When I was a freshman in college, we all had to take a class called "War and its Alternatives." I remember reading about how one of the consistantly used propaganda tools in warfare is to "otherize" the purported enemy. Cartoons and verbal descriptions picturing the enemy as animals are one example of how this is often accomplished (think World War II ads depicting the Nazis as apes, or even more recently cartoons that show President Bush as a mouse with large ears). Such propaganda decreases the ability of the public to emphathize and relate to the "enemy" and increases the public's keenness to see the enemy destroyed.
New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof recently wrote a column piece on "The Push to 'Otherize' Obama." It's an excellent piece to read in its entirety, but here's one quote from the article:
"What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian. The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him. Raising doubts about a candidate based on the religion of his grandfather is toxic and profoundly un-American, cracking the melting pot we emerged from. "
And as Eugene Cho points out in his blog, we can see "otherizing" efforts directed at the Republican party as well, notably with the attacks on Sarah Palin, although here race is not the key factor. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of her, but why drag into the fray the fact that she likes mooseburgers, if not to paint her as some crazy hick from the far off reaches of Alaska??
Your thoughts on "otherizing" and this presidential election or on the possibility of racism cloaked in religious prejudice/preference?
2 comments:
Mooseburgers, really? ;)
Yes, I find this sooooo annoying! Like the emphasis on Obama's middle name, or the way the media has painted Palin's Christianity. I'm with you, I'm not her biggest fan, but some of the criticisms are nonsense. I was reading a column in the LA Times about Wasilla, Palin's hometown, and the columnist was scathing about her home church and that it preaches that the end times may be near. Why pick on that, I wonder, when it has been my experience that many churches happen to take that view? Sigh, I just think that there's too much mudslinging in this campaign in general.
Mmmmmm, mooseburger...
I picked up on this when I was first in the military, how we have to demonize the "enemy" how we have to in order to do what we do to them. Its odd, there is a whole section of the military that their whole job is to do psy warfare, they design ways of changing people's opinion of a situation or of a person. When we first started our war in Afghanistan, we dropped TONS of these crazy little leaflets from our planes, I wish I had kept some of them, but they freaked me out. They had the face of Osama on them, but when you turned them a little his face was really like a skull and his eyes turned really creepy.
It becomes so much easier to kill/marginalize people when they are not human.
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