Becoming a Beast in the Long Run Travelling Perpetrators and the Animal as Metaphor for Violence

In Dutch war-themed travelogues on the Indonesian War of Independence, representations of human and nonhuman animals are conflated through the animal as a dual metaphor for representing violence. On the one hand, the animal metaphor is used in describing the transformation of the Dutch from trained soldier to cold-blooded beast. On the other hand, it is used to describe Indonesian freedom fighters’ violence as non-human which is considered to be the basis for the Dutch soldiers’ transformation. Moreover, distance is created between the perpetrators as agents of violence and the violence they commit through the animal metaphor. The result is that both the ‘animal Other’ and the ‘animal Self’ act as post colonial barriers to processing the perpetratorship of the Self.