by wv

Under War – 06 Dehumanization

VOICE:

News reports frequently carry accounts of individuals or groups stripped of their defining traits and social recognition.1 Examples abound, in recent headlines as in older popular culture. These are repeated discourses, repeated accusations, at whose conclusion the targeted become legitimate objects of abuse, exclusion, or annihilation.

These are processes of dehumanisation.2

Students torment a classmate until she reaches breaking point;3 a parliamentarian dismisses a constituent who challenges him by mocking his appearance;4 a book on migrants is titled: Non-Persons;5 a public authority brands fellow citizens as traitors to the common interest, internal enemies;6 a popular saying goes: ‘women are not people.’7

This is how the dehumanisation trap works — for individuals as for entire communities or categories: the spouse, the colleague, migrants, women, AIDS patients, enemies, Italians, judges…

Across the historical record, the denial of another’s humanity typically operates through association with either animals or machines.8
In its unfolding, the device that dehumanises does not eliminate awareness of the other as a physical person.9 The other is there, in plain human evidence: two legs, two arms, a nose… But the discourse suspends their moral value.10 The aim is not to convince anyone that the other is really a rat, a tick, a cold robot. The aim is to convince people to treat them as such,11 without feeling guilty for doing so.12

It manifests in the systematic use of dehumanising labels in public discourse: in television studios, in newspaper headlines, in posts. In the treatment of the other as an absolute, irredeemable threat — one who cannot change, with whom any negotiation is futile.13 Tolerance for symbolic violence, blatant insults, over-excitement, screaming at the other — these draw audiences. Public exclusions and humiliations are not felt as unpleasant14.

In animal representation the other is bestial, savage, primitive, governed by instinct. It lies in the use of blunt categories such as ‘the pack’, the Maranza. It is Obama as a monkey.15

Such discourses call into question the presence of specifically human qualities: rationality, self-control, or civilisation. The outcome can be ferocious: animal dehumanisation is the most common form that precedes genocides16: Jews as rats (Nazi propaganda), Tutsi as cockroaches (Rwanda).17 Palestinians as beasts.18

It is a process — it does not work if it is a single episode or a handful of incidents. It requires constancy. It persists over time, pervades discourse, feeds prejudice, reiterates labels, clothes bodies.19 It solicits reactions of disgust and fear toward those who are labelled, and thereby makes reactions of self-protection, acts of defence, socially acceptable. And, of course, no one should feel guilty for having defended themselves. ‘Defence is always legitimate’ — and the circle closes.

This is not the only mechanism. An alternative to animal representation is mechanistic dehumanisation: where the former insists on bestiality, instinct and disgust, in the latter the other is cold, devoid of emotions, incapable of empathy, calculating, opportunistic.

What is underscored are the qualitative deficiencies in the accused’s human nature: warmth, emotional openness, depth. This is the typical form of modern bureaucratic violence: a language that blurs substance, concealing the tragic under the formulas of administrative language. It does not wound — it distances: the enemy? A “strategic threat“; the civilian, the innocent? “Collateral damage“; the victim? A statistical “number“, a bookkeeping matter.20

Reduction of the enemy to a figure, a statistical datum, a logistical problem in official documents, a bureaucratic matter to be resolved.21
The dehumanising attempt in this case aims at indifference, at distancing the other from our daily life. It distances empathy and emotion, and it is this emotional detachment that then makes violence possible.22

Unlike animal dehumanisation, in which the incitement to hatred is explicit,23 mechanistic dehumanisation is less conspicuous, harder to recognise in time and harder to refute. The everyday language of explicit hatred is replaced by the language of laws and bureaucratic practice.24

It is the use of law, or of any regulation, to redefine categories of persons as existential threats to be neutralised. This is mechanistic dehumanisation by legal means.25 Those who dissent are excluded from the community; they become a hostile category, not citizens in disagreement. The boundary between criticism and the dehumanisation of the other becomes crossable.26

Both mechanisms work. They do not exclude each other. They operate through different accusations. They can coexist and reinforce one another. Their tools — imaginaries, prejudices, stereotypes — differ. What cannot be stigmatised through one is stigmatised through the other.
The objective is not exclusion; on the contrary, the longer the beasts and the opportunists remain, the more we thrive. Constructing an other-than-us as unworthy confirms, a contrario, the rightness of our own existence. In the absence of other arguments, pointing to this or that person as other-than-us presents us as upright, healthy, rooted in tradition — in short, trustworthy, and so on.27

