From the trenches of the First World War to the skies over Tehran, racialised slurs have helped cast enemies as less than human
By
The United States of America entered the First World War in the spring of 1917, two and a half years after the conflict began in Europe. Once it had joined its British and French allies in the trenches, facing them across no man’s land were the German troops, or, as they had come to be derogatorily known, ‘the Huns’.
‘Hun’ is an unlikely slur for Germans. Historically, the Huns were a nomadic people who roamed across Central Asia and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th centuries. The name stuck because it was associated with the brutal reputation of the Kaiser’s advancing divisions. In the early phases of their rapid assaults on Belgium and France, the Imperial German Army was likened to the hordes of Dark Age barbarians led by Attila the Hun.
Enjoying this article? Check out our related reads…
For the propagandists of the Allied powers, ‘Hun’ was a label that helped to dehumanise the enemy and cast Germans as a racialised and monstrous other to be machine-gunned or bayoneted. The image of a demonic Hun, with his spiked helmet, cast in shadow, appeared on US government posters for Liberty Bonds. Adverts and newspaper headlines primed Americans for a fight against evil.
In the Second World War, America would again face the Germans, still known as ‘Huns’, but the opening strike against it came from the Japanese Empire. It was thus another racialised opponent, in the form of ‘the Japs’, that became a focus for propaganda. Later, in the Korean and Vietnam wars, ‘gook’ was deployed indiscriminately as a racist label for East and Southeast Asians, whether allies, civilians or enemies.
In tandem, stateside, away from the theatres of war, labels including ‘Japs’, but also ‘Negro’ and ‘wetback’, featured in official US government language from the 1940s to the 1960s. Under segregationist policy, ‘Negro’ was the recognised term for Black people and carried with it connotations of racial subservience. ‘Wetback’ derived from the 1954 Operation Wetback, which targeted removed immigrants, primarily of Mexican origin. The label persisted as a reference for Latinx people who crossed the Rio Grande. These degrading words reproduced local minority groups in America as racialised others: people viewed as inferior to the white majority.
Since 11 September 2001, the relentless stream of American-led wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East has spawned its own racialised language. Local people – primarily, but not exclusively, Muslim – are known as ‘hajjis’: a pejorative ubiquitous across the American military. David Buchanan, a former US Air Force pilot, describes how the word ‘applies everywhere, for nearly any purpose, as long as a brown person is involved’. This slang will be familiar to anyone who has seen a Hollywood war film from the past two and a half decades, including the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker from 2009. Originally, and properly, hajji is an honorific title given to a Muslim who has completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. However, in the vocabulary of the American combatants, it is a hateful word that objectifies and demonises local people as targets of violence.
Back in the homeland, the racist language that served as markers for specific ethnic, cultural or geographically defined populations in the mid-20th century has faded from US government documents. Yet a toxic new word has arisen. The target of recent deportations and controversial ICE policing operations in Minnesota and elsewhere has been ‘aliens’, a term frequently qualified as ‘removable aliens’. While covered by bureaucratic language, the meaning is clear: an alien person is less of a person than the average American.
‘Alien’ is the ultimate word to use for people from elsewhere. It is divorced from any identifiable geographic origin, burnishing it with a politically correct veneer of neutrality. Yet its pop-cultural association with hostile space invaders that present an existential threat beckons, and serves to justify, a forceful response from America’s homeland security apparatus.
Labels such as ‘Hun’, ‘wetback’, ‘hajji’ and ‘alien’ matter, as they are means to communicate ideologies or worldviews about other people. Racist and dehumanising language enables those in positions of authority and power, including politicians, soldiers and police, to view enemies of the state as expendable.
At the time of writing, the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has been threatening ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy’, casting the war as an effort by a Christian nation to vanquish an evil foe. His rhetoric echoes the ways in which Germans, or ‘Huns’, were once likened to monstrous Dark Age barbarians. When the pilots of the F-35s release their bombs over Tehran, do they think of the ‘hajjis’ below as undeserving of mercy and somehow less human than themselves?
