Genocide emerges through a progressive ladder of escalating acts, not a sudden leap

Evidence

Staub goes on to make another point, to which I have alluded earlier in this discussion. The scapegoating group is not capable of leaping immediately to genocide, to killing the members of the scapegoated group just because of their group membership. There is the familiar progression of acts. Open criticism of the scapegoated groups produces derogation, which licenses brutality; brutality is justified, and leads to further derogation and the discovery that the scapegoated group is somehow not included in humanity. Finally, killings, and then systematic killings. Genocide. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3979

Categorization

• XREF: This stair-step dehumanization sequence strongly parallels the reader’s past work on moral panics and on how category-shifts (exclusion from humanity) license violence. — connects to: The genocide grew from decades of escalating hate-speech argumentation, not sudden eruption. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 51; The ten genocide stages are non-linear and earlier stages persist throughout — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 0; Genocide escalates from smaller harms that progressively change the perpetrators — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 126
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘progression of acts’ as a testable intervention map — each rung is a point where escalation could in principle be interrupted.