1106: Dehumanization of the Left & Authoritarian Mass Psychology
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/04/26
Nick Haslam (2006)
“Denying uniquely human attributes to others represents them as animal-like, and denying human nature represents them as objects or automata. Those are the two core forms of dehumanization.”
Susan Benesch (2006)
“Dehumanizing language is a hallmark of Dangerous Speech, because it makes violence seem acceptable toward the targeted group.”
Timothy Snyder (2017)
“Trump’s talk about the ‘enemy within’ and ‘vermin’ is a vocabulary we know from history — the vocabulary fascist leaders used while rising to power. They didn’t pull the trigger themselves; their language licensed others to do it.”
Jason Stanley (2018)
“When a leader calls opponents ‘vermin’ he attunes the audience to rats — and to the practices you use on rats. That is how hate speech prepares people to accept, or commit, political violence.”
Henry A. Giroux (2018)
“Fascism arrives through the language of hate, bigotry, dehumanization … but also through the everyday acceptance of that language.”
Federico Finchelstein (2020)
“Fascists take the violent, discriminatory tendencies already in society and radicalize them, put them in political terms, and make them part of a cult.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2020)
“They use dehumanizing language … all these groups who ‘live like vermin.’ This is exactly what the original fascists did; Hitler started calling Jews ‘parasites’ in 1920, softening the public up for violence.”
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A. Mitchell Palmer (1920)
“Like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order … It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into schools, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes…”
Benito Mussolini (1927)
“Bolshevism must be fought like a pestilential bacillus which contaminates everything it touches. Against it, we must mobilize our moral forces as one would mobilize against a deadly epidemic.”
Joseph Goebbels (1933)
“Now the red plague will be eradicated root and branch. The German people will rise up like one man against this pestilence that threatened to destroy everything sacred.”
Francoist Agrarian pamphlet (Spain, 1939)
“The fight against the red plague is the fight to save our fatherland, our religion, our traditions, and our very existence. The red infestation must be uprooted without mercy or hesitation.”
Senator Joseph McCarthy (1950, 1952)
“The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205 — a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
“Our job as Americans and as Republicans is to dislodge the traitors from every place where they’ve been sent to do their traitorous work.”
General Suharto & Indonesian Army (propaganda orders, 1965–66)
“It is necessary to exterminate the communists down to their very roots (menumpas sampai ke akar-akarnya) so that they do not rise again to threaten the nation.”
Pinochet officers at Estadio Chile (1973)
“Listen, you Marxist scum! You traitors! You filthy communists! You who have sold your country to foreigners! We are going to cleanse Chile of your filth!”
Argentine junta doctrine (Dirty War, 1976–77)
“Subversive elements are like a cancer that infects the social body. Just as a surgeon cuts away gangrenous flesh to save the patient, so must we remove these subversives from Argentine society.”
Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion veteran (1981)
“Communism is a cancer. It spreads through villages, infecting everything good. If you’re a guerrilla, they don’t just kill you — they kill your family, your neighbors, to make sure the disease does not return.”
Paul Wiffen (UKIP candidate blog, 2010)
“You left-wing scum are all the same, wanting to hand our birth-right to Romanian gypsies, Muslim nutters, and every African who can get here. You have no loyalty to Britain.”
Rodrigo Duterte (televised speech, 2017)
“If you find yourselves in an armed encounter with the New People’s Army, kill them all. Finish them off. Do not think about human rights. I will take responsibility.”
Tommy Robinson (2017)
“Communist scum objecting to democracy, showing once again that the left cannot accept the will of the people.”
Rush Limbaugh (2017)
“This is human debris who have had their minds polluted and poisoned by the American left. They’re not protesters, they’re sick individuals filled with hatred and violence.”
Jair Bolsonaro (2018)
“We are going to machine-gun the petralhada here in Acre. Let’s send these crooks to eat grass elsewhere! PT [the Workers’ Party] will never return to power.”
Urban-Naxal meme / Hindutva online campaigns (2021)
“The termites are within us. These Urban Naxals are more dangerous than Pakistan, China, or any outside enemy because they rot the nation from the inside.”
Vladimir Putin (2021)
“The Russian people will be able to distinguish true patriots from the scum and the traitors and will simply spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths — spit them out onto the pavement.”
Donald J. Trump (2023)
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lying, stealing, cheating, and rigging elections.”
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