What matters is that both — the animal stigma and the mechanical one — allow the transition from the perception of violence as a crime to violence as a possible, ordinary act, in its most extreme forms.28
This is not a brief process. Early signals — assertive language, slogans, political propaganda, the production of stereotypes — may precede by years the intended and inevitable outcome: manifest violence.29
Equal in outcome, yet operating very differently, the two devices require different preventive strategies to be defeated. Propaganda that reduces the other to an animal must be countered differently from propaganda that mechanises them.30 Even if, as common experience shows, the two forms can coexist within the same campaign inciting violence.31

Both have weaknesses: in both cases, dehumanisation is a procedure, a process — not a single event. It requires time. It requires repetition.32 It works only if it becomes habit, if it becomes — so to speak — a familiar vocabulary. It works if it has the opportunity for cultural sedimentation.33

Certainly, the practice of dehumanisation is not the sole or exclusive cause capable of justifying violent action. As historians, sociologists, and social psychologists have demonstrated, violence that annihilates the other can arrive by different routes: uncritical obedience, gratuitous violence, moral collapse…34

The fact remains. When physical violence erupts, the preceding rhetorics of dehumanisation have already completed their work.

And someone has profited handsomely from it.

Notes

> This is part of a series titled ‘Under the War’, category ‘War’. Posts published to date: 00 — Introduction; 02 Community and Crime <-

English translation by Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), revised by wv. The Italian version is the reference text.

