'Toxification' as a More Precise Early Warning Sign for Genocide Than Dehumanization? An Emerging Research Agenda

Abstract

Abstract.In genocide scholarship, dehumanization is often considered to be an alarming early warning sign for mass systematic killing. Yet, within broader research, dehumanization is found to exist in a variety of instances that do not lead to aggression or violence. This disparity suggests that while dehumanization is an important part of the genocidal process, it is too imprecise as a salient early warning sign. Genocide scholars have acknowledged such a conjecture in the past. This article initiates an embryonic research agenda that offers 'toxification' as a more precise early warning sign for genocide than dehumanization. It contends that while dehumanization signals that killing members of a particular group may be regarded as permissible, a more indicative early warning is one that flags when extermination is considered a necessity. Following a literature review of dehumanization, the purpose of this article is to introduce the idea of 'toxificaton' , and to illustrate how the concept can work in practice, using two twentieth century genocides as examples. Keywords IntroductionScholarship over the last half century suggests that genocide does not manifest without hideously vivid preliminaries: the processes' paradox of contextual uniqueness and "painful axiom of invariance" 1 has yielded a number of early warning indicators that are considered common to genocides.2 Dehumanization-the denial of a person's humanity and his/her ejection from the "sphere of equal moral standing"

Filthy Animals: Integrating the Behavioral Immune System and Disgust into a Model of Prophylactic Dehumanization

“…Moreover, groups that are stigmatized due to their perceived lack of warmth and competence both elicit disgust and are considered less capable of complex, “uniquely human” experiences (Harris & Fiske, 2011 ). Outside of the laboratory, perpetrators of violence often liken their victims to infectious diseases or their vectors such as rats and cockroaches (Musolff, 2007 ; Smith, 2020 ), and this disease-based dehumanization is thought to facilitate genocidal violence due to the prophylactic disgust it inspires (Neilsen, 2015 ; Savage, 2007 ).…”

“…The Prophylactic Dehumanization Model suggests that the BIS facilitates dehumanization by inspiring disgust toward disease-relevant outgroups. This may explain why dehumanization likening victims to diseases or their vectors (e.g., rats and cockroaches) is thought to have played an integral role in several twentieth-century genocides (Neilsen, 2015 ; Savage, 2007 ). To quantify the prevalence of disease-based dehumanization during a paradigmatic instance of genocide, we first re-analyzed data from a previous content analysis of Nazi antisemitic propaganda (Enock et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The Holocaust serves as a paradigmatic instance in which victims were likened to infectious diseases or contaminants (Musolff, 2007 ; Neilsen, 2015 ; Savage, 2007 ), leading us to conduct a preliminary content analysis to quantify the prevalence of this form of disease-based dehumanization in Nazi propaganda. Our data come from Florence Enock and colleagues ( 2020 ), who initially analyzed ten antisemitic Nazi propaganda documents published between 1936 and 1944, available on the German Propaganda Archive ( https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/ ).…”

Dehumanisation in religious and sectarian violence: the case of Islamic State

“…The idea of infra-humanisation suggests that gradations are possible in a person's level of perceived humanity. The idea that it is possible to distinguish between 'dehumanisation' and 'toxification' (Neilsen, 2015) specifically assumes that the specifics of words matter. How is describing a greedy person as a pig different from describing a morally despicable or worthless person as a cockroach, except in degree?…”

Toxic Speech: Inoculations and Antidotes

“…Toxic speech is not the narrow concept of “toxification” found in Neilsen . Neilsen says “Toxification refers to the cognitive perception of the target group as not merely inhuman, but as toxic to the self, or toxic to the ideal; consequently, the victim group must be purged for the security the perpetrators’ society.” This runs together a variety of discursive actions, carefully laid out in Semelin ; Tirrell ; and Smith .…”