Dehumanizing the victim precedes atrocity through ‘pathic projection’ of the perpetrator’s own image

Evidence

Indignation over cruelty diminishes in proportion as the victims are less like normal readers, the more they are swarthy, ‘dirty’, dago-like. This throws as much light on the crimes as on the spectators. Perhaps the social schematization of perception in anti-Semites is such that they do not see Jews as human beings at all. The constantly encountered assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze – ‘after all, it’s only an animal’ – reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is ‘only an animal’, because they could never fully believe this even of animals. In repressive society the concept of man is itself a parody of divine likeness. The mechanism of ‘pathic projection’ determines that those in power perceive as human only their own reflected image, instead of reflecting back the human as precisely what is different. Murder is thus the repeated attempt, by yet greater madness, to distort the madness of such false perception into reason: what was not seen as human and yet is human, is made a thing, so that its stirrings can no longer refute the manic gaze. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 119

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment work on anti-Semitism and the administered society; also evokes the described gaze structure that later appears in Arendt’s accounts. — connects to: Anti-Semitism projects the subject’s own repressed impulses onto the victim — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 147; Projection converts taboo inner impulses into perceived external enemies — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 152; Victims’ aggression gets reframed as the victim’s own deviance (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Victims’ aggression gets reframed as the victim’s own deviance #expands (0.85)
• Dehumanizing victims lets perpetrators disengage self-sanctions for mistreatment #expands (0.82)
• Collective violence requires dehumanizing victims into abstract categories #corroborates (0.80)
• Dehumanizing targets as non-human makes racist violence self-excusing #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1873
• Perpetrators excuse harm by displacing blame and dehumanizing victims #expands (0.80)
• Dehumanizing victims as animals makes killing psychologically easier for perpetrators #expands (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2449
• Dehumanizing opponents disables moral self-sanctions, enabling cruelty #corroborates (0.80)
• Threat to in-group moral image triggers defensive reinterpretation of atrocity reports. #expands (0.75) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2136
• Trauma simultaneously marks dehumanization and demonstrates the humanity of its sufferers #complicates (0.72) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1222
• Shared identity with the perpetrator is the critical precondition for moral disengagement #complicates (0.72) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2112