't incentive compatible. In the short run, the pretence can be maintained. Middle to long term, its biggest victims are those most vulnerable.

While necessary, these are hardly sufficient to achieve the good – namely, the kinds of justice due after years of imperial, racist, capitalist exploitation that created the violent conditions under which they became migrants.

I suppose there are campuses where 'social justice'- i.e. worthless degrees in worthless Subjects for those with historical grievances, bogus or otherwise- can find a 'safe space'. But taking, or even giving, such courses leads to lower life time earnings. At the margin, it makes you unemployable and stupider than you were born to be.

At the same time, we should be wary of using humanity to positively equate or compare Latinx kids in cages with their white, middle-class American age-equivalents. These caged kids are not also human; they are extraordinary beings, superhumans, having made incredible, dangerous journeys across lands to escape from the ugly margins of capitalism and empire that made them who they are (and killed many of their peers). Whatever commonalities might exist, unequal structural forces have shaped them into radically different and incommensurable forms of existence.

In which case, Americans shouldn't let these super-human kids in because they will eat the domestic variety's lunch.

They should be respected and recognised, rather than flattened by providing the deceptive material trappings of a basic humanity. Just as a bar of soap or a flu shot does not give them justice, neither does asserting their essential sameness to rich age-mates growing up in the heart of global empire.

We may respect and recognize man-eating piranha fish, but we don't want to introduce them into our baths.

Humanity’s abstract universality aims to help us connect to people in very different circumstances, but at the expense of encouraging us to wrongly think of ourselves as like them.

The 'abstract universality' of anything at all may aim at whatever it likes. But, it accomplishes nothing. Similarly, the 'concrete particularism' of some shite or the other is equally useless. On the other hand the socioproctological ditopology of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat with respect to Humanity's Abstract Universalism under the rubric of a critical ontology of the concreteness of the particular aims at making myself a nice cuppa tea and maybe raiding the cupboard for a couple of chocolate biscuits. 

At the same time, humanity claims to reach for the good of universal justice, when in reality its claims are shaped by particular Western ideas about justice that have historically oppressed rather than emancipated non-Western others.

Eurocentric much? Humanity does not have any claims shaped by Western ideas about Justice coz, like Eastern ideas about Justice, they are completely shit.

It might be time to give up on humanity as a byword for emancipation or liberation, and instead call more precisely on what we often ask for in the name of humanity: justice and recognition for those constructed in and deeply marginalised by past and present structures of imperialism, racism, colonialism and capitalism.

But nothing and no one has ever been constructed by some verbose shite. This stupid fucker thinks Imperialism is still around. He thinks some countries are colonizing others. Fuck is wrong with him? How stupid and ignorant do you have to be to get a Doctorate in Anthropology?