Demonization

The demonization or demonization is the rhetorical and ideological technique of disinformation or alteration of facts and descriptions (close to the inverse sacralization, or victimhood) that consists as as defined by the RAE in: "Attribute to someone or something extremely evil or diabolical qualities or intentions". For example, presenting political, ethnic, cultural or religious entities, etc., as fundamentally bad and harmful, as a way of positively vindicating oneself with respect to those entities (calling the other a demon "divinizes" and makes it as indisputable as God to whom it does) to justify, by omission, a better political, military or social treatment, or attribute evil to what is simply different, but not worse or more bad, than what is believed or supported.

Description

Feelings are generally used to manipulate those who are more convinced with them than with reasons, using the easiest levers of interest that in rhetoric are called pathos (feelings, passions) and ethos (admiration, models), rather than more minority and difficult of thought or logos, since most people make decisions with the first two criteria than with the last (according to the sociologist and mathematician Wilfredo Pareto, only a fifth or 20% use the logos criterion). In demonization, the public influence of an individual or sector with a high degree of visibility and ethos —such as the government or the mass media— is brought into play to stimulate a smear reaction that removes moral restrictions or legal to act to the detriment of the demonized group. The demonization of the other transforms the demonizer into someone as indisputable as God and dispels any logical or reasonable argument.

Since the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum to the present day, inquisitorial discursive instruments with the same identical structure as that book continue to appear; it is always about "emergency" and, as he is a "formidable threat" which is a "tremendo" risk nothing less than to the foundations of our entire culture and all of humanity, "extraordinary" (that is, cruel or even worse than what is denigrated, if it exists and is not just a name or label of arbitrary definition) to combat it, generally identified with an "foreign enemy& #34;, to protect and strengthen the impunity of those who intend to manipulate by becoming the "divinized" slayer of the ideological demon thus created. The appeal to pathos or basic negative emotions such as fear and dread in the supposed emergency (sometimes used by reactionary powers to prevent egalitarian social evolution, as explained in the book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein) is used by punitive power to eliminate any obstacle that comes its way, generating the foundations of a state of paranoia and collective hysteria, a delusional system or cloud of propaganda that allows power to be exercised without brakes or limits and eliminate any opponents. Any person who opposes that punitive power will be named and accused of being an accessory to evil. She will even be alienated, dehumanized, animalized or objectified, in search of a purity or cleanliness of any kind. If anyone doubts that the accused is a witch, it is because she is also possessed by Satan.

Changing its content according to the times, we can observe how that same discourse of uncontrolled punitive power appears in Germany under Nazism, in Spain under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in Argentina under the National Reorganization Process, in Russia of Stalinism, in the China of Maoism, in the war against terrorism in the United States, in the massacre of the war in Croatia, in the Cambodian genocide, in the genocide in Bosnia, in Porraimos, in the Rwandan genocide, in the Congolese genocide and in almost all the historical massacres in police states where legal rights and constitutional guarantees are lost.

In the most extreme cases, the members of the segregated group are presented as subhuman or inhumane, like Jews or Gypsies in Nazi Germany; however, more frequent is the simple presumption of guilt, which in practice leads to the restriction of the civil rights of the group, even without an administrative endorsement. The situation of the natives of the Middle East in the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when they were subjected to police controls based on their ethnic profile, is a typical example of this second case. Other circumstances of this type have been the different wars against the Indians throughout the Americas ("the best Indian is the dead Indian" and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny), the anti-communist rhetoric of the 50s and 60s, or the persistent segregation of North Africans in the countries of the Mediterranean basin.

The procedure is very old, and not very impartial historians have resorted to it frequently, always associated with power, regardless of their ideology. See, for example, what the royal chronicler Pero Mexía writes about the communal uprising against Carlos V:

Two and a half years were, and not yet full, that the Emperor had come to these kingdoms and governed them by his person and presence, and had them in much tranquility, peace and justice, when the demon, the sower of tares, began to alter the thoughts and wills of some peoples and nations; so that they rose up after storms, troubles and seditions...

Mexía, who shortly after hammers away "as I say, all this was the work of the devil" snatches, demonizing the Comuneros, the causes, more logical than infernal, that they had to rise up. The theme of patriotism in the mouth of “salvapatrias” lends itself especially to demonization, due to the rhetorical pathos and ethos that pervade certain themes, and that emanate from what Léon Poliakov studied as a collective expression of a paranoid need to magnify or magnify the father in order to deify the son.

Demonization, in these cases, is one of the ways in which racist or xenophobic convictions of a society are expressed and propagated, in which the most numerous homogeneous members of the mass more easily point to the few heterogeneous elements, undoubtedly more visible, as responsible for not being what they are, for hiding what they really are. The circumstances produced by globalization at the end of the 20th century, with relatively high rates of international migration together with a situation of relative economic stagnation and educational degradation and misery, have influenced an intensification of the different forms of demonization and stigmatization. Critical sectors have highlighted that, behind the nominally ethical or cultural arguments that make up the stereotyped argument of demonization, economic interests are probably hidden, such as those of colonial exploitation. Neorhetoric concludes that it is one more procedure to influence that part of the audience, always broader than the other, which is convinced more with feelings than with reasons.

Use of the term in religions

In the religious context, demonization is the reinterpretation of deities, commonly from polytheistic pantheons, as evil or demons from other religions, generally monotheistic and henotheistic.

Instead of outright denying the existence of another religion's pantheon, proselytizers claim that those gods are unworthy of worship because they are actually demons trying to deceive their followers. Demonization is closely associated with missionary Christianity that tries to convert pagans, although Judaism, Islam, and other religions have had similar practices and have been demonized as well, both by elements within their religions and by other faiths.