This is a pre-publication draft Please do not cite this draft; it is for online reading only on this website. Please do not post this file anywhere online Please do not make multiple copies for classroom use or other distribution without permission. Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence By Chip Berlet Published version appears as Chip Berlet. 2014. “Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence,” in Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson (eds), Doublespeak: Rhetoric of the Far-Right Since 1945, Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag. ‘Get the nigger’! The voice came from within the racist mob after it had just forced a Jewish counterdemonstrator to swim across the park’s pond to escape being attacked’. Kill that nigger! Stomp him!’ Yelled a white teenager as the terrified black youth realized he has pressed his luck too far by attending a neo-Nazi rally. He dodged fists as he ran to escape, but a leg snaked out and he fell. Face down in the grass he only had a moment to consider his plight before the first boot smashed into his ribs. ‘Kill the nigger, kill the nigger’, chanted the crowd. More boots, then fists, and as the black youth struggled, his shirt was reduced to shreds. Blood tricked down from his nose, and the corner of his mouth was split as yet another fist found its mark. A handful of white people rushed forward to the rescue, being pummeled in the process. The racist mob then surrounded a small group of counter-protesters from a neighborhood synagogue’. Go back to Skokie, Jew bitch’, yelled one white teenager at a young woman. Skokie is a northern suburb of Chicago, Illinois in the United States with a high percentage of survivors of the Nazi genocide’. Do you sleep with the niggers? Why don’t you go back to Africa with them?’ ‘Jews go home’, the crowd chanted, ‘Jews go home’. This story is drawn from Chip Berlet, ‘Hate Groups, Racial Tension and Ethnoviolence in an Integrating Chicago Neighborhood 1976-1988, in Research in Political Sociology, Vol. 9, The Politics of Social Inequality, eds. Betty A. Dobratz, Lisa K. Walder, and Timothy Buzzell, 2001, pp. 117–163. No one, not even the leader of the neo-nazis in his fiery speech, directly told the members of the mob to go attack blacks and Jews that day. Yet each person in the mob just knew what was expected of them. Why? How does this work? - - - As intellectuals we often remove ourselves from the bloody reality of words that provoke violence. I have therefore used the troubling and offensive language above to describe an incident I witnessed in 1978 in the Chicago neighborhood where my wife and I lived and joined in anti-racist work. While scholarly research exists on its own intellectual merits, we need to recognize that helping unravel the complexity of bigotry and xenophobia assists those working to extend human rights. The leaders of organized political or social movements sometimes tell their followers that a specific group of ‘Others’ is plotting to destroy civilized society. History tells us that if this message is repeated vividly enough, loudly enough, often enough, and long enough—it is only a matter of time before the bodies from the named scapegoated groups start to turn up. The majority of this study is a literature review and sketch of concepts with an expanded set of cites devised to support the underlying premise of the conference and the resulting articles. Portions of this study have been adapted from previously published work as noted in the endnotes as appropriate. Levin persuasively argues that both culture and self-interest shape prejudiced ideas and acts of discrimination or violence, which are ‘in many cases, quite rational’. According to Levin, respect for ‘differences can be so costly in a psychologically and material sense that it may actually require rebellious or deviant behavior’, in contrast to the existing norms of a society. Jack Levin, The Violence of Hate: Confronting Racism, Anti-Semitism, and Other Forms of Bigotry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002), Social science since World War II and the Nazi genocide has shown that under specific conditions, virulent demonization and scapegoating can—and does—create milieus in which the potential for violence is increased. What social science cannot do is predict which individual upon hearing the rhetoric of clear or coded incitement and turn to violence. In approaching some of these questions, this concluding study will unpack the concepts of ‘constitutive rhetoric’; the vilification, demonization, and scapegoating of a named ‘Other’; coded rhetorical incitement by demagogues; the relationship between conspiracism and apocalyptic aggression; and the process of scripted violence by which a leader need not directly exhort violence to create a constituency that hears a call to take action against the named enemy. It will argue that these processes can and do motivate some individuals to adopt a ‘superhero complex’ which justifies their pre-emptive acts of violence or terrorism to ‘save society’ from imminent threats by named enemies ‘before it is too late’. In the United States, following the 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist bombing by a small cell of right-wing militants, there were calls by Democrats and liberals to show restraint in the rhetoric used in electoral campaigns. A handful of principled conservatives also joined in this call. Overwhelmingly, however, the response by Republicans and conservatives (and a few liberals) was to denounce such concerns as falsely linking media rhetoric to violent action and thus endangering First Amendment free speech guarantees. A few of the more macho voices declared such concerns to be a sign of political weakness. Actually, such claims rebutting the link between rhetoric and violence are based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentations of existing social science. A vivid example of this can be found in the statistics chronicling ethno-violence compiled by the US Justice Department. Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon (the military headquarters outside the US capital city of Washington, DC.), assaults, the defacements of buildings, the murders of people perceived by attackers to be Muslims in the United States, showed a ghastly upwards spike. This is not just a convoluted turn of phrase. From the first days after the 9/11 terror attacks by militant Islamic supremacists, adherents to the Sikh religion were attacked because the truly ignorant xenophobic attackers assumed that anyone with a swarthy skin and a ‘rag-head’ had to be a Muslim enemy of America. In their study of how media manipulation for political ends can help incite genocide, Frohardt and Temin looked at ‘content intended to instill fear in a population’, or ‘intended to create a sense among the population that conflict is inevitable’. Mark Frohardt and Jonathan Temin, Use and Abuse of Media in Vulnerable Societies, Special Report 110, Washington, DC, United States Institute of Peace. October 2003, http://permanent. access. gpo. gov/websites/usip/www. usip. org/pubs/specialreports/sr110.pdf, (accessed 26/9/2012). Although an excellent study, the report is flawed by the failure to include a single footnote. See also Kofi A. Annan, Allan Thompson, and International Development Research Centre of Canada, The Media and the Rwanda Genocide (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2007). They point out that ‘media content helps shape an individual’s view of the world and helps form the lens through which all issues are viewed’. They found two patterns: content creating fear and content creating a sense of inevitability and resignation that violence was about to occur. According to the authors: In Rwanda prior to the genocide a private radio station tried to instill fear of an imminent attack on Hutus by a Tutsi militia. In the months before [conflicts] in Serbia, state television attempted to create the impression that a World War II–style ethnic cleansing initiative against Serbs was in the works. Throughout the 1990s Georgian media outlets sought to portray ethnic minorities as threats to Georgia’s hardfought independence. Frohardt and Temin found the result was a sense within the target population that ‘imminent’ and serious threats were to be expected, even though ‘there was only flimsy evidence provided to support them’, When such reporting creates widespread fear, people are more amenable to the notion of taking preemptive action, which is how the actions later taken were characterized. Media were used to make people believe that ‘we must strike first in order to save ourselves’. By creating fear the foundation for taking violent action through ‘self-defense’ is laid. ‘By convincing people that conflict is inevitable, those manipulating the media create a self-fulfilling prophecy’, explain Frohardt and Temin. ‘Consequently, people convinced of the inevitability of conflict are much easier to move to violence. Two strategies have been used to create this sense of inevitability: portraying conflict as part of an ‘eternal’ process, and discrediting alternatives to conflict’. