Monster-making is a political act that justifies exterminating unwanted communities.

Evidence

The creation of monsters is a political act, and monsters are political creatures. Each of the monsters examined in the following chapters emerged from a particular social milieu in which Jews, Africans, Arabs, Turks, Moors, women, homosexuals, and other subalterns were feared, desired, disliked, vilified, and, in some cases, exterminated—both imaginatively and in the real world. The creation of these monsters was a way to deal with unwanted communities, exemplifying Girard’s notion of religious scapegoating, in which “[t] he victims are either expelled or destroyed… [in a] process of exclusion [based on] religious beliefs and practices.” In the cases examined here, whether communicated with the printed word, on canvas, or in film, the monster is often expelled from the society he violates. By dehumanizing the Muslim as a dangerous monster, one can justify the extermination of this threat. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 53

Categorization

• XREF: Girard’s scapegoating mechanism echoes the Frankfort School’s ‘indifference to victimization enables genocide’ and the anti-Semitic scapegoat logic from later in that book.