Ralph Peters somehow always manages to outdo himself. Not satisfied with being staggeringly wrong throughout the presidential campaign on Obama’s foreign policy, among other things, Peters now aspires to fit every last stereotype of militaristic imperialists, according to whom our rebel subjects are not merely misguided, backward or even simply evil, but are actually not really human:

A fundamental reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can’t understand Afghanistan is that they don’t recognize that we’re dealing with alien life-forms.

Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We’re divided into two sexes (more or less). And we’re mortal.

But that’s about where the similarities end, analytically speaking.

Yes, if there’s one thing the last eight years have shown it is that Washington politicians are prone to too many fits of respecting our enemies’ humanity! So many times we have had to plead with them: please treat Arabs and Afghans like alien beings! But would they listen to us? No! Their dedication to human dignity knew no bounds. Their tender concern for the “body casings” of enemy combatants was so great that you could easily confuse the subjects for human beings if you weren’t careful. Fortunately Peters is here to remind us that we are not really dehumanizing our enemies with propaganda and unjust treatment, since they are not really human in the first place. Where would we be without Peters’ keen insights?

It would be easy to dismiss Peters as deranged or simply hateful, but that does not give him enough credit. Every ideologue is tempted to follow the route Peters is going, and every person is tempted at times by the appeal of one ideology or another, and invariably the result is the same. Ideology teaches that those who do not fit into a universal scheme, whatever it claims about human nature and society, cannot really be human or at least they are not deserving of the treatment accorded to fully rational human beings. If another people has radically different cultural values that order things in an entirely different way, it is ultimately not enough to acknowledge that the values of different cultures clash, sometimes violently, or even that one culture may be deeply wrong about many things. It is apparently necessary to insist that the people who practice that culture are not the same species and do not share our nature, which implies that we do not have to afford them the same protections and respect that we extend to our fellow man.

At the end, of course, Peters must retreat and claim that he just wants this to be an “exercise” that is “meant to break our mental gridlock, to challenge our crippling assumption that we’re all merry brothers and sisters who just have to work through a few small understandings.” Yes, we are so badly crippled–obviously we have been suffering from an excess of empathy and recognition of shared humanity. If the pious internationalist claim that “all people just want the same thing” is misleading, Peters’ position is far, far worse in that he seems unable to imagine that other people could hold views that are radically alien to his own without falling into the habit of describing them as members of another species.

Filed under: foreign policy, politics