Faceless Enemies

Today we watched the documentary, Faces of the Enemy. I found the first part of the movie that we watched to be very interesting. It was a powerful movie that suggested that people all over the world are the same, whether they are enemies, from different racial backgrounds, or if they believe in different forms of government or religion. In this movie all of the different Countries portrayed their enemies as faceless animals or monsters. Evidently, it is easier to encourage your army to kill a group of faceless beings instead of a friends or humans that are just like everyone else.

The soldiers were trained to relate to the enemies as pronouns and not as ‘Joe’ or ‘Mike’ because then killing someone would be much more difficult. By dehumanizing the enemy Countries are able to encourage and instill hate into their armed forces so that they are able to kill. Of course all of this seems unreal, but it has been happening for centuries and is even happening today. Perhaps this is just a way for armies to creatively change murder into killing. As one of the men in the video said, that only a soldier knows the fine line between murdering and killing. I believe that because the soldiers are instructed to kill the enemy, that it is not considered murder. I have nothing against our armed forces; rather I completely support and honor their hard work to protect our Country. But I did find this movie to be very interesting because it showed how all of the Countries deface their enemies to encourage hate and hostility against their opponents. I may be unaware, but I do not believe this is occurring in our world today, like it did during the World Wars and the Cold War. Perhaps new war tactics and different ways to deface our enemies have been developed in today’s world.