Abstract
One way in which killing and expulsion are justified and explained by their perpetrators is through the demonisation of the victims. Kristen Monroe reports her interview with a Dutch Nazi who ‘could not see the humanity in those she persecuted’.3 In this way a language is employed which disguises what is being done by renaming it and justifies it to the oppressor by redefining it. Killing other people is murder, so by redescribing the other as not like oneself or one’s own group, but as uncivilised, subhuman, alien, beyond the pale of normal humanity, murder is redefined as cleansing, or a solution, or a holy purification, or a necessary defence against evil. Yet as with all forms of rhetoric, narrative and justification, the relation between the narrative and other aspects of political action is never wholly predictable or consistent. Murder can be carried out with gentle words or bureaucratic euphemisms, and murderous language used without murderous consequences. The consideration of the most extreme form of the language of contention, demonisation, must therefore be carried out with caution, hoping at best to discover some possible patterns, but not expecting to be able to pronounce laws or predictions.
‘I will follow upon mine enemies and overtake them: neither will I turn again till I have destroyed them.’1
‘We therefore here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this time of tragedy, and we like them will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.’
‘These events have split the world into two camps — the camps of belief and the camps of disbelief.’2
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Notes
Press statement delivered by Tony Blair outside 10 Downing Street, 11 September 2001, and Osama Bin Laden, statement broadcast on al-Jazeera T V, October 2000, each quoted in John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: Free Press, 2003), pp. 114–15, and 130.
Kristen Renwick Monroe, ‘Identity and Choice’, in Kenneth R. Hoover (ed.), The Future of Identity: Centennial Reflections on the Legacy of Erik Erikson (Lanham: Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004), p. 82.
George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: an Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936 (Berlin: Greenwood Press, 2nd edition, 1970), pp. 53–4. Schmitt, in response to criticisms and comments from Schwab, employed the distinction between enemy and foe, or between ‘real enemy’ and ‘absolute enemy’, a change which he variously attributed to Lenin and ideological absolutism, to the world emerging after 1945, or to the world emerging after 1918, and to the idea that combatant nations can be criminals rather than just
enemies. G. L. Ulmen, ‘Return of the Foe’, Telos, 72, Summer (1987), pp. 187–93.
Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 102.
Michael Paul Rogin, ‘Ronald Reagan,’ the Movie: and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. xiii.
Kevin Toolis, Rebel Hearts (London: Picador, 1995), p. 77.
Reichsführer-SS, SS Hauptamt, Der Untermensch (Berlin: Nordland, 1942), p. 2,
Quoted by Robert Jan van Pelt, ‘Bearers of Culture, Harbingers of Destruction: the Mythos of the Germans in the East’, in Richard A. Etlin (ed.), Art, Culture and Media Under the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 98–135, p. 106.
George Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 120–34.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World (Liepzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1912).
Quoted in David Little, Sri Lanka: the Invention of Enmity (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993), p. 24.
Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 3.
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996 (first published 1964)), p. 31.
Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion (London: Pluto, 2002), p. 135.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2003), p. 149.
Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), p. 51.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Towards a Theory of Treason’, in Raids and Reconstructions: Essays in Politics, Crime and Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1973).
Andreas Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 22.
Michael Mann, ‘The Dark Side of Democracy: the Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing’, New Left Review, 235, May/June (1999), pp. 18–45;
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (New Haven and London: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Ian Buruma, ‘The Indiscreet Charm of Tyranny’, New York Review of Books, 52, 8, 12 May (2005), p. 37.
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© 2007 Rodney Barker
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Barker, R. (2007). Demonisation: the Frenzy of Enmity. In: Making Enemies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287532_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287532_8
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