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). According to Hannah Arendt, this process is clearly observable in totalitarian movements of the right and left. Arendt, comparing Hitlerism and Stalinism, linked it to the elevated status of the totalitarian leader and the elite cadre of followers: Their superiority consists in their ability to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose. In distinction to the mass membership which, for instance, needs some demonstration of the inferiority of the Jewish race before it can safely be asked to kill Jews, the elite formations understand that the statement, all Jews are inferior, means, all Jews should be killed. Ibid., p. 385. This example illustrates the most extreme case. Few would dispute that the rhetoric of Hitler and his propagandists had a connection to the murder of Jews and other ‘enemies’ of the Thousand Year Reich. What is disputed is whether or not this process can be extended to less obvious forms of provocative rhetoric. From Words to Actions. ‘They’ always lie to ‘Us’. It doesn’t matter who ‘They’ are, because one of the hallmarks of bigotry is that ‘Their’ religion, ideology, or culture is said to promote lying. They cannot be trusted. In fact, they are probably conspiring against us right now. They threaten our entire way of life. They are not like us. They don’t value human life like we do. In order to defend our nation, which reflects eternal truths, we must act now before it is too late. Attack first. Our war is justified. God is on our side. That’s the universal narrative of justified aggression against a demonized ‘Other’. Chip Berlet, ‘Islamophobia, Antisemitism and the Demonized “Other”: Parallels among bigotries reflect the conspiratorial mindset’, EXTRA! Magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, August 2012, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4589, (accessed 26/9/2012). Conspiracy theories attached to apocalyptic timetables are especially effective in building a constituency for aggression against the evil plotters. The history of the United States is replete with episodic widespread panic about subversion have created a mass countersubversive movement whose bigoted charges became part of the public conversation about politics: Freemasons (1798– 1844); Catholic immigrants (1834–60); Jews (1919– 35); Italian and Russian immigrants, with some deported as anarchists and Bolsheviks (1919–35); Communists and their ‘fellow travelers’ (1932–60); Communist and Jewish control of the Civil Rights Movement (1958–68), secular humanists, feminists and the ‘homosexual agenda’ (1975– ); the ‘New World Order’ (1990– ); Islamic menace and Sharia law (post 9/11). That’s the short list. Chip Berlet ‘Protocols to the Left, Protocols to the Right: Conspiracism in American Political Discourse at the Turn of the Second Millennium’, in The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, eds. Richard Landes and Steven Katz (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2011). The potential for violence in a society increases when the mass media carries rhetorical vilification by high profile and respected figures who scapegoat a named ‘Other’. This dangerous ‘constitutive rhetoric’ can build an actual constituency of persons feeling threatened or displaced. Or to put it another way, when rhetorical fecal matter hits the spinning verbal blades of a bigoted demagogue’s exhortations, bad stuff happens. The resulting violence can incite a mob, a mass movement, a war, or an individual actor. Individual actors who engage in violence can emerge in three ways. They can be assigned the task of violence by an existing organizational leadership; they can be members or participants in an existing organization, yet decide to act on their own; or they can be unconnected to an existing organization and act on their own. According to the US government definition, a ‘Lone Wolf’ is a person who engages in political violence and is not known by law enforcement agencies to have any current or previous ties to an organization under surveillance as potential lawbreakers. CBS News, ‘Napolitano: Lone wolf terror threat growing’ (December 2, 2011), http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57336080/napolitano-lone-wolf-terror-threat-growing/, (accessed 26/9/2012). The person committing the violence may expect or even welcome martyrdom, or may plan for a successful escape to carry on being a political soldier in a hoped-for insurgency. Either way, the hope is that ‘a little spark can cause a prairie fire’. The “spark” phrase is from an essay by Mao. “Spark” (Iskra in Russian), was the name of a newspaper paper established by Lenin. The phrase was popularized by the 1960’s Weather Underground in its revolutionary journal Prairie Fire. The concept originates in the revolutionary theory known as “propaganda of the deed” which can include acts of violence and terrorism. The theory was developed in the 1800’s by left revolutionaries and anarchists, notably Carlo Pisacane, Mikhail Bakunin, and Paul Brousse. Revolution is seldom the result, but violence and death remains as a legacy. Following the Research Trail Social Science Responds to WWII After World War II social scientists inspected the Nazi genocide and tried to develop theories of how citizens in a society allow such atrocities to occur. While in some cases this research has been challenged and newer theoretical models proposed; there is a substantial amount of theoretical claims that stand up to the test of time; at least as social science is concerned. The most influential early studies were sponsored by the American Jewish Committee as part of a series that began publishing before the US entry into WWII but after the trajectory of Nazi Party antisemitism became clear. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row: 1950); Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, The Dynamics of Prejudice (New York: Harper & Row, 1950); Norman W. Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (New York: Harper & Row, 1950); John Dollard, L. Doob, N. E. Miller, O. H. Mowrer, and R. R. Sears, Frustration and Aggression, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939); Theodor W. Adorno, et al. , The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950); Gordon W. Allport, Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison–Wesley, 1954). Titles included: Frustration and Aggression (1939), The Dynamics of Prejudice, (1950), Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder, a Psychoanalytic Interpretation. (1950), The Authoritarian Personality (1950), The Nature of Prejudice (1954). Of these, The Dynamics of Prejudice, Frustration and Aggression, and The Nature of Prejudice have stood up relatively well to the test of time. Naturally there are critics of this argument, but many of the contentions remain valid. Other contentions have been challenged or remain unproven in social science research studies. An exemplary review of this is found in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). The Authoritarian Personality has received substantial criticism, but social scientists have made adjustments that keep it salient as a theory. The most obvious revisions include the harsh reality that authoritarians can appear anywhere on the political spectrum; and that authoritarian followers are in a symbiotic relationship with those who enjoy the psychic tingle of being an authoritarian leader. The submissive can enjoy the whip of the dominant. There will be more discussion of this later. A benchmark 1951 study is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which had three major parts: ‘Antisemitism’, ‘Imperialism’, and ‘Totalitarianism’. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, [1951], republished in three volumes: Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968);Hannah Arendt, Imperialism: Part Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968); Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968). Other works that also played a role in establishing the post-war liberal consensus include Hoffer, The True Believer, and Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, (Harper and Row, New York: 1951); Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind, (New York: Basic Books, 1960). Pluralist or Classical School Emerges What emerged in social science was what is called classical theory, the pluralist school, or centrist-extremist theory; and a flurry of books were published around similar themes that stressed individual psychological disturbance, mob violence, or the reaction to stress or competition in societies as viewed through the lens of social psychology at the time. See for example, William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959); Hans Toch, The Social Psychology of Social Movements (London: Methuen, 1966); Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of Popular Mind (New York: Viking Press, 1960); Herbert Blumer, ‘Social Movements’, in Barry McLaughlin ed. Studies in Social Movements: A Social Psychological Perspective (New York: Free Press, 