  1. The correct term, at least in the sociological sense intended here, in place of ‘defining traits and social recognition’, is status. ↩︎
  2. Dehumanise, dehumanization. In common usage the two terms are interchangeable. Both describe an action aimed at stripping humanity from someone who is, at least until that moment, human — as will become clear.
    Between the two, I prefer dehumanise.
    In everyday language, ‘inhuman’ describes a person who commits acts — often physical — that we disapprove of, especially when committed by an adult: killing an animal for entertainment, inflicting unjustified suffering on someone, and so on.
    Dehumanise, in my view, has a more precise, or if you prefer more limited, meaning. It points to actions that are typically non-physical — actions linked to words, to language use, to symbols. In this sense it is more accurate in circumscribing the relational phenomena with which this post, 06-Dehumanisation, is concerned.
    A comparable choice is made by one of the acknowledged authorities on the subject: Volpato, Chiara. (2011). Deumanizzazione. Come si legittima la violenza (Dehumanisation: How Violence is Legitimised). Roma-Bari: Laterza; note 1, p. 23. ↩︎
  3. Ferrante, Allegra. (08.02.2026). “Amelia, mamma di una liceale bullizzata a Milano.” Corriere della Sera / Milano.
    Anyone who has studied bullying, hazing, and other forms of sustained persecution will recognise the territory immediately.
    It is striking that people who have personally experienced school bullying — as much as those who have not — tend to minimise the phenomenon, reducing it to ‘kids being kids’, ‘things that happen’, ‘we all went through it’, and similarly obtuse dismissals. Obtuse, because the damage bullying causes can be devastating, as I hope this post makes clear. And yet, as one often discovers, even pedagogical actors — teachers, school administrators — downplay or deliberately conceal what is happening.
    It should be borne in mind that bullying is — in every respect — one of the possible forms of dehumanisation processes. As has been noted, “Generally when it comes to bullying, it may not be the behaviour itself that makes the victim suffer – it is the frequency of the act and other situational factors relating to power differences or inescapable interactions that may cause the anxiety, misery and suffering.” Beattie, G., (2020), “Can you unintentionally bully someone? Here’s the science” in The Conversation.
    There exist low-cost, widely accessible methods for mitigating or eliminating bullying in schools: one consists in demonstrating to the parties in conflict (say, to the parents) that a shared interest can be found — for instance, keeping the matter within the school’s educational framework rather than treating it as a criminal or quasi-criminal problem. Another, much undervalued, is working with bystanders — the audience to which the torment of the victim is always addressed. To begin thinking that bystanders who remain silent, who do not take the victim’s side, are complicit. They must take responsibility, whether in silence they dare not — or do not want — to intervene, or whether they are in fact gleeful, happy to film a scene with their phone for the clicks: complicit while closing in and not stepping to the victim’s side, not declaring her worthy of attention.
    On these points — complicity, the decision that the victim is the ‘worthy’ party in the aggressor/victim dyad — prevention would not be difficult.
    One multi-year initiative in this direction was carried out by the Municipality of Milan in the previous decade: the Progetto Legalità (Legality Project), Education Department (Banfi, S.); Polizia Locale (Cerrone, V., Locascio, N.); Vulnerable Victims’ Ombudsman of the Municipality of Milan (Forno, P.); Public Prosecutor’s Office, Cybercrime Unit (Cajani, F.); Milan Bar Association (Turco, M.); third-sector organisations; and above all, together with many lower secondary schools in the city — among many others: Gallotti, C.F., Petruzzelli, M. See also notes 11 and 12 below. ↩︎
  4. Tortorelli, Guido. (08.02.2026). “«Mi sembri davvero molto brutto»: il deputato Marattin offende un insegnante di Matera.” Corriere del Mezzogiorno. ↩︎
  5. Dal Lago, Alessandro. (2004). Non persone. L’Esclusione Dei Migranti In Una Società Globale (Non-Persons: The Exclusion of Migrants in a Global Society). Milano: Feltrinelli.
    The author identifies a mechanistic process of dehumanisation directed at migrants. On mechanistic dehumanisation, see below in this post. ↩︎
  6. Noury, Riccardo. (09.02.2026). “Il ministero della Giustizia della Russia vuole mettere fuorilegge due gruppi LGBTQIA+.” Corriere della Sera; the Italian Prime Minister, in Agenzia ANSA. (07.02.2026). “Meloni: ‘Chi manifesta contro le Olimpiadi è nemico dell’Italia’.” On the theme of ‘the enemy’, see also the forthcoming post ’20 The Internal Enemy’.
    From Fascism through the post-war period, Italian political language systematically constructed categories of ‘non-citizens’ or ‘non-Italians’ that anticipated policies of exclusion. Cf. Ventrone, Angelo. (2005). Il nemico interno (The Internal Enemy). Roma: Donzelli. ↩︎
  7. Milanese saying: ‘I donn hin minga gent’ (‘Women are not people’). ↩︎
  8. The procedures through which dehumanisation operates have been the subject of study in social psychology and sociology.
