Enemies are rhetorically recast as animals or demons before being killed.

Evidence

In the holy terror of the Crusades, Pope Urban II portrayed Muslims as “despicable, degenerate, and enslaved by demons.” In his contemporary jihad, Osama bin Laden portrayed the American “decadent infidels” as “the most ravenous of animals.” The Holocaust, genocides, mass killings, and military atrocities are fueled by institutionally orchestrated campaigns of dehumanization. Once entire classes of people are rendered less than human, their stigmatization, persecution, and exclusion from the most basic human rights becomes personally and socially acceptable. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 613

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the dehumanizing rhetoric in the reader’s past reading on propaganda and on war justifications — parallels with the enemification in the Spanish Armada material. — connects to: Hostile writers assumed what harms an enemy’s cause is automatically true.; Treating enemies as vermin to be exterminated actually amplifies the terror it targets — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1454; Enemies are dehumanized into vermin before military force can be unleashed — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1451 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: This dyad of Crusades-era Muslim vilification and bin Laden’s counter-vilification parallels the cross-cultural moral-panic framing in the immodesty article.