The Rhetoric of Denunciation has three parts:
1. Victim Group
2. Enemy
3. Traitors
The narrative of victimhood (Us) runs parallel to the narrative of strength (Them), which functions to control dissent within the victim group. Don't sympathize or associate with the enemy - they are powerful and will use you to justify their oppression. If given the chance, they will subvert our cause. If you soft-peddle the harm they have done us, you are a traitor.
To guard against traitors and slackening of resolve, the enemy must be dehumanized, the better to neutralize pesky reservations and exact righteous retribution. The enemy must be seen as:
"...outside the human universe of moral obligation.... portrayed and seen as weeds, rats, vermin, dogs, cows, viruses, maggots, microbes, parasites, plague, pests, snakes, spiders, lice, locusts, cockroaches, cancerous cells, and malignant tumors." (Moshman, 2007)
China's Cultural Revolution employed the rhetoric of denunciation with its violent "class struggle" against "bourgeois elements". So did the Nazis. So do Islamic Jihadists. And so does the #MeToo movement, with its multiplying tales of suffering victims and powerful men, and its intolerance of even mild criticism.
#MeToo is about telling stories of victims, often highlighting their suffering and feelings of helplessness:
“I just felt really confused and lost and ashamed.” A woman who reported a man pressured her to pose for pornographic photos when she was 16.
“He created a very hostile work environment, where I felt sexualized, objectified, and unsafe.” A woman who reported a man sexually harassed her over a period of years, once exposing himself to her.
“I had to laugh back then so I wouldn’t cry.” Women who reported a man groped her.
In these stories, the perpetrators are usually men with some type of power over the victim, especially the power to advance or damage their careers, e.g., professor to student, boss to worker, valuable contact to job seeker in an overcrowded career field like modeling or acting. Or they may simply be famous. Either way, the perps as a group tend to be summed up as "powerful men", a once-neutral descriptor that has become a slur. In stories of sexual misconduct, the power of the perpetrator is often front and center. Take this opening sentence by Ronan Farrow in a recent New Yorker piece on Les Moonves:
"For more than twenty years, Leslie Moonves has been one of the most powerful media executives in America."
Not exactly setting us up to like the guy.
And then there's how even mildly expressed reservations are bounced on by #MeToo advocates as giving comfort to the enemy, such as what occurred when Matt Damon noted that there was a difference between patting someone on the butt and, say, raping them, even though both "those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?” A comment described as "horrid" by the HuffPost and which met with this response from Alyssa Milano:
“Sexual harassment, misconduct, assault and violence is a systemic disease…The tumor is being cut out right now with no anesthesia."
Since when does fixing a problem require the rhetoric of Nazis?
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Next: #MeToo, Moral Principles and Legal Rights
References:
Finlay, W.M.L. The propaganda of extreme hostility: denunciation and the regulation of the group British Journal of Social Psychology (2007), 46(2), 323--‐341. DOI: 10.1348/014466606X113615
Moshman, David, "Us and Them: Identity and Genocide" (2007). Educational Psychology Papers and Publications. 87. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/edpsychpapers/87