1969); Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1967); Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel, (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press: 1970); Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right: The New American Right, Expanded And Updated, (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, 1964); Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right–Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); and Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Danger on the Right (New York: Random House, 1964). In a related vein, there were a series of books by Hofstadter, especially The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Richard Hofstadter, ’The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); Richard Hofstadter, Anti–Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). The basic idea was that right-wing movements of the 20th century—whether populist or elitist—reflected dysfunctional outbursts of irrational ‘extremism’. Many of these books had descriptive sections that remain valuable. Hofstadter’s work has remained the most valuable of these, if one ignores the social psychological theories that have been revised by more recent research. An excellent overview of these newer theories is Evan R. Harrington, ‘The Social Psychology of Hatred’, Journal of Hate Studies, 2003/04, 3/1, Journal of Hate Studies (Institute for Action against Hate, Gonzaga University Law School), 3/1 (2004), pp. 49-82, online at http://guweb2. Gonzaga.edu/againsthate/journal3/GHS110.pdf, (accessed 26/9/2012). During the Cold War, it became politically expedient to tie communism to the theories of what social mechanisms where involved in totalitarianism and the rise of fascism in Europe. In some cases this led to theoretical breakthroughs, such as Hannah Arendt’s tripartite study of totalitarianism, which today (along with Eichmann in Jerusalem) is undervalued as a significant philosophical formulation. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951); Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). Hitler and Stalin were both totalitarians; this never was meant to support the claim that rightists or leftists were all totalitarians. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick made the claim that Arendt had indicted all Marxists in Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster: 1982). For a critique of Kirkpatrick’s claims, see Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press: 1995), pp. 198, 216-217. For Arendt’s actual thesis, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, [1951] 1973), especially pp. 468-474. Arendt herself protested this interpretation of her work in the preface to one of her subsequent editions. In 1967 sociologist Michael Paul Rogin challenged the claims of the Pluralist School. Michael Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 1967), especially pp. 261–282. Other scholars joined this critique as sociology turned to newer theories about social movements. Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, eds., ‘Introduction’, in Conspiracy: The Fear Of Subversion In American History, edited by the authors, (Holt, Rinehart And Winston, New York: 1972), pp. xii–xi; Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 237–257; Margaret Canovan, Populism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1981), pp. 46–51, 179–190; Jerome L. Himmelstein, To The Right: The Transformation Of American Conservatism, (Berkeley: Univ. Of California Press: 1990), pp. 1–5, 72–76, 152–164; Sara Diamond, Roads To Dominion: Right–Wing Movements And Political Power In The United States (New York: The Guilford Press: 1995), pp. 5–6, 40–41; Sara Diamond, ‘How “Radical” Is the Christian Right?’ The Humanist, March/April 1994; Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History. (New York: Basic Books: 1995), pp. 190–193; Betty A. Dobratz and Stephanie Shanks–Meile, The White Separatist Movement in the United States: “White Power, White Pride!” (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997); Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, “One Key to Litigating Against Government Prosecution of Dissidents: Understanding the Underlying Assumptions”, Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report, West Group, in two parts, 5/13, January-February 1998, and 5/14, March-April: 1998; William B. Hixson, Jr. , Search for the American Right Wing: An Analysis of the Social Science Record: 1955–1987 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992). For statistical data that refutes claims made by centrist/extremist theory about the social base of the ‘radical right’, see Rogin, Intellectuals and McCarthy; Fred W. Grupp, Jr. , ‘The Political Perspectives of Birch Society Members’, in The American Right Wing: Readings in Political Behavior, ed. Robert A. Schoenberger (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969); James McEvoy, III, ‘Conservatism or Extremism: Goldwater Supporters in the 1964 Presidential Election’ in Schoenberger ed. American Right Wing; Charles Jeffrey Kraft, A Preliminary Socio-Economic & State Demographic Profile of the John Birch Society (Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 1992). New Paradigm: Social Movement Theories Nothing in the previous discussions should be read to imply that social movements are all dangerous, or that only right-wing movements are dangerous. Social and political movement activists have different ideologies and methodologies in a myriad of combinations from left to right, from non-violent to violent, from socially constructive to destructive. People who join all sorts of social movements turn out to be pretty much like their neighbors along a full range of demographics. This section is borrowed from Chip Berlet, ‘Reframing Populist Resentments in the Tea Party Movement’, in Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party, eds. Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2012). People who join social movements tend to be average people with grievances. They join with others to resolve their grievances. To accomplish this they mobilize resources, exploit opportunities that open up in the political system, develop their own internal culture, and create perceptual frames, clever slogans, and parable-like stories to achieve their aims. John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, ‘Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory’, American Journal of Sociology, 82/6 (May 1977), pp. 1212–1241; Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Sociologists talk about ‘framing’ as an ongoing process in which social movement leaders illustrate a power struggle by narrowing the subject to a specific point of view or perspective easy understood by followers. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959); Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974); McCarthy and Zald, ‘Resource Mobilization’; David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, ‘Frame Alignment Process, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation’, American Sociological Review 51 (1986) pp. 464–481; David A. Snowand Robert D. Benford, ‘Master Frames and Cycles of Protest’, in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, eds. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (Yale University Press, New Haven: 1992). A narrative is simply a story told inside a movement which is sometimes shared with the public. These stories serve as parables, with the plot and storyline revealing heroes and villains. Movement participants learn lessons on expected ideas and actions valued by the movement as a whole. These become internalized and exist as if they are ‘common sense’. Joseph E. Davis, ed., Stories of Change Narrative and Social Movements (State University of New York Press, Albany: 2002); Francesca Polletta, ‘Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements’, Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 4,1998, pp. 419-446. Narrative stories can be told in ways that defend the status quo or challenge the status quo. Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, ‘Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative’, Law & Society Review Vol. 29, No. 2, 1995, pp. 197-226. The main reason people join a social movement is that they have a grievance with society and get motivated enough to join others to do something about it. They plug into silo-like information channels where leaders frame an issue in a way that suggests a solution can be achieved through collective action. They agree to use techniques for social change that step outside the normal boundaries of political activism of using elections or lobbying, yet they often interact with political movements for elections and legislative campaigns. The most successful movements have skilled leaders who articulate clear goals, create positive communal interactions, and support their ideologically-driven strategies with resonant framing of issues and narrative stories that act like parables. Authoritarianism Revisited The original theories about an ‘authoritarian personality’ had some serious flaws, especially what appeared to be a bias limiting the syndrome to right-wing ideology. Later research showed there were several inter-related factors involved; there were dominant authoritarian leadership personalities and submissive follower personalities; and the syndrome could be found across the political spectrum. Altemeyer discusses how the most socially-destructive individuals combine authoritarianism and social dominance with ethnocentric prejudice. Robert (Bob) Altemeyer, ‘Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,’ in Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 14: 2004, pp. 421-447. See also Robert (Bob) Altemeyer, Right-wing authoritarianism (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1981); Robert (Bob) Altemeyer, Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing Authoritarianism (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988); Robert (Bob) Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). In 2010 he revisited his research to detail its relevance to understanding the right-wing populist Tea Party movement in the United States. Robert (Bob) Altemeyer, ‘Comment on the Tea Party Movement,’ personal website, April 20, 2010, http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/drbob/Comment%20on%20the%20Tea%20Party.pdf (Accessed 5/10/2012). Betz has studied similar right-wing populist movements in Europe which attract support by using radically xenophobic and authoritarian rhetoric.” Hans-Georg Betz, ‘The Two Faces of Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe,’ The Review of Politics, Autumn 1993, Vol. 55, No. 4, pp. 663-685, quote from abstract, p. 663. According to Taras, the ‘rise of xenophobia is nearly synonymous with the anti–immigrant backlash’ in Western Europe, ‘especially against non–Europeans and ‘people who are not racially Caucasian or religiously Judeo–Christian.’ Ray Taras, Europe Old and New: Transnationalism, Belonging, Xenophobia, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 83-172, quote from p. 93. A number of recent books have used combinations of cognitive science and sociology to argue that certain types of ‘authoritarian personalities’ actually do tend to be more prevalent on the political right. Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: Public Affairs, 2007); George Lakoff, The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to your Brain and its Politics (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008); Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality (Hoboken, NJ; Chichester/Wiley2012). The Tools of Fear: A Catalog of Ingredients and Processes In terms of radical right rhetoric, it is best to start with the concept and reality of prejudice: the preconceived formation of negative or hostile views toward a person or group of persons based on ignorance, stereotyping, or other filter of bigotry. Prejudice can be unconscious or conscious, and any set of prejudiced ideas may be transformed into an ideological viewpoint. Prejudice is a set of views. Discrimination is an act. What follows in this section traces the path to violence. This section is adapted from Chip Berlet, ‘The United States: Messianism, Apocalypticism, and Political Religion’, in The Sacred in Twentieth Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Professor Stanley G. Payne, eds. Roger Griffin, Matthew Feldman, and John Tortice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). pp. 221-257; Chip Berlet, ‘Christian Identity: The Apocalyptic Style, Political Religion, Palingenesis and Neo-Fascism’ in Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion, ed. Roger Griffin (Routledge, London: 2005) pp. 175-212; Chip Berlet, ‘When Alienation Turns Right: Populist Conspiracism, the Apocalyptic Style, and Neofascist Movements’, in Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium: The Evolution of Alienation, eds. Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin Fishman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) pp. 115-144; Chip Berlet, ‘Protocols to the Left, Protocols to the Right’; Chip Berlet, Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, & Scapegoating (Somerville, MA: Political Research Associates, 2009), http://www. publiceye. org/conspire/toxic2democracy/index. html, (accessed 26/9/2012). Chip Berlet, ‘Fears of Fédéralisme in the United States: The Case of the “North American Union” Conspiracy Theory’, Fédéralisme Régionalisme, Vol. 9, No.1, 2009, special issue on ‘Le Fédéralisme Américain’, http://popups. ulg. ac. be/federalisme/document. php?id=786, (accessed 26/9/2012). Dualism Dualism is a concept that divides the world into ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’; and in the religious sense, between the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In fact, a particular form of religious dualism, Manichaeism, was broadly practiced between the third and seventh centuries, and incorporated into many features of early Christianity. Today the terms Manichaeism and dualism are sometimes used interchangeably. Dualism plays a central role in ‘a totalist movement with an idealized charismatic leader and an absolutist apocalyptic outlook’, write Anthony and Robbins’. Participants ‘engage in the ‘projection of negativity and rejected elements of self onto ideologically designated scapegoats’, and this helps create ‘a basis for affirming a pure, heroic self’. Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins, ‘Religious Totalism, Exemplary Dualism, and The Waco Tragedy’, in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, eds. Robbins and Palmer (New York: Routledge: 1997) pp. 261-84, quotes from pp. 264, 269. Anthony and Robbins call this ‘exemplary dualism’. Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins, ‘Religious Totalism, Violence and Exemplary Dualism: Beyond the Extrinsic Model’, in Millennialism and Violence, ed. Michael Barkun, Cass Series on Political Violence (London: Frank Cass, 1996) pp. 10–50. Hofstadter, in turn, noted that the ‘fundamentalist mind…is essentially Manichaean’. Hofstadter, Anti–Intellectualism, p. 135. The United States has a significant presence of politically active fundamentalist Christian conservatives, many of whom are caught up in social and political movements that employ exemplary dualism. Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books: 1996). In Europe this worldview is found among anti-immigrant and xenophobic movements in addition to organized white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Demagoguery and Constitutive Rhetoric Demagoguery has been used historically by both populists to denounce corrupt elites, and by government officials to justify political repression—in both instances, its use is based on fears of conspiracies by real and imaginary subversive elements. Gordon W. Allport, ‘Demagogy’, in Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History, eds. Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown (New York, N.Y: Holt, Rinehart and Winston: 1972), pp. 263–76. Demagogues need to be charismatic movement leaders; otherwise, their performance is interpreted as buffoonery. A clearer view of the demagogic process that can lead to ‘scripted violence’ is made visible when combining the contemporary sociological understanding of frames and narratives in mass movements with the concept of constitutive rhetoric from the fields of speech, communication theory, and media criticism. The early theorizing in this arena built a firm foundation for studying the societal role of rhetorical content in mass media, from Lippmann’s agenda-setting theory (1922); Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, New York: 1922). through Bernays’ public opinion and propaganda theories (1923 and 1928); Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Liveright, 1923); Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright, 1928). In an interview I conducted with the late Bernays, he quiped that rhetoric of persuasion that used “propaganda techniques not in accordance with good sense, good faith, or good morals” should be called “impropaganda;” Logic & Credible Journalism, http://www. researchforprogress. us/media/training/logic. html, (accessed 26/9/2012). to cultivation theory and other theories by Gerbner and his fellow thinkers in more recent decades. George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, ‘Growing up with Television: The Cultivation Perspective’, in Against the Mainstream: The Selected Works of George Gerbner, ed. Michael Morgan (New York: Peter Lang, 2002) pp. 193-213;James Shanahan and Michael Morgan, Television and Its Viewers: Cultivation Theory and Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1999). Much of the newer theorizing is prompted in one way or another by the work of Althusser, which influences a wide range of authors far beyond the original small audience of theoretical Marxists. Louis Althusser, For Marx (Pantheon, New York: 1965; Louis Althusser, Reading Capital. London: NLB: 1970. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review: 1971. Charland writes that central to his analysis of constitutive rhetoric is ‘Althusser’s category of the subject’ in which the collectivized identity of the constituency is actually created through a ‘series of narrative ideological effects’. