A Short History of Dehumanization Through Defecation

Everyone Poops, but some poopers are more privileged than others.
Everyone Poops, but some poopers are more privileged than others.
Human shit has a number of remarkable properties. First of all, every human produces shit. Secondly, every fully autonomous human handles the disposal of their own shit. In fact, properly disposing of one’s own shit is a necessary condition for being considered a fully autonomous human being. Thus it is possible to efficiently and completely dehumanize people by preventing them from dealing competently with their shit.

Polish authorities in 1947 explaining to Rudolph H&oumlaut;ss, erstwhile commandant of Auschwitz, that it's not OK to force people to live in their own shit in order to facilitate genocide
Polish authorities in 1947 explaining to Rudolph Höss, erstwhile commandant of Auschwitz, that it’s not OK to force people to live in their own shit in order to facilitate genocide
This principle was grasped early on by the National Socialist founders of the infamous complex of concentration camps known collectively as Auschwitz,1 where the subhuman (Jews, Russians, etc.) inmates were allotted only 0.2 square feet of toilet space, less than one twelfth the amount allocated for ordinary criminal prisoners. Historian Robert-Jan Van Pelt summarizes the view of historian Terrence Des Pres that design choices like this, which resulted in every surface in the camps including human flesh, being covered with shit, were “the result of a deliberate policy to destroy the last vestiges of the prisoners’ sense of self-worth. It was not enough just to kill the prisoners. They had to be totally broken first.2 As Van Pelt summarizes, “with the latrines submerged in excrement, with very little water to be had at very few points, and with mud all around, what remained was an inmate population without the means to preserve any outward sign of human dignity.”2

It’s not discussed in the article we’re citing, but it’s surely plausible that such degradation made it easier for the SS to go about their unholy work of genocide. No matter how cruel the project, the guards carrying it out were still human beings, and is it not easier to send millions of people to their deaths if they’re smeared with their own shit and therefore, at least in that one sense, not fully human? Or to move them away from their native land so that you and your totalitarian buddies can move in? This principle has been rediscovered throughout history by those who have need of such a tool.

Steve Seyler, thinking deep thoughts about deep shit and who ultimately ends up in it
Steve Seyler, thinking deep thoughts about deep shit and who ultimately ends up in it

Which brings us back around to Steve Seyler, bully boy bossman of the BID security patrols and Reinhard Heydrich of the HPOA’s campaign to ethnically cleanse Hollywood of its homeless untermenschen.

seyler.on.public.defecation.case.600
Take a look at the man’s report to the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and its kissin’ cousin the Sunset-Vine BID for October 2014. See especially page 13, where we find Seyler, in his characteristically weird blend of contempt and self-satisfied humor, telling us that “out of the kindness of [his] heart” he’s not going to show the committee a photograph of the shit in the gutter serving as evidence against a poor woman who, forced by the conscious policy of the HPOA to relieve herself in the public street, was arrested by Seyler’s minions, the BID patrol. We also find him giving her one of his moronic epithets (a practice he now seems to have abandoned). Yeah, ha-ha, Steve, and very kind. It’s clear enough to the few human beings who’ve read your work that the real crime is not shitting in the streets, it’s designing the streets so that people are forced to shit in them.

George Patton in Los Angeles in 1945, celebrating his victory over fascism, never suspecting its imminent resurgence on the very streets that host his parade
George Patton in Los Angeles in 1945, celebrating his victory over fascism, never suspecting its imminent resurgence on the very streets that hosted his parade
The real crime is having your gunmen arrest them over and over and over again for daring to be human in the inhuman environment you and your masters in the BID have created. The real crime is harassing them serially until they move somewhere that’s not currently being colonized by rich white people. And its easier to do it if they’re smeared in shit, because genuine valuable actual humans don’t do that, do they? The strategy worked for the SS for a while, Steve, and it seems like it’s working for you now. But it’s worth considering that May 9, 1945 might come to Hollywood, as it once did to Berlin.

  1. This account is taken from Robert-Jan Van Pelt’s fine article, A Site in Search of a Mission, occupying pages 93-156 of Yisrael Gutman’s and Michael Berenbaum’s indispensible anthology Anatomy of the Auschwitz death camp.
  2. Ibid. p.130

Merda Umana image by Carlo Minucci is released under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 and is available from the photographer’s flickr stream here. Image of Rudolph Höss being hanged by Polish authorities is in the public domain. Who’s gonna complain, anyway, since all governments in action here are defunct, eh? You can get your own copy, complete with some random Wikipedia editor’s delusory theories about the reproduction rights, here if you want it. Image of Steve Seyler is ©2014 by us. Image of Patton in LA is public domain for the usual reasons, innit?

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