From Behave (Robert Sapolsky, 2018) pp632-3
Chapter 11 emphasized pseudospeciation, when Thems are made to seem so different that they hardly count as human. Chapter 15 considered the skill of demagogues at this, framing hated Thems as insects, rodents, bacteria, malignancies, and feces. That provides a clear punch line: be wary of rabble-rousers who frame Thems as things to step on, spray with toxins, or flush down toilets. Simple.
But pseudospeciating propaganda can be subtler. In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.
The girl – she would give only her first name, Nayirah – had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die.
Our collective breath was taken away – “These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony. “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity. and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.”
Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and co-chair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the Firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record-long after the war.
Be careful when our enemies are made to remind us of maggots and cancer and shit. But also beware when it is our empathic intuitions, rather than our hateful ones, that are manipulated by those who use us for their own goals.
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