Regular Episode
#186 – HUMANS AS MONSTERS
Perlmutter is a political communication scholar and the author of 📚 Visions of War 💵, a sweeping survey of how warfare has been depicted across media from cave paintings to photography. His expertise in visual propaganda and the politics of imagery gives the conversation an unusually wide historical lens — one that stretches from Paleolithic cave art all the way to Nazi trophy photographs and the Rwandan genocide.
🖼️ Propaganda Didn’t Start with the Printing Press
One of Perlmutter’s central arguments, drawn from Visions of War, is that spin is as old as pictures themselves. The famous Lascaux Cave paintings of the Franco-Cantabrian region don’t reflect the actual diet of their creators — the archaeological faunal record shows they ate salmon and rabbits, none of which appear on the walls. Instead, the walls are packed with oversized pregnant megafauna: bison, mammoths, horses. These were aspirational images, depictions of the big kills that mattered culturally and politically, not objective records of daily life. “Picture zero,” as Perlmutter puts it, was already spin.
Similarly, the Assyrian bas-reliefs, Mayan wall paintings, and the carvings of the Zapotec civilization all publicly displayed the massacre of enemies — not as atrocity documentation, but as political messaging. The horror of war, Perlmutter argues, is a relatively recent moral category. For much of human history, piling up enemy dead on your public buildings just meant: don’t mess with us.
🧠 Dehumanization and the Making of Monsters
Karen raises the linguistic dimension: calling a human being a “monster” is fundamentally an act of dehumanization — a way of separating that person from the category of “us” and placing them outside the moral community that deserves empathy. The group agrees this mechanism is both ancient and disturbingly easy to trigger, and that it operates on surprisingly fine gradations.
The discussion touches on Genghis Khan (national hero in Mongolia, architect of mass death by almost any objective count), Vlad Tepes (hero of Romanian national resistance, inspiration for vampire lore), and the recurring observation that most genocides are committed not by outside invaders but by neighbors — people who had previously lived alongside their victims. The Rwandan genocide of the 1990s, the Cambodian killing fields under Pol Pot, and the mass killings of the Soviet system all illustrate that the “other” who must be destroyed can be ethnically, linguistically, and physically indistinguishable from the killer — defined as monstrous by ideology alone.
⚖️ The Banality of Evil — and Its Limits
Karen invokes Hannah Arendt‘s famous concept of the “banality of evil,” developed from her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial — the idea that one of the Holocaust’s chief architects was not a fanatic but a colorless bureaucrat who would have efficiently managed ball bearings just as readily as death transports. Perlmutter pushes back gently: more recent scholarship suggests Eichmann was, in fact, a committed ideologue who wanted to kill, not merely a paper-pusher following orders.
Blake reads Leonard Cohen‘s poem “All There Is to Know About Adolph Eichmann” — a forensic catalogue of Eichmann’s entirely average physical and mental attributes, closing with the devastating question: “What did you expect? Talons? Oversized incisors? Green saliva? Madness?” The poem neatly encapsulates what makes human monsters so difficult to detect and so easy to live alongside.
Perlmutter also quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s observation that evil is not localized in some detectable part of the human body that could simply be cut out — it runs through all of us, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous.
📷 The Tourists of Destruction
One of the episode’s most arresting sections draws on Perlmutter’s archival research at Koblenz, where he examined original photographic rolls taken by Waffen-SS propaganda photographers. The rolls tell a disturbing story in sequence: the first half of each roll looks exactly like vacation photography — a quaint Polish church, the village square, a picturesque barn. The second half shows the same village being burned to the ground. The photographers shifted genre from tourist to destroyer without apparent hesitation.
He also describes the SS commander who, after overseeing the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, produced a coffee table book of his trophy photographs — apparently seeing nothing in those images that required concealment. The documentary record of the Holocaust, Perlmutter notes, was created almost entirely by the perpetrators themselves: bureaucratic documentation, trophy photos, and what he calls “the tourism of destruction.”
🏛️ Ancient Massacres and the Archaeology of Violence
The conversation ranges into the deep past, touching on the Crow Creek massacre site in South Dakota (dated to roughly 1325 CE), where archaeologists found evidence of overkilling, the near-total absence of young women’s remains (indicating abduction), and a pattern consistent with a drought-driven conflict between neighboring groups. Perlmutter’s point: there is no evidence the perpetrators experienced guilt. This was, in all likelihood, simply what one did.
He also discusses Jared Diamond‘s controversial New Yorker reporting on tribal peoples who described pre-state inter-group killing as unremarkable daily life — and the ongoing scholarly debate over whether texts like the Iliad or Viking sagas contain evidence of what we would now call post-traumatic stress. Perlmutter is skeptical: the Roman legionnaire who massacred a Gaulish village probably went home, collected his pension, and bragged about it.
🪞 Is the Monster Always Male?
As the conversation winds down, Karen asks a pointed question: given the litany of names — Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ted Bundy — is monstrousness gendered? Perlmutter acknowledges the historical and anthropological record is stark: organized killing has been overwhelmingly male work, for reasons that are biological, cultural, and sociological all at once. He notes that gender roles in labor (including violent labor) have shifted dramatically across history — industrialization, not nature, hardened many of the divisions we now treat as fixed.
The group also touches on the Aileen Wuornos case — the subject of the film 🎬 Monster 💵 — and on the Lorena Bobbitt documentary (produced by Jordan Peele) as a case study in how narrative control determines who gets labeled the monster and how that label can be revised decades later when new voices gain access to the story.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Visions of War 💵 by David D. Perlmutter
– 📚 The Psychopath Test 💵 by Jon Ronson (previous MonsterTalk guest)
– 🎬 Monster 💵 (2003), dir. Patty Jenkins
– 🎬 The Thing 💵 (1982), dir. John Carpenter — briefly referenced in the context of hidden-in-plain-sight monsters
🔗 Related Links
– Dehumanization (Wikipedia)
– Eichmann in Jerusalem — Hannah Arendt
– Crow Creek Massacre
– Lascaux Cave Paintings
– Waffen-SS
– Dmitri Volkogonov — Soviet general and historian who wrote definitive biographies of Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin after gaining access to the Soviet archives
– Rwandan Genocide
– Bayeux Tapestry
– Scythians — recent archaeological finds of female warrior burials discussed in connection with the historical basis for Amazon legends
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
In MonsterTalk episode # 186 we talk with Dr. David D. Perlmutter, dean of the College of Media & Communications at Texas Tech University in Lubbock about the ways that humans can become monsters, and the ways that humans turn other humans into monsters. We discuss war crimes both recent and ancient, serial killers, and more. We reference his book, Visions of War. This free Patreon-edit of the show is brought to you by TTU’s new STEM Leadership Communication online program.
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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