    Suggestive precursors — with the perspective inverted onto the subject-victim of dehumanisation — can already be found in the symbolic interactionists. Cf. Goffman, E., (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. “When an individual comes into contact with other people, he projects, consciously and unconsciously, a definition of the situation, in which his own self-conception plays an important role. When an incident occurs that is expressively incompatible with this projected impression, significant consequences arise simultaneously at three levels of social reality (…) First, social interaction… may come to an abrupt halt. [Participants] sense a false note in the situation and begin to feel uneasy, confused and, literally, beside themselves. Second, … The audience tends to accept the self projected by a single actor during any given performance as a responsible representative of his group of colleagues, his team and his social institution. … these larger social units are implicated every time the individual performs his routine; with each new performance the legitimacy of these units is put to the test. Finally, we can often observe that the individual deeply commits his ego to identifying with a specific part, institution and group, and to conceiving of himself as someone who does not disrupt the interaction or renounce the social units that depend on it. When a disruption occurs, therefore, we can see how the self-conception around which his personality is built becomes discredited.” pp. 241–2.
    The most systematic studies belong to social psychology: Haslam, Nick. (2006). “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3): 252–264; and Volpato, Chiara. (2011). Deumanizzazione. op. cit. ↩︎
  9. Dispositivo [device/apparatus] denotes an ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions that produce the intended social effect — here, the suspension of the other’s moral value. The term is used in this sense especially following the work of Foucault, M. ↩︎
  10. In this sense I read Vattimo, Gianni. (2012). Della realtà (On Reality). Milano: Garzanti, p. 196; and Jonas, Hans. (2004). Il concetto di Dio dopo Auschwitz (The Concept of God after Auschwitz). Milano: Il Melangolo.
    For both, see also my review of Mazzinghi, (2025), “Il libro di Giobbe e il problema del Male” in Marchionni, S., (ed.), Mazzinghi, L., Di Maio A., (2025) Male, with an ‘Introduction’ by Piccolo, G.. EDB, Bologna, available here on this blog. ↩︎
  11. “Moussa Balde was subjected to a ‘process of animalisation’, the judge rules on the suicide at the Cpr detention centre in Turin”, La Stampa, 22/05/26. https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2026/05/22/news/cpr_torino_suicidio_moussa_balde_motivazioni_condanna_direttrice-15632085/ ↩︎
  12. Allport, Gordon W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge MA: Addison-Wesley; who already observed how “we may say that anger is an emotion, whereas hatred must be classified as a sentiment — an enduring organization of aggressive impulses toward a person or toward a class of persons. Since it is composed of habitual bitter feeling and accusatory thought, it constitutes a stubborn structure in the mental-emotional life of the individual. By its very nature hatred is extropunitive, which means that the hater is sure that the fault lies in the object of his hate. So long as he believes this he will not feel guilty for his uncharitable state of mind. There is a good reason why out-groups are often chosen as the object of hate and aggression rather than individuals. One human being is, after all, pretty much like another — like one-self. One can scarcely help but sympathize with the victim.” p. 365. (Emphasis added.) ↩︎
  13. One thinks immediately of keyboard haters, but the point is not the ‘Napalm 51’ figure — the satirical character created by comedian Crozza — the point is the systematic nature of the action against a person or group. The behaviour of public figures may be judged unpleasant, beyond the pale, folkloristic, or even entertaining; it is quite another thing to systematically target the magistracy as a class, or migrants.
    That said, keyboard haters should not be underestimated when speaking of dehumanisation processes. It is established that in the most significant cases these are neither amateurs nor lone actors, but organised structures pursuing manipulative interests at high levels — structures capable of creating bots that enormously amplify the spread of a message, up to and including AI systems capable of processing vast quantities of information and producing propaganda tools: from the influencing of public opinion to national elections, from market manipulation to the relativisation of every truth.
    “In the autumn of 2017, suddenly in Turkey there was great excitement around a new scientific theory advanced by a member of the AKP’s youth organisation. His article, published on the party’s website, maintained that the earth is in fact flat, and that the spherical-earth theory is a conspiracy imposed on the real people by the Vatican, Zionists, Freemasonry and various other forces of evil. The following day, pro-government newspapers published dozens of articles explaining the philosophical bases of the theory, all reaching the same conclusion: that science is nothing but one narrative among many, simply another truth. The government’s trolls had only to spread this absurd idea on social media for it to enter the general conversation. Within hours, thousands of trolls and excited fools were ranting, in revolutionary tones, against oppressive scientists and the cruel predominance of science.” Temelkuran, Ece. (2019). How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. London: 4th Estate, p. 58.
