A misconception we currently face is that hate speech is easily identifiable, usually in the form of brutish stereotypes thrown at undeserving individuals or groups, seeking to categorise them as inferior.

Whereas that tends to be the case for ordinary folks (with no political power) , dehumanisation needn’t be expressed in slurs or ignorance regarding other people’s culture.

In fact, at the highest levels, it is expressed in very careful language, nonetheless announcing the intention to participate in mass murder, for some political purpose or another.

Unfortunately, people have become desensitised to international “interventions”, insofar as they don’t affect them directly. War has been an almost inextricable part of the recent history of certain developed countries (the US in particular), that many people, even if fervently religious, have stopped reflecting on its inhumanity.

The ultimate form of dehumanisation is  not even mentioning the innocent people who will undoubtedly lose their lives in any planned intervention, as if it were a natural occurrence, so far removed from those watching their representatives debate on television it is easily ignored and forgotten.

An elected official propagandising for war is directly calling for the death of innocent civilians, in abstract terms, as if their lives didn’t matter enough to spare one thought. The fact that the language used is not triggering enough should not avert people’s attention.

Quite often nowadays, more emphasis is placed, including by the media, on Twitter spats and the vocabulary used on social media, than the very real consequences of people being dehumanised, to the point of being killed and turned into statistics, to be mentioned for ten minutes during the evening news.