“The problem with the pseudo-realism of the call-out culture is that it is so naïve. Once you adopt binary thinking in which people are categorized as good or evil, once you give random people the power to destroy lives without any process, you have taken a step toward the Rwandan genocide.”
My initial take was that this point could have been made in a considerably less florid manner and that David Brooks needs to up his lithium dosage stat, but maybe I’m just an insensitive jack-booted thug.
I think the only point he’s making is that dehumanization is typically a major step in any genocide. The Rwandan ‘cockroaches’ rhetoric is one of the classic examples and probably the one he was thinking of. Hutu media in the months/years leading up to the genocide began referring to Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ (more accurately ‘Inyenzi’) who were a plague on Rwandan society and operated as criminals under the cover of darkness. This dehumanization is what social scientists believe allowed otherwise sane, rational people to machete their neighbors to death. Dehumanizing words should always be something of which we should be wary.
There are 8 stages of genocide
Classification - This is simply treating members of a group as the group. Dividing a society into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ I think it’s safe to say that largely in America we’re at that point, but to be fair it’s not uncommon among societies that never do reach genocide, so it’s not a cause for alarm, but it’s a cause for a bit of concern.
Symbolization - That is applying symbols to both your own group and the other group. Famously the ‘yellow star’ is an example, but symbolization is a pretty common part of all us vs them environments A red MAGA hat or a conspicuous American flag might be examples.
Dehumanization- This is where it really begins. When the ‘other’ group begins to lose their essential worth in the eyes of the ‘us’ group. That can be by calling them inferior or using animal imagery. It’s saying there’s an essential part of them that makes them ‘less than’ the ‘in’ group. This is the dangerous phase because it’s really where you take a step from natural human grouping tendencies into violence. This is basically the last stage where things can be stopped relatively easily.
Organization - This is when actual organized groups begin to form, usually with violence as their goal. Sometimes they are organized by the state in a coherent fashion and sometimes they can arise more naturally and be less hierarchical.
Polarization - This is when people actually start to realize that bad things are going to happen. This is the stage where the groups are actually driven apart. Large scale media assaults are common. Usually prohibitions on intermarriage or social contact arise. Moderates are silenced, sometimes violently. Moderates within the groups are typically the largest threat to prevent the coming violence, so they are usually purged, either violently or silenced in some other way. Moderates themselves sometimes get classed as ‘the other’ and are seen as even worse than ‘the other’ because they ‘betray’ the ‘in’ group.
6)Preparation - At this point, it’s too late to do anything. This is when the death lists are drawn up. Assets of the ‘out’ group are seized. The ‘out’ group faces arrest. This is really the start of the genocide.
7)Execution - It’s a done deal. This stage is the actual killings. Usually groups view themselves as ‘exterminators’ who are cleansing the country of ‘subhumans’ and view their work as a necessary evil to get rid of the animals who hate and destroy the ‘good’ guys of whom they feel they are a part.
Denial - This is usually a prelude to another round of killings. It’s a denial that anything bad happened. Mass graves may be dug up and the bodies more thoroughly destroyed. Witnesses may be intimidated or killed. Any killings that are undeniable are said to be the fault of the victims or an unfortunate accident.
So there you go. The makings of genocide. You can see that dehumanization is such an important place to arrest things since no one is yet committed during this stage. Our words have effects on the real world and we have to be careful with them. Any language that paints your opponents as anything less than human beings with whom you have a disagreement should be avoided. Not that every dehumanizing action leads to genocide, but dehumanizing actions are an undeniable step on that path.
What **senoy **said. It would be ridiculous to make the A-to-Z jump that online bullying leads to genocide, but it is a case of going from A to B. And then B goes to C, and C goes to D, and then eventually Y goes to Z, Z being genocide. The dehumanization is the first step; “we are good and they are evil.” Step B would be “what is evil needs to be eliminated.”
I don’t readily recall any specific examples, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve seen that Rafał Gan-Ganowicz quote and “Warm Up the Rotors” referenced enough times online that I’m a bit surprised about how relatively few incidents of political violence we’ve actually had.
I know that if I was going to call out dehumanizing behavior, I’d definitely pick “Stop being an asshole misogynist” over “You want Mexican druglords to rape all the women and murder all the babies because you don’t support our wall and hate America”
As a definite lefty, but one whose belief in universal love and compassion as being the most important tools of social change (which diverges dramatically from popular practice these days), I find a lot philosophically that I agree with in that op-ed.
However, I’m painfully aware that there is a cohort who calls for peace, love and understanding only as a way to maintain the status quo. They call for an understanding of the abuser while ignoring the plight of the abused.
So I look skeptically at this piece. What’s your solution to injustice, David Brooks? If you don’t have one, then writing articles about how perpetrators of injustice need to be treated more nicely sounds like nothing more than a defense of injustice in the name of “civilization”.
The most troubling aspect of our political culture is the narrative of victimization that is so prevalent. On the right there is a consensus that the elites have victimized regular Americans and are profiting off of their pain. On the left there is a consensus that white het cis men are victimizing everyone else. This is scary because people will do things in self defense or in defense of others they would never consider otherwise.
When the Yugoslavian civil war and genocide was going on and the world was condemning Serbia for the mass killings and rape camps there was a journalist who wrote about going to Serbia and talking with the people and how they dealt with the condemnation of the world for what their armies and death squads were doing. The answer was that they were bathing in self pity and victimization. They talked about how they were the only Balkan people who stood up to the Nazis while everyone else was collaborating. The world was taking the sides if the Nazi lovers and ganging up on them when they were just trying to defend themselves.
The Nazis thought they were the victims of the Jews who had caused the defeat in WW1, the hyperinflation, and the great depression. The Soviets thought they were the victims of the kulaks who horded food and money. The Hutus thought themselves victims of the Tutsi who collaborated with the colonizers. These narratives allowed otherwise decent people to dehumanize and then seek to exterminate other groups of people.
