The quote below is from The Canadian Museum for Human Rights article called Us vs. Them: The process of othering by Clint Curle. The article is relevant today because the United States republican politicians and their white evangelical christian nationalist backers are attacking our LGBTQ+ community, especially trans kids. They are stripping them of their human rights.
Here’s a part of the article on Othering and the Holocaust:
An extreme example of othering and its consequences is found in the Holocaust – the systematic persecution and murder of six million Jews organized by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1933 to 1945.
In addition to committing genocide against the Jews, the Nazis committed genocide against the Roma and the Sinti. Many other groups, including people with disabilities, homosexual men, Slavic peoples, political opponents and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also violently persecuted during this period.
The Nazi party divided humans into two categories: the so?called “Aryans” (the Germanic people) whom they considered genetically superior; and the so?called “inferior races” composed of Jews, along with Slavs, Roma and Sinti, and Blacks. This ranking of some groups of people as “lesser than” was a process of othering that helped create the conditions for the genocide.
The attacks on the LGBTQ+ community are also happening in Uganda, where recently their parliament has passed some of the most sweeping and toughest anti-LGBTQ legislation in the world. Uganda’s bill calls for not only life imprisonment for identifying as LGBTQ+ but also the death penalty.
This happened not only because of leadership inside Uganda but by American evangelicals coming into the country and helping them do this. American evangelicals pick smaller target countries to hone and implement their agenda, then move to more prominent countries like America to pass anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that harms people. All because they deem people as different. And that difference is something evangelicals do NOT condone. But evangelicals seem to be okay with this.
Based on everything that’s happening around the world and in America, we could see the same Uganda legislation or worse, implemented in America.