As you could have guessed by now, I read and watch many things, often quite weird, in order to be better informed about the state of things in the world, and the creatures that love to think of themselves as children of God. I recently watched many YouTube videos about gun culture in America. Some of those videos are harmless fun – some guys shooting targets with various guns. Some are about people field-stripping rifles, or even reconstructing them completely, or making their own ammunition.

Some, however, use the guns for their intended purpose of killing. There seem to be areas in America that have problems with coyotes and wild pigs. Only in Texas, there are over 4 million wild pigs that feed on crops, and the farmers are trying to do the best they can to deal with the situation.

One farmer grows pecan nuts, and the pigs come every night to eat his pecans, and at some point he called a friend with a gun and a night-vision sight to, basically, convert pecans into hams. Pigs eat his pecans, he compensates by killing some of them when possible, and eats them. I can understand that and I actually sympathize with the man. His position is “no wonder the pigs taste so good, they’ve been eating nothing but my pecans”.

Some farmers take it further and install fences with GSM controlled trap doors and cameras, and they capture pigs at the rate of 30 at a time and sell them for meat. This method is actually so effective it can be seen as the most effective pig farming method. Take some corn as bait, capture 30 pigs; I don’t know how much corn farmers normally use to grow a pig but I would bet it’s much more.

But this is when I get to feel sorry for the pigs, because they are getting hit disproportionately to their offense. The only decent thing I’ve seen those pigs experience from humans was when the hunter took pity at them and sprayed them with a water hose to cool them down, and I can just see how smart and aware of the situation they are, they’re not stupid animals, but very close to human level of awareness and emotion. You can see their fear and even emotional pain, the feeling of “please don’t kill me, I was just eating some corn”. And that’s just it – that’s the extent of their crimes. They ate some corn. I can see the farmers’ position. He grows his crops, be it peanuts, corn or pecan nuts, and the pigs eat what doesn’t belong to them and harm him, so he has to do something about it. But I also see the pigs’ position. They were eating something tasty that was on the ground, and they are captured and being driven to the slaughterhouse. They are not evil or malicious; they are smart, cute and like tasty things.

There are words that people use when they want to depersonalize you in order to feel morally justified when treating you extremely badly. One such word is “animal”. It’s a very general word for beings that move around on their own, and are not humans. It is so broad it encompasses everything from bugs to whales. If something is an “animal”, it means it can be excepted from empathy. It can be killed and eaten. God doesn’t protect it, moral law doesn’t protect it.

There are worse words, like “vermin”. “Vermin” is the subset of animals that is seen as harmful to human interests. A cockroach is vermin, for instance. You can kill it with no remorse and it’s actually a good deed. A rat is vermin, a wild rabbit is vermin, a coyote or a fox is vermin, and apparently a wild pig is vermin. The word “vermin” is emotionally charged in such a way that one feels absolutely no remorse for eradicating it. They are pests and they are stepped on like bugs. This works especially well when you exterminate vermin from afar, seeing it as a tiny speck in your rifle scope.

When you kill vermin from a helicopter, it’s a funny target practice. There’s no empathy, because you’re shooting vermin, and they are just rat-sized moving targets seen from above.

But that’s the trick: humans can be seen as vermin, especially if you see them from afar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTHF2OeskEQ

You see an image on the screen and you decide whether it’s human or vermin. If it’s vermin, you press a button, see puff of smoke and vermin falls down. If it continues moving, press button again until it stops. Vermin eradicated.

There’s a reason why the Nazi concentration camp workers and commanders lived perfectly normal lives and didn’t suffer from any particular stress. They were not killing people. They were eradicating vermin. It’s a good thing, it has to be done for the benefit of your kind. You are a child of God, and that’s just vermin.

A cockroach is vermin, a rat is vermin, a pig is vermin, a Taliban is vermin, a Jew is vermin. From afar, all vermin is alike, they are cockroach-sized specks you can place a cursor at and squish them until they stop moving. From up close, a pig is conscious, aware, afraid and feels pain because it knows it is about to be killed for the horrible crime of eating corn. From up close, vermin that is brought to a concentration camp for orderly extermination is Anne Frank. But you don’t want to look up close, you shave their heads, dress them in rags and treat them like pigs or rats or some other species of vermin. It helps you make the moral distinction between you, a child of God, and vermin that needs to be exterminated for the greater good.

Humans like to feel good about themselves, they like to feel they are better than vermin, than animals, than “that scum” they are shooting. Americans in particular seem to be very fond of that attitude. They eradicated the Indians who were vermin. They eradicated the American bisons by shooting them from trains for sport. They went to Vietnam where they treated the patriotic locals as vermin, and occasionally eradicated entire villages full of vermin, the strange looking people who didn’t speak English and instead made incomprehensible vermin noises. Obviously it’s not a problem, it’s not like they’re killing good Americans.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a famous Buddhist teacher, told stories about how the Americans killed his students in Vietnam, either by accident or in their valiant effort to exterminate vermin.

It’s interesting how vermin can be quite smart and sophisticated. I, myself, used to be that caged pig, and I used to be an ant-sized creature in someone’s targeting scope when he shot rocket-propelled cluster bombs in the general direction of where I used to live, along with other vermin that was to be indiscriminately killed. The Americans who pay for the opportunity to shoot at pigs from a helicopter remind me of the so-called “weekend Chetniks”, who found great entertainment at shooting the Croatian vermin in Vukovar during the siege. It’s not like they were shooting at proper humans or anyone of value. It’s not like my wife was there as a child, throughout the entire siege, and was hit by shrapnel from a tank grenade that exploded in her home. I must say it’s an interesting experience to be seen and treated as vermin, because you get to learn much about humans and how they rationalize the evil of their existence. They, the children of God, who are doing only what has to be done for the greater good, exterminating vermin and fighting evil.

But what if the table were to be turned, and you found out that “vermin” were in fact the precious children of God, and you are a dark abomination in the eyes of the Gods? What if they saw your extermination as a good thing, as destruction of the evil spawn of Satan?

(to be continued…)