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1/ 6 Some twitter folks have asked if there is good, accessible literature on the relationship between dehumanizing rhetoric and mass violence and genocide. There is of course contentious academic debates on this, but the NGO Genocide Watch has a primer:genocidewatch.org/genocide/8stag…
2/6 one of the world's leading genocide scholars, Ben Kiernan, has written an excellent over view of genocide and mass violence in world history, and the introduction (pp. 1-43) describes the role that dehumanization of victims plays: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030010…
3/6 There are many debates among scholars of particular episodes of genocide - the Holocaust, Rwanda, etc. about the relative weight of dehumanizing rhetoric compared to social, economic, political, and other factors. Here is a good recent example: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
4/6 The Journal of Genocide Research, edited by @dirkmoses, himself a leading genocide scholar, has published essays weighting the role of dehumanizing rhetoric among other factors predicting mass violence and genocide: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
5/6 psychologists have weighed in as well, producing useful scholarship on the individual and collective psychology of mass murder. This is a decent 'pop psychology' take: psychologytoday.com/us/blog/philos…
6/END The point is *not* to argue that Trump saying immigrants and asylum seekers are animals, invaders, hordes, etc is a predictor of mass violence and genocide. His rhetoric, however, is a warning sign, an indicator of darker possibilities that we must resist with urgency.