    What matters is the potential — in the construction of a dehumanising narrative — that the internet affords and that is amply exploited through structures working to create ‘moral panic’ functional to generating a desired social reaction.
    We use the term moral panic to denote a collective reaction entirely disproportionate to a group or behaviour. Constructed and amplified by the media, society comes to believe that the group represents a grave threat to social order, even when the facts do not justify it. The reference is to Cohen, S., (2011), Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London–New York: Routledge, p. 11. ↩︎
  14. The treatment inflicted on the Ukrainian Prime Minister at the White House in 2025 is paradigmatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSYIR8IfudE; as are many episodes of quarrelling in talk shows or institutional settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3qKP_J2ZMM; https://youtu.be/_VnspqWfC7o — cited not as isolated incidents, but as moments of constant attitudes over time directed at individuals or categories. ↩︎
  15. Barack Obama and Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, former President of the United States and his wife, were depicted in this way in a recent piece of political propaganda. ↩︎
  16. Haslam, Nick. (2006). “Dehumanization…” op. cit. “Dehumanization is frequently examined in connection with genocidal conflicts (Chalk & Jonassohn, 1990; Kelman, 1976). A primary focus is the ways in which Jews in the Holocaust, Bosnians in the Balkan wars, and Tutsis in Rwanda were dehumanized both during the violence by its perpetrators and beforehand through ideologies that likened the victims to vermin. Similar animal metaphors are common in images of immigrants (O’Brien, 2003a), who are seen as polluting threats to the social order.” p. 253. ↩︎
  17. https://ilmanifesto.it/ruanda-note-da-un-genocidio; https://www.facebook.com/ARTEita/videos/guarda-ora-una-di-millecolline/459652899728797/ ↩︎
  18. Gallant, Katz, are among the Israeli politicians who have used such terms — not a recent usage for the Israeli far right. Cf. Terry, T., in Haaretz. “If Gazans Are ‘Human Animals,’ What Does That Make Us Israelis?”; see also Caracciolo, Lucio. (28.07.25), “Salvare i salvabili”, in Limes. ↩︎
  19. Clothing, in the form of uniform, badge, or sign, is paradigmatic. The striped pyjama, the purple or yellow star… The uniform. The garment that announces belonging and thereby excludes those who do not dress accordingly — whether the anorak, the Barbour jacket, the shoe, the suit in which one takes the oath before the President of the Republic, or the clothes of Queen Elizabeth II.
    If there is a continuity in the rhetoric that socially constructs the other, fashion participates in the construction of the enemy no less directly, no less effectively, than other narratives.
    The uniform — military, carceral, compulsory work dress — is the most obvious device of de-individuation. Not to mention the absolute mechanism of dehumanisation, the Asylum, the Total Institution. Asylums, barracks, factories, prisons. See Basaglia, F., Ongaro-Basaglia, F., (1971), La maggioranza deviante. L’ideologia del controllo sociale totale. Torino: Einaudi; Foucault, M., (1973), Sorvegliare e punire. Nascita della prigione (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison). Torino: Einaudi, passim.
    It is no coincidence that the Italian prison reform act (L. 354/1975) intervened on this question — Art. 1, §6: “I detenuti e gli internati sono chiamati o indicati con il loro nome” (Detainees and internees shall be addressed and referred to by their name).
    For Roland Barthes, (1967), Système de la mode (The Fashion System). Paris: Seuil — (“… comme la suppression des classes sociales se révèle illusoire (puisque ces classes continuent d’exister), ainsi les hommes appartenant aux classes supérieures sont contraints, pour se distinguer de la masse, de varier les détails de leurs vêtements… Ils élaborent cette nouvelle notion… qu’on appelle — avec un terme heureusement ambigu — la distinction”) (just as the suppression of social classes proves illusory, so men belonging to the upper classes are forced to vary the details of their clothes in order to distinguish themselves; they elaborate the notion of distinction) — the fashion system is never neutral; it always produces an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. See also Bourdieu, P., (1979), La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste). Paris: Minuit.
    Far from being a symbol of conformity alone, insurgent fashions (Punk culture, etc.) carry counter-dehumanising messages — affirmations of alterity in opposition to conformist and dehumanising practices: the phenomenon of wearable activism, from Westwood, V., to Eilish, B., from denim jeans to the anorak. As we shall see in the forthcoming post ’28 – Preparing for Dehumanisation.’ ↩︎