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois, in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 73, No.2, 1987, pp. 133-150. Charland’s study concerns the movement for the sovereignty of a Quebec nation. According to Charland, he draws from Althusser’s work to explain how the ‘subject is not ‘persuaded’ to support sovereignty’ but the support ‘for sovereignty is inherent in the subject position addressed by ‘the pro-sovereignty’ movement’s rhetoric. This demonstrates Althusser’s contention that in these situations it is the members (subjects) of the collectivized constituency are ‘interpellated’ as political subjects through a process of identification in rhetorical narratives that ‘always already’ presume the constitution of the subject’. Ibid. Therefore the assumptions in the text and subtext of a movement leader’s constitutive rhetoric call into being an actual living constituency made up of the individual ‘subjects’ being addressed. Thus when Hitler’s favorite journalist Julius Streicher, in his newspaper Der Stürmer, railed against the Jews using a particular narrative rhetoric, a constituency was created which moved from being individual passive antisemites into being active Jew haters in a collectivity with a shared identity. Of course, this process of interpellation is not limited to Nazi rhetoric. Gray notes that ‘Althusser’s theories of ideology and interpellation may be readily applied to the study of mass communication, in the context of perpetuation of hegemonic ideology via the mass media’. Jennifer B. Gray, ‘Althusser, Ideology, and Theoretical Foundations: Theory and Communication’, in NMEDIACm: Journal of New Media & Culture, 3/1 Winter 2006), online at http://www. ibiblio. org/nmediac/winter2004/gray. html, (accessed 26/9/2012). Movement leaders speak to their followers, but they also speak to different groups of people. Moving from the center of a movement outwards, leaders speak to their inner circle; staff, loyal members or cadre, general membership and followers, potential recruits, the general population via mass communications media; and their opponents. Johnston calls this a ‘micro-frame analysis’. Hank Johnston, ‘A Methodology for Frame Analysis: From Discourse to Cognitive Schemata’, in Social Movements and Culture, Social Movements, Protest, and Contention vol. 4, eds. Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN: 1995), pp. 217–246. The rhetoric aimed at each group needs to be analyzed separately or altogether. Journalist frequently report only on the message aimed at them as media carriers, and not the more vivid rhetoric reserved for loyal followers that may more accurately reflect the ideological content of the speaker. Some skillful rhetoricians can speak to several audiences at the same time using coded language, known in rude jargon as ‘dog whistles’. For example, in some of his speeches, Pat Buchanan has woven in coded jargon aimed at Christian evangelicals, anti-immigrant xenophobes, antisemites, militia supporters, and intellectual neofascists. Meanwhile, many listeners who are not mobilized into a specific constituency just hear a conservative patriotic speech. Speakers on the ideological Left sometimes do the same thing. An example of constitutive rhetoric is explored in a study of e-mail forwarded round online right wing groups. Duffy, Page, and Young analyzed messages that ‘ranged from anti-liberal or anti-Obama polemics to blatantly racist communications’. The content of these e-mails ranged from claims that Obama was ‘incompetent’ to those that claimed ‘he’s plotting the downfall of America’ Margaret Duffy, Janice Teruggi Page, and Rachel Young, ‘Obama as Anti-American: Visual Folklore in Right-wing Forwarded E-mails and Construction of Conservative Social Identity’, Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 125, No. 496, 2012, pp. 177-203. Many e-mails recounted events that evidently sought to reveal Obama as un-American, un-Christian, power-obsessed, weak, or Nazi-like. The dichotomous portrayals of Obama as both diabolical and incompetent expressed many of the fears of conservative voters: that the United States would become a socialist nation with government control of all businesses and institutions, overrun with minorities and immigrants and run by politicians who glad-handed despotic foreign leaders, particularly those from Muslim nations. In other words, Obama was illustrative of everything ‘anti-American’. Ibid., The authors argued that this is a ‘form of digital folklore that is politically motivated’, and found that ‘their political dynamics may contribute to constructing not only group identity but also the individuals’ social identity within their e-mail group’. They also argued that these ‘images may amplify the impact and believability of the messages, especially when they are linked to familiar and sometimes demonized or beloved cultural references and experiences, at times through a process known as visual appropriation’. Ibid., Right-wing movements in the United States have long used the rhetoric of fear mongering linked to scapegoating and conspiracy theories in ways that demonize a subversive ‘Other’ hiding inside progressive political movements. David Neiwert, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (Sausalito, CA: PoliPointPress, 2009); John Amato and David Neiwert, Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane (Sausalito, CA: PoliPointPress, 2010); Alexander Zaitchik, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010); Will Bunch, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama (New York: Harper, 2010). Scapegoating In Western culture the term ‘scapegoat’ can be traced to an early Jewish ritual described in the book of Leviticus in the Bible. This text is borrowed from Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right–Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press: 2000), pp. 7-9. As Gordon W. Allport explains: On the Day of Atonement a live goat was chosen by lot. The high priest, robed in linen garments, laid both his hands on the goat’s head, and confessed over it the iniquities of the children of Israel. The sins of the people thus symbolically transferred to the beast, it was taken out into the wilderness and let go. The people felt purged, and for the time being, guiltless. Allport, Nature of Prejudice, p. 244. On the ritualized transference and expulsion of evil in a variety of cultures, see Frazier, Golden Bough, pp. 624–686. On the process and social function of scapegoating in historic persecution texts of myth and religion, see Girard, Scapegoat. The word scapegoat has evolved to mean a person or group wrongfully blamed for some problem, especially for other people’s misdeeds’. Psychologically’, Richard Landes explains, ‘the tendency to find scapegoats is a result of the common defense mechanism of denial through projection’. Richard Allen Landes, ‘Scapegoating’ in Encyclopedia of Social History ed. Peter N. Stearn (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 659. This can involve guilt over their own misconduct, or a rejection of their own inner thoughts, or a redirection of their own anxiety or frustration onto the scapegoat. Allport, Nature of Prejudice, p. 350. A certain level of scapegoating is endemic in most societies, but it more readily becomes an important political force in times of social competition or upheaval. At such times, especially, scapegoating can be an effective way to mobilize mass support and activism during a struggle for power. Berlet and Lyons, Right–Wing Populism, pp. 7-9. Fisher explains that ‘the scapegoated group serves more as a metaphor’. Nor does scapegoating by large groups and social movements indicate mass mental dysfunction. Conversation with Susan M. Fisher, MD (clinical professor of psychiatry at University of Chicago Medical School and Faculty, Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis): 1997. As a social process, the hostility and grievances of an anxious, angry, or frustrated group are directed away from the most significant causes of a social problem onto a target group demonized as malevolent wrongdoers. In a book on right-wing populism several years ago, Lyons and I put it this way: The scapegoat bears the blame, while the scapegoaters feel a sense of righteousness and increased unity. The social problem may be real or imaginary, the grievances legitimate or illegitimate, and members of the targeted group may be wholly innocent or partly culpable. What matters is that the scapegoats are wrongfully stereotyped as all sharing the same negative trait, or are singled out for blame while the other major culprits and causes are let off the hook. See Allport, Nature of Prejudice, pp. 243–260; Girard, Scapegoat. Benedict writes that desperate people ‘easily seize upon some scapegoat to sacrifice to their unhappiness; it is a kind of magic by which they feel for the moment that they have laid [down] the misery that has been tormenting them’. Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics (The New York: Viking Press, 1961), p. 151. According to Benedict, we all ‘know what the galling frictions are in the world today: nationalistic rivalries, desperate defense of the status quo by the haves, desperate attacks by the have-nots, poverty, unemployment, and war’. Benedict also observes that ‘Whenever one group. . . is discriminated against before the law or in equal claims to life, liberty, and jobs, there will always be powerful interests to capitalize on this fact and to divert violence from those responsible for these conditions into channels where it is relatively safe to allow’. Ibid., pp. 150-151, 153. In this way, scapegoating feeds on people’s anger about their own disempowerment, but diverts this anger away from the real systems of power and oppression. While scapegoats are often less powerful and more marginalized than the actual sources of conflict, this is not always the case. Allport, Nature of Prejudice, p. 351. Scapegoating of persons with high status can serve the status quo and protect those in power from criticism. Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt, Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed (New York: Plenum Press: 1996), pp. 234-235. This can happen when a faction of elites holding political power targets another elite faction seeking electoral victories. Sometimes scapegoating targets at the same time both socially disempowered or marginalized groups as well as the powerful or privileged, in a form of populism called ‘producerism’. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion; Berlet and Lyons, Right–Wing Populism, especially p. 6. Producerism is the idea that a hard-working and ‘productive’ middle class is being robbed by parasites above and below them on the socio-economic ladder. Ibid. For example, conservative activists Gary Allen and Larry Abraham used a producerist framework built around a conspiracy theory in None Dare Call It Conspiracy to explain the success of the communist conspiracy in penetrating America. They claimed this involved the use of the “Communist tactic of pressure from above and pressure from below”: The pressure from above comes from secret, ostensible respectable Comrades in the government and Establishment, forming with the radicalized [leftist] mobs in the streets below, a giant pincer around middle-class society. The street rioters are pawns, shills, puppets, and dupes for an oligarchy of elitist conspirators working above to turn America’s limited government into an unlimited government with total control over our lives and property. Gary Allen with Larry Abraham, None Dare Call It Conspiracy (Rossmoor/Seal Beach, CA: Concord Press, [1971] 1972), p. 24. In their book, Allen and Abraham provide a diagram of the producerist vice. It illustrates how a conspiracy of the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, and the Council on Foreign Relations applies pressure from above. Meanwhile a subversive leftist network (including the Students for a Democratic Society, Black Panther Party, Youth International Party (YIPPIES), Young Socialist Alliance and Common Cause) applies pressure from below. This creates the vice crushing the middle class. Ibid., an image of the graphic is at http://www.rightwingpopulism.us/producerism/index.html, (Accessed 5/10/2012). Right-wing authors in the United States have used producerism coupled with a racialized subtext for decades. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion; and Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America. Vilification and Demonization of an ‘Enemy’ Vilification in the societal sense is the use of vicious rhetoric to denounce and portray a target group as disgusting and to be avoided. Demonization is the process through which a group of people target other groups of people as the embodiment of evil. James A. Aho, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle: 1994), pp. 107–21; Elaine H , Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York: Random House, 1995); David Norman Smith, ‘The Social Construction of Enemies: Jews and the Representation of Evil’, Sociological Theory: 1996, 14/3; Lise Noël, Intolerance, A General Survey, translated by Arnold Bennett (McGill–Queen’s University Press, Montreal:1994). The hated target is first denigrated, then vilified, then demonized, and finally dehumanized. Typically, proponents claim that the target is plotting against the public good. Robert Solomon Wistrich, Demonizing the Other (Amsterdam: Published for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999) Demonization generally involves demagogic appeals. The demonization of an adversary involves well-established psychological processes. Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1961] 1989); Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). There are a number of social science experiments with troubling outcomes that demonstrate that across many cultures it is relatively easy to turn one group against another. Harrington, ‘The Social Psychology of Hatred’. Among the most famous are the ‘Milgram Experiments’, Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). and the ‘Brown Eye Blue Eye Experiments’. Public Broadcasting System, ‘Brown Eye Blue Eye Experiment’ devised by schoolteacher Jane Elliott, ‘A Class Divided’, Public Broadcasting System, original airdate March 26, 1985, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/, (accessed 26/9/2012). The demonized scapegoat serves a dual purpose by representing the evil ‘them’ and simultaneously illuminating, solidifying, and sanctifying the good ‘us’. René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) pp. 43–44, 49–56, 66–73, 84–87, 100–101, 177–178. According to Aho, even when it is unconscious, the objectification of evil through scapegoating has this wondrous outcome: ‘The casting out of evil onto you not only renders you my enemy; it also accomplishes my own innocence. To paraphrase [Nietzsche]. . . In manufacturing an evil one against whom to battle heroically, I fabricate a good one, myself’. Aho, This Thing of Darkness, pp. 115–116. In addition, Girard argues, ‘the effect of the scapegoat is to reverse the relationship between persecutors and their victims’. Girard, Scapegoat, p. 44. When persons in scapegoated groups are attacked, they are often described as having brought on the attack themselves because of the wretched behaviour ascribed to them as part of the enemy group. Noël, Intolerance, pp. 129–144. They deserved what they got. Scapegoating evokes hatred rather than anger. The ‘hater is sure the fault lies in the object of hate’, notes Allport. Allport, Nature of Prejudice, pp. 363–364. Fuller, similarly, links scapegoating to Christian apocalyptic millennialism by noting how frequently throughout U. S. history scapegoated groups have been named as harbouring agents of the Antichrist. Fuller also sees a psychological dimension: Many efforts to name the Antichrist appear to be rooted in the psychological need to project one’s ‘unacceptable’ tendencies onto a demonic enemy. It is the Antichrist, not oneself, who must be held responsible for wayward desires. And with so many aspects of modern American life potentially luring individuals into nonbiblical thoughts or desires, it is no wonder that many people believe that the Antichrist has camouflaged himself to better work his conspiracies against the faithful. Robert C. Fuller, Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 168). Apocalyptic Aggression Apocalypticism involves the sense of expectation by individuals or groups that dramatic events are about to unfold during which ‘good’ will confront ‘evil’. This confrontation will change the world forever and reveal hidden truths. Fuller, Naming the Antichrist; Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Norman Cohn The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, [1957] 1970), especially the Introduction; Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Paul S. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Belknap/Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992); Charles B. Strozier, Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Beacon Press, Boston: 1994); Damian Thompson, The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (Univ. Press of New England, Hanover, NH: 1998); Richard K. Fenn, The End of Time: Religion, Ritual, and the Forging of the Soul (Pilgrim Press, Cleveland: 1997); David G. Bromley, ‘Constructing Apocalypticism’, in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, eds. Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (New York: Routledge, 1997) pp. 31–45; Catherine Wessinger, ‘Millennialism With and Without the Mayhem’, in Robbins and Palmer, Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, pp. 47–59; Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Pagels, Origin of Satan. Members of apocalyptic movements believe that time is running out. The term millenarianism describes apocalyptic movements built around a theme involving a one thousand year span (or some other lengthy period). Robert J. Lifton observes that ‘historically the apocalyptic imagination has usually been nonviolent in nature’, but such beliefs also can generate indiscriminate violence. Robert Jay, Lifton, Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003) p. 21; Catherine Wessinger, ed., Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2000). An apocalyptic leader may take on the mantle of the messiah, and in some cases urge forms of apocalyptic aggression against the scapegoated enemy. In such cases, the apocalyptic activists often cast a ‘projection of negativity and rejected elements of self onto ideologically designated scapegoats’. Anthony and Robbins, ‘Religious Totalism’, p. 269. Conspiracism Conspiracist thinking exists around the world and, in some circumstances, can move easily from the margins to the mainstream, as has happened repeatedly in the United States as mentioned above. David Brion Davis, ed.,The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un–American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY: 1972); Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT: 1985); Robert Alan, Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University, 2001); Michael Barkun, ‘Conspiracy theories as stigmatized knowledge: The basis for a new age racism’? In Nation and race: The developing euro-American racist subculture, eds. J. Kaplan and T. Bjørgo (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1998) pp. 58-72; Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, Univ. of California; Berkeley: 2003); Michael Barkun, ‘Anti-Semitism from Outer Space: The Protocols in the UFO Subculture’, in The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, eds. Richard Landes and Steven Katz (New York: published for the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series [Boston] by New York Univ. Press, 2012) pp. 163-171. Goldberg traces the concept of conspiracy thinking back to the ‘Latin word conspirare—to breathe together’, which implies some type of dramatic scenario. Goldberg, Enemies Within, p. 1. Conspiracism evolves as a worldview from roots in dualistic forms of apocalypticism. Fenster argues that persons who embrace conspiracy theories are simply trying to understand how power is exercised in a society that they feel they have no control over. Often they have real grievances with the society—sometimes legitimate—sometimes seeking to defend unfair power and privilege. Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999). Nonetheless, Conspiracism can appear as a particular narrative form of scapegoating that frames demonized enemies as part of a vast insidious plot against the common good, while it valorizes the scapegoater as a hero for sounding the alarm. Berlet and Lyons, Right–Wing Populism, p. 9. Conspiracist thinking has appeared in mainstream popular discourse as well as in various subcultures in the United States and Europe. Chip Berlet ‘Protocols to the Left’. In contemporary examples we can see conspiracy theories built around fears of liberal subversion by President Obama; Chip Berlet, “Collectivists, Communists, Labor Bosses, and Treason: The Tea Parties as Right–Wing Populist Countersubversion Panic’, in Critical Sociology, July 2012; 38 (4) pp. 565-587; Berlet, ‘Reframing Populist Resentments in the Tea Party Movement.’. fears of government attempts to merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico into a North American Union; Berlet, ‘Fears of Fédéralisme in the United States’.and fears that Muslims living in the United States are plotting treachery and terrorism. Brigitte Nacos and Oscar Torres-Reyna, Fueling Our Fears: Stereotyping, Media Coverage, and Public Opinion of Muslim Americans (Lanham, MD: Rowman& Littlefield, 2007); Center for Race & Gender and Council on American-Islamic Relations, Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States; January 2009—December 2010 (Berkeley: University of California, Center for Race & Gender, and Washington, DC: Council on American-Islamic Relations, 2011). From Paranoid Style to Apocalyptic Frame Since the 1960’s, numerous scholars have explored the role of conspiracy theories in American life. Some of the best known early studies of conspiracy theories were penned by noted historian Richard Hofstadter whose essay on ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ established the leading analytical framework in the 1960’s for studying conspiracism in public settings. Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics.’ Hofstadter identified ‘the central preconception’ of the paranoid style as a belief in the ‘existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character’. According to Hofstadter, this style was common in certain figures in the US political right, and was accompanied with a ‘sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic’ which ‘goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation’. Ibid., p. 4. According to Hofstadter: …the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy. But there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others. Ibid., emphasis in the original. Damian Thompson, a journalist and scholar of religion, suggests Hofstadter was right to articulate the ‘startling affinities between the paranoid style and apocalyptic belief’, especially the demonization of opponents and ‘the sense of time running out’. Thompson, however, argues Hofstadter should have made a more direct connection by considering ‘the possibility that the paranoia he identified actually derived from apocalyptic belief; that the people who spread scare stories about Catholics, Masons, Illuminati, and Communists’ were, in fact, extrapolating from widespread Protestant End Times beliefs. Furthermore, the persistence of End Times belief ‘in the United States rather than Europe surely explains why the paranoid style seems so quintessentially American’, concludes Thompson, who has also written extensively on apocalyptic millennialism. Thompson, The End of Time, pp. 307–308. Scripted Violence and the Superhero Complex Individuals in an elite totalitarian cadre organization can robe themselves in the garb of the elite warrior defending hearth and home from attack. In contemporary society, people who are fearful and alienated can adopt the same ideas and actions. They are self-mobilized into the role, and embrace this superhero persona in which the duties and actions are clearly laid out in popular media from television, comic books, motion pictures, and the Internet. Popular fictional superheroes are essentially vigilantes stepping outside the law to ‘do what needs to be done’. Why are we surprised when amateur emulators attack or execute black people, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, Sikhs, abortion providers, or gay people? In the United States especially, this Superhero Complex is generated in part by the routine exposure to images of violence, primarily on television. That television viewing could be associated with violence was asserted with authority as early as 1972 in an advisory report issued by the US Government. United States Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior and United States Public Health Service, Office of the Surgeon General, Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Television Violence; Report to the Surgeon General. (Washington: US Govt. Printing Office, 1972). Critics of the connection between viewing of large volume of violent media images and negative outcomes in children often argue that no direct causal link has been demonstrated. This is true if misleading. Many studies have shown that in the large population of young people who routinely watch many hours of televised violence, the percentage of those viewers with negative outcomes of socialization is higher than the group of young people not exposed to long hours of violent images. W. James Potter, Ten Myths of Media Violence (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003). Gerbner argues that some people exposed to many hours of violent images in the mass media develop what he calls ‘Mean-World Syndrome’ in which they become unrealistically afraid of threats from people outside their home and direct friendship circle. George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, ‘The “mainstreaming” of America: Violence’, profile no. 11. Journal of Communication, Vol. 30, No. 3, 1980, pp. 10-29; George Gerbner, ‘Reclaiming our cultural mythology: Television’s global marketing strategy creates a damaging and alienated window on the world,’ The Ecology of Justice, Vol. 38, Spring 1994, pp. 40-44; George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, Nancy Signorielli, and James Shanahan, ‘Growing up with television: Cultivation processes’, in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, eds. