Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
alongside minority ethnic groups and the disabled in the Nazi holocaust and many
thousands were sent to death camps. 3 Nazi discrimination represented an extreme
manifestation of state prejudice against homosexuality evident in nearly all countries
at the time (far less frequently against lesbianism) and still apparent in many states
today. Domestic legal restrictions on homosexuality have greatly lessened in most
of the developed world over recent decades but Amnesty International reported in
2000 that there were still 70 states legally prohibiting same sex relationships. Of
these states at least three had executed people on these grounds in the previous ten
years (Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia) and a number of others retained the death
penalty for this ‘offence’(Amnesty International 2000).
Even where homosexuality is not a capital crime, being gay can cost you your
life. Violent political non-state groups, of various shades, have targeted homosexuals
and other sexual minorities in campaigns in a number of countries. Right-wing death
squads have murdered homosexuals in Colombia as have the left-wing MRTA
in Peru (Narrain 2001–2). In some states the government may be complicit in
such attacks, even if they are not directly responsible. President Mugabe’s remark
in 1995 that homosexuals were ‘less than human’ undoubtedly contributed to the
subsequent proliferation of attacks on gay Zimbabweans in the course of the internal
conflict raging there. Even in some countries where homosexual rights are firmly
entrenched, ‘gay bashing’ remains a significant problem. The bombing of a Soho
pub, known as a favourite haunt of London’s gay community, by a lone neo-Nazi
fanatic in 1999 served to illustrate this fact.
Disabled people, too, were among the array of ‘undesirable’ minority groups targeted
in the Nazis’ reign of terror in Germany. An estimated 200,000 mentally ill or physically
disabled people were killed between 1939 and 1945 under the ‘T-4’ programme
in Germany and the occupied territories (Burleigh 1994). The policy was presented
as ‘euthanasia’ but the practice of deliberate starvation and the administering of lethal
injections was far from the contemporary notion of consensual ‘mercy killings’. The
T-4 programme represented an escalation of the war against the handicapped, which
had previously concentrated on sterilizing rather than killing those with physical or
mental impairments. Between 1934 and 1937 around 225,000 of Germany’s disabled
population were made incapable of reproducing new disabled (or, indeed, ablebodied)
people (Kevles 1995: 117).
This initial Nazi strategy of ridding their country of the disabled was, however,
largely uncontroversial. Many other states at the time were introducing similar, if
less extensive, schemes as the science of eugenics gained popularity. Eugenics is
the science of ‘improving’ humanity by restricting the reproduction of those deemed
imperfect. The USA had sterilized 36,000 disabled people by 1941 (Kevles 1995: 116)
and eugenics programmes had been introduced in Sweden, Denmark, Finland
and in one Swiss Canton between 1929 and 1939 (Kevles 1995: 115). ‘Democratic
eugenics’ (Drouard 1998: 174) continued in the Nordic states (including Norway)
until the 1970s. The ethical tide has ebbed away from eugenics in democracies but
the sterilization of the disabled persists in many contemporary states. China in 1995
Disability
115