  20. Rather than recall one of the innumerable possible quotations, think of Banksy’s anti-dehumanisation works: Jobs, the son of migrants; Dismaland; and others — in which the core of the opposition to indifferentiation, a topos of dehumanising practices, is the restoration of faces, individuals, stories, biographies — in short: empathy. The same is done by Libera every 21 March on the “Day of Memory and Commitment,” when the names of all victims of the Mafia are read aloud. Equally anti-dehumanising are the practices of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project; and the words in “The Blacker The Berry” by Lamar, K. (2015), album Pimp a Butterfly. ↩︎
  21. “Gli organismi di competenza accerteranno chi versa in condizioni di vulnerabilità e di questi ci faremo carico a prescindere dalle regole internazionali che noi riteniamo essere chiare. Dopo di che la nave dovrebbe lasciare le acque nazionali, con tutto il resto del carico che ne dovesse residuare” (“The competent bodies will establish who is in a condition of vulnerability and we will take care of those individuals regardless of the international rules, which we consider to be clear. After that, the vessel should leave national waters, with whatever remains of its cargo”) — Italy’s Interior Minister, speaking of migrants awaiting disembarkation, as reported on 07.11.2022 by Il Fatto Quotidiano (emphasis in the original text). ↩︎
  22. Haslam, Nick. (2006). “Dehumanization:” op. cit. pp. 257 ff.; Allport, Gordon W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. op. cit. — on the construction of the enemy, conjectures a direct correlation with narcissistic traits: “…negative prejudice is a reflex of one’s own system of values. We prize our own mode of existence and correspondingly underprize (or actively attack) what seems to us to threaten it… if we are wholly right then the enemy must be wholly wrong. Since he is wholly wrong, we should not hesitate to exterminate him. But even in this wartime example it is clear that our basic love-prejudice is primary and that the hate-prejudice is a derivative phenomenon.” p. 50.
    From a sociological standpoint, the label of ‘non-persons’ identified by Dal Lago (2004), op. cit., vividly illustrates Haslam’s mechanistic mechanism applied to a contemporary category. People crossing the Mediterranean are not represented as beasts — they are represented as an anonymous flow, as an emergency, as an overwhelming number. ↩︎
  23. On hatred as a contingent social construction, see my critique of Murgia, Michela. (2026). Lezioni sull’odio (Lessons on Hatred). Torino: Einaudi, available here on this blog. ↩︎
  24. Arendt, Hannah. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press. (“Eine große Rolle bei der erschreckenden Präzision, mit der die 'Endlösung' durchgeführt wurde, spielte die sonderbare, in Deutschland tatsächlich weit verbreitete Vorstellung, daß Gesetzestreue nicht einfach Gehorsamkeit bedeute, sondern daß man so handle, als ob man selbst der Gesetzgeber wäre, dem man gehorcht… Welche Rolle Kant bei der Ausbildung der Mentalität des 'gewöhnlichen Mannes' in Deutschland gespielt haben mag, eines steht außer Zweifel: Eichmann befolgte tatsächlich Kants Vorschriften: Ein Gesetz ist ein Gesetz, Ausnahmen gibt es nicht.”) (A good part of the fearful precision with which the Final Solution was carried out can indeed be traced to the strange idea, widespread in Germany, that being law-abiding means acting as if one were the legislator who drafted the law one obeys… whatever role Kant may have played, there is no doubt that Eichmann genuinely followed Kantian precepts: a law is a law and there can be no exceptions.) ↩︎
  25. A fine article by U_Net (15.02.2026), “Crack-rap-nemici-pubblici” in Alias, cultural supplement of Il Manifesto, recalls how the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (Reagan, 1986) translated into law a punitive machine that rap had already been documenting for years.
    This is the historically dramatic aspect of legal norms based on the ‘author-type’ (Tätertyp). A dogma dear to every dictatorship, the author-type connects the offence to the typology of the person, or to their belonging to categories defined as harmful by public authority. Not the criminal act, but adherence to a human typology is the basis of liability. For a comparison, see the principle of strict legality in the Italian legal order (Art. 25 Const.; Art. 1 Penal Code) with criminal prosecution based on ethnic or religious belonging, or on adherence to ideologies or moral convictions.
    From a criminological standpoint, a criminal law based on the author-type is explained by its repressive social-control function: where ‘classical’ criminal law cannot reach, the author-type steps in. According to many, an echo in the Italian legal order is found in security measures and in the automatic aggravating factors in criminal proceedings (Arts. 102–109 CPP).
    It is my view that the rejection of certain provisions of the ‘Security Decree’, D.L. 48/2025, converted into L. n. 80/2025, was (also) a challenge to this dogmatic tendency. Cf. Magri, Ugo. (15.1.2026), “Ddl sicurezza, le cinque criticità segnalate da Mattarella”, La Stampa; Stasi, L., (27.06.2025), “La Cassazione boccia il decreto sicurezza”, L’Espresso. ↩︎