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994). An extensive and excellent overview of Gerbner’s theories is Scott Stossel, ‘The Man Who Counts the Killing,’ The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 279, No. 5, May 1997, pp. 86-104, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97may/gerbner.htm (Accessed 5/10/2012). Many of these theoretical elements of the Superhero persona appear in vivid detail in the 1,500 page manifesto written by convicted Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. Anders Behring Breivik (writing as Andrew Berwick), ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence,’ self-published, July 2011. A copy of the Breivik manifesto in PDF format is archived at http://www.researchforprogress.us/dox/europe/norway/breivik/manifesto.pdf (Accessed 5/10/2012). A number of authors have written about what Mattia Gardell calls ‘Breivik’s Ideology’ of the ‘Romantic Male Warrior Ideal’. Gardell writes that Breivik saw himself as a ‘self-appointed knight’ who ‘gave himself the stage name [of the Norwegian King] Sigurd – the Crusader’. Mattia Gardell, ‘Roots of Breivik's Ideology: Where Does the Romantic Male Warrior Ideal Come From Today?’, OpenDemocracy.net, January 8, 2012, http://www.opendemocracy.net/mattias-gardell/roots-of-breiviks-ideology-where-does-romantic-male-warrior-ideal-come-from-today (accessed 27 January 2012). Gardell observes of Breivik: Animated by heroic tales of the crusaders, movie epics such as 300, Lord of the Rings, Passion Of The Christ, Serbian ultranationalist narratives of Radovan Karadzic’s bloody actions during the Bosnian civil war, and the exploits he performed in World of Warcraft, Breivik felt equipped for battle’. Ibid. Breivik’s manifesto correspondingly warns of a ‘deconstruction of European cultures, identities and the traditional structures’ which he identifies as the ‘nuclear family, traditional morality and patriarchal structures’. He rejects what he sees as the current ‘pacified/feminized’ culture of Europe. He sees himself as a heroic warrior standing erect against the onslaught of ‘Cultural Marxism,’ David Neiwert, ‘Norway terrorist Breivik was an ardent subscriber to theories of “Cultural Marxism”’,Crooks and Liars, July 23, 2011, http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/norway-terrorist-breivik-was-ardent- (Accessed 5/10/2012); based in part on the program ‘Political Correctness Is Cultural Marxism,’ March 25, 2009, Fox News, Andrew Breitbart appearance on the March 25 edition of the Sean Hannity program, ‘The Obama Lexicon’ segment. See also Media Matters, ‘Breitbart: "Cultural Marxism is political correctness, it's multiculturalism, and it's a war on Judeo-Christianty”’, Mediamatters.org, 18/12/2009, http://mediamatters.org/video/2009/12/18/breitbart-cultural-marxism-is-political-correct/158346 (Accessed 5/10/2012), where the Andrew Breitbart appearance on the Sean Hannity program is also preserved as online video . which is revealed in Breivik’s manifesto to be a fantastic conspiracy construction that justifies aggression against liberals and Muslims in defense of Christianity and western culture. Bill Berkowitz: ‘Nightmare in Norway and the Threat of Fundamentalist Christian, Blonde, Blue-eyed Terrorists in Our Midst’, Buzzflash, http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12881 (accessed 27/1/2012); Sarah Posner, ‘How Breivik’s “Cultural Analysis” is Drawn from the “Christian Worldview”’, Religion Dispatches, http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4934/ (accessed 27 January 2012; Henry A. Giroux, ‘Breivik's fundamentalist war on politics, and ours,’ 3 August 2011, http://www.truth-out.org/breiviks-fundamentalist-war-politics-and-ours/1312390288 (accessed 27 January 2012). The role of gender panic in shaping an identity of the Superhero warrior is analyzed by Gibson in his book Warrior Dreams. James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Viet Nam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). In a similar line of analysis, Julie Ingersoll found in Breivik’s Manifesto ‘evidence of his profoundly sexist view of the world, where women are naive and lacking in rationality, but are useful for sex and reproduction’. She called it ‘emasculation paranoia’. Ingersoll also highlighted Breivik’s claim that ‘feminism is to blame for what he asserts is the success of a supposed Muslim plan for world domination’. Breivik ‘wants to set the culture clock back ‘to the ‘50s—because we know it works’. This mythic nostalgia, according to Ingersoll, ‘is a central feature …of how Breivik’s analysis could well have been lifted from the talking points of the religious right’. Julie Ingersoll, ‘Breivik’s Emasculation Paranoia Fueled Vision for Patriarchal “Reforms”’, Religion Dispatches, 29 July 2011, http://religiondispatches.org/breiviks-emasculation-paranoia-fueled-vision-for-patriarchal-reforms/ (accessed 27 January 2012). See also Julie Ingersoll, ‘Breivik’s Christianity About Culture Not Piety,’ Religion Dispatches, 25 July 2011, http://religiondispatches.org/breiviks-christianity-about-culture-not-piety/ (accessed 27 January 2012); Julie Ingersoll, ‘What’s Actually in Breivik’s “Declaration of Independence”’, Religion Dispatches, 26 July 2011, http://religiondispatches.org/whats-actually-in-breiviks-declaration-of-independence/ (accessed 27 January 2012). Behind this is a long history in the United States of seeing the country being emasculated by liberal treachery. Jerry Lembke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2000); Jerry Lembke, CNN’s Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam’s Last Great Myth (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Jerry Lembke, Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2010). Conclusions If we assemble the ingredients and processes in this study, we arrive at the following list which traces the linkages from words to violence: Pre-existing prejudice or tensions in the society that can be tapped into. Intensity of the vilifying language, its distribution to a wide audience, and repetition of message. Dualistic division: The world is divided into a good ‘Us’ and a bad ‘Them’. Demagoguery. Respected status of speaker or writer, at least within the target audience. A constituency is molded. Vilification and Demonizing rhetoric: Our opponents are dangerous, subversive, probably evil, maybe even subhuman. Targeting scapegoats: ‘They’ are causing all our troubles—we are blameless. The employment of conspiracy theories about the ‘Other’. Apocalyptic aggression: Time is running out, and we must act immediately to stave off a cataclysmic event. Violence against the named scapegoats by self-invented Superheroes. Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem concluded that evil was banal, and that if there was one clear universal truth, it is that ordinary people have a moral obligation to not look away from individual or institutional acts of cruelty or oppression. We recognize the processes that lead from words to violence, they are well-studied, and the theories and proofs are readily available. Silence is consent. Denial is simply evil. References follow below Updates on Scripted Violence Here: http://www.researchforprogress.us/topic/concept/scripted-violence/ The Tools of Fear: http://www.tools-of-fear.net/get/index.php Addendum Some problems with using the term “Stochastic Terrorism” On 26 January 2011 a clearly well-meaning and literate blogger invented the term “Stochastic Terrorism” to describe how right-wing pundits were indirectly inciting followers to acts of violence against scapegoated targets in the United States. See http://stochasticterrorism.blogspot.com/ Unfortunately, the author was also clearly unfamiliar with social science research since the 1950s. This form of incitement to action through mass media by “demagogues” can and does generate acts of violence--including, but not limited to, acts of terrorism. This is a well-studied process of “incitement” based on “prejudice” and “stereotyping” that involves the “vilification” or “demonization” of a named “Other” who is portrayed as threatening the survival of the “real people” of the idealized nation. A compressive study of these processes is found in Gordon W. Allport’s 500-page 1954 masterwork, The Nature of Prejudice, (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley). A selected bibliography is provided below. Much of the scholarly research and writing in the late 1940s and 1950s focused on the demonization of Jews in Nazi Germany; but attention was also paid over time to the targeting and vilification of communists, anarchists, homosexuals, the infirm (including those with physical or mental issues); as well as others including critics who dared to speak out against Hitler’s regime. While at Political Research Associates in the 1990s I began researching these related processes involved in incitement to violence and publishing articles in scholarly and popular publications. In 2014 a study I authored was published as “Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence,” in Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson (eds), Doublespeak: Rhetoric of the Far-Right Since 1945, Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag. In the chapter I noted that the term “scripted violence” was the term I found the most useful in previous research and publications in the social sciences. I still think that is true. === References hip Berlet: Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill--16--Doublespeak: Rhetoric of the Far-Right Since 1945 Copyright 2014 by ibidem-Verlag – Stuttgardt, Germany - Reproduction or reposting prohibited