Historical victimhood narratives can be mobilized to incite new genocides

Evidence

Bette Denich (1994) relates the way that Serbian nationalists have drawn on images of the massacre of Serbs in World War II in inciting Serbs to conduct campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims and Croatians. Liisa Malkki (1995) argues that a crucial dimension of the construction of historical memory by refugees and by the Burundi and Rwandan states revolved around not just who inaugurated genocides, and at whom they were directed, but the concept of “genocide” itself. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 282

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘complaints about immodesty’ article pattern of historical narratives weaponized for present politics; also echoes contemporary debates about memory politics. — connects to: Elite party entrepreneurs manufacture a victimhood narrative to mobilize ethnic solidarity — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 166; The internet enables nationalist extremists to advocate genocide — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 202; Historical events re-presented as genocide can reshape victim and perpetrator identity threats — Nurit Shnabel and Johannes Ullrich, Identity Needs in Intergroup Relations:…, 60
• STORYSTEM: A narrative device where a historical massacre memory is deliberately repurposed to make a population see itself as about-to-be-victim — strong engine for a novel about how collective memory is engineered.