  26. Cf. Ventrone (2005), Il nemico… op. cit.; Tajfel, Henri. (1982). Social Identity and Intergroup Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Jowett, Garth S.; O’Donnell, Victoria. (2015). Propaganda and Persuasion. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Even without reference to existential conflicts such as war, the mechanism of crossing the line between criticism and destruction is symbolically evident in the US electoral campaign: “… these books are highly propagandistic, some bordering on outright lies or, at the least, containing unsupportable accusations aimed at discrediting the opposition… These books, usually argued in a highly one-sided manner, have a significant impact on those readers who already subscribe to the notion that ‘something is wrong with our society.'” p. 139. ↩︎
  27. “I primi slogan [del Nazionalsocialismo]… vennero progettati per distrarre la classe media e la classe operaia dai problemi interni. La <<comunità nazionale>> venne eletta a panacea per la cura dei mali economici e politici… Le dottrine militaristiche e razziste furono gli strumenti usati per circuire e conquistare la popolazione (…) la versione sociale e biologica dell’antisemitismo divenne una delle prime caratteristiche fanatiche del programma hitleriano. Questo problema si prestava al concetto del nemico assoluto che qualunque movimento totalitario deve avere per poter dirigere e deviare l’aggressività che ha mobilitato.” Bobbio, Norberto; Matteucci, Nicola; Pasquino, Gianfranco. (1983). Dizionario di Politica. Torino: UTET. p. 699. ↩︎
  28. “To effectively address support for intergroup violence, we must understand the psychology promoting it… Dehumanization is widely considered one such promoter… Here, we demonstrated that dehumanization is both distinct from dislike and robustly linked to support for violence through a meta-analysis of the existing literature… substantial proportions of respondents literally believed the target group was less than human, and these literal dehumanizers were especially supportive of violence against the target group… these results illustrate dehumanization’s uniquely powerful impact on support for intergroup violence… our cross-cultural and experimental studies found it to strongly predict support for war crimes and genocide — often more strongly than dislike.” Landry, Alexander P., Ghezae, Isaias, Abou-Ismail, Ramzi, et al. (2025). “The Uniquely Powerful Impact of Explicit, Blatant Dehumanization on Support for Intergroup Violence.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. ↩︎
  29. Cf. Volpato, Chiara. (2013). “Negare l’altro. La deumanizzazione e le sue forme” (Denying the Other: Dehumanisation and Its Forms). ↩︎
  30. As we shall see in more detail in forthcoming posts: if the practice is to reduce the other to a beast, prevention lies in demonstrating affinity, similarity, identity in posture, in affective thought, in moral options, in the capacity to create beauty. This is what, for example, the Palestinian online magazine Sabra does — as described by Halutz, Avshalom, (17.03.26), “This Magazine Is Unapologetically Palestinian – and Entirely in Hebrew”, Haaretz: “Featuring writing from across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, the online magazine Sabra hopes to fight the widespread dehumanization of Palestinians in Hebrew.” ↩︎
  31. Haslam, Nick. (2006). “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review.”… op. cit. “One important account of dehumanization is found in Bar-Tal’s (2000) analysis of ‘delegitimizing beliefs.’ In these beliefs ‘extremely negative characteristics are attributed to another group, with the purpose of excluding it from acceptable human groups and denying it humanity’ (pp. 121–122)… Dehumanization is one of five belief categories, involving ‘labelling a group as inhuman, either by reference to subhuman categories… or by referring to negatively valued superhuman creatures such as demons, monsters, and satans’ (Bar-Tal, p. 122). Delegitimizing beliefs are theorized as products of interethnic conflict that serve several functions: explaining the conflict, justifying the ingroup’s aggression, and providing it with a sense of superiority.” pp. 254–5.
    From this angle, phenomena such as Q-Anon, MAGA, or Thiel’s Antichrist take on a very different meaning — quite serious, with grounds for suspicion of intelligence operations. ↩︎
  32. Jowett, Garth S.; O’Donnell, Victoria. (2015). Propaganda… op. cit. “…the Pentagon had secretly set about creating a propaganda ‘Trojan horse’ to influence the public debate about the conflict in Iraq… launched in early 2002… to recruit ‘key influentials’ to help sell a wary public on a possible invasion of Iraq. … It was this combination of originator (Rumsfeld and Clark), disseminator (the Pundits), and channel (the television networks) that permitted this strategy to be implemented between 2002 and 2008…” pp. 353–4. ↩︎
  33. Further forthcoming posts — ’28 – Preparing without Dehumanising Oneself’; ’27 – Memory as Defence’; ’26 – Strategies of Adaptation, Protection, etc.’ — are devoted to practices that can counter dehumanisation strategies. ↩︎
  34. For example, and respectively: Browning, Christopher R. (1992 [2nd ed. 2022]). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Torino: Einaudi; Collins, Randall. (2008). Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Zimbardo, Philip G. (2008). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Milano: Raffaello Cortina editore.
    Uncritical obedience, gratuitous violence, moral collapse, and other causes will be presented in forthcoming posts with similar titles. ↩︎

NB: Unless otherwise specified, links were verified on 07.03.26

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– Last Updated on 26.10.26 by wv

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