The Rhetoric of Dehumanization
On the evening of April 19, 2013, crowds in Boston cheered, waved American flags, and shouted, “USA! USA! We got him!” as Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken into custody. Mayor Thomas M. Menino was recorded saying that he hoped the court system “throws the book at [Tsarnaev]” by giving him the harshest sentence possible. Both scenes seemed out of place given the grimness of the bombing itself and of Tsarnaev’s violent arrest, which involved a manhunt and multiple shootouts.
People across the country voiced their opinions of what they felt were suitable punishments for the suspect, often extremely graphically. I was a junior in high school in a suburb of Boston at the time of the bombing, and my classmates joined in the national display of hatred towards Tsarnaev. My social media feeds filled with such statements as, “I hope he rots in jail,” “He deserves to be murdered,” and even the disturbingly common sentiment of wanting to personally torture Tsarnaev. One of my classmates wrote on Facebook that Tsarnaev should be hung from a lamppost in Boston, and the people of Boston allowed to do whatever they wanted to him.
[pullquote]Not only was I faced with the “monsters” who were the bombers themselves, but I also saw people I knew showing a new, and to me monstrous, side of their characters.[/pullquote]
That day in 2013, I was appalled by these sentiments that my peers openly shared. The bombing itself deeply shocked and scared me – my dad ran the marathon that day, and my mom and brother were at the finish line when the bombs went off – but the reactions of people close to me felt in some ways more jarring. Not only was I faced with the monsters who were the bombers themselves, but I also saw people I knew showing a new, and to me monstrous, side of their characters.
[pullquote]The bombing itself deeply shocked and scared me – my dad ran the marathon that day, and my mom and brother were at the finish line when the bombs went off – but the reactions of people close to me felt in some ways more jarring.[/pullquote]
In 2013, the outright dehumanization of a person by those close to me, no matter how terrible the crimes that person had committed, seemed new, foreign and horrifying to me. But the rise of Trump has made that kind of dehumanization – and the support for extralegal action that it engenders – part of mainstream America.
[pullquote]In 2013, the outright dehumanization of a person by those close to me, no matter how terrible the crimes that person had committed, seemed new, foreign and horrifying to me. But the rise of Trump and Trumpism has made that kind of dehumanization, and the support for extralegal action that it engenders, part of mainstream America.[/pullquote]
At an event discussing the Trump administration’s efforts to combat the MS-13 gang, Trump said of police treatment of suspected criminals, “Please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over it. Like, don’t hit their head, and they’ve just killed somebody. I said, you can take the hand away, O.K.?” He was effectively arguing for extralegal violence against crime suspects – erasing their legal and human rights in the service not of public safety, but of violent and as yet legally unfounded retribution. This is just one example among many other similar statements made by Trump directly or obliquely endorsing extralegal violence against perceived criminals and opponents.
As many have noted throughout Trump’s rise, his presence on the national stage makes this kind of rhetoric, which strips human and legal rights away from its targets, feel more acceptable to many Americans. Even those who do not agree with this rhetoric are no longer surprised by it when it comes from those around them, as I was following the marathon bombing.
That lack of surprise is dangerous. Resignation to violent rhetoric can lead to indifference to it, which eventually could lead to a failure to prevent the violence described in the rhetoric from actually occurring. Our president ‘rules by tweet,’ as many political commentators have noted. The immediacy of social media allows rhetoric to quickly spread, and quickly mutate into action. If tweets and Facebook statuses were to dictate the law after the marathon bombing, Tsarnaev might have been hung from a lamppost for the people of Boston to exact
their revenge as they wished.
Rhetoric that dehumanizes criminals and terrorists and calls for extralegal action appeals to people’s desire for immediate gratification and retribution. It also prevents us as a nation from facing the underlying issues that create acts of crime and terror in the first place. By turning the perpetrator of a crime into a monster, we avoid facing the monstrous forces in society, and perpetuate them by unleashing a cycle of violent rhetoric and actual violence.
Tsarnaev was, in fact, given the given the harshest sentence possible: he was sentenced to the death penalty in May 2015, two years after the bombing, to little fanfare in Boston. My high school classmates who had posted about wanting his death were silent on social media following the sentence. The justice system, though it had condemned Tsarnaev to death, had treated him as a person, respecting his rights. That was not what my classmates had wanted; they had wanted revenge, at the expense of human rights and the moral systems of our country.
Rachel Butler ‘18 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at rachelkbutler@wustl.edu.