DAVID STANDEN - The appropriation of victimhood
The “post-truth” issue
is intimately tied to the ability of powerful people to fabricate victimhood
The “appropriation” of
victimhood seems more specific than this (or possibly a subset of victimhood
culture, if you grant the validity of that category). To be exact, it is the
appropriation of victimhood by groups who have traditionally enjoyed privileged
status, who oppose progressive values and societal change, and even those who
are arguably purveyors of oppression.
This phenomenon (and
the term “appropriation of victimhood”) is neatly captured in Antonio Golan’s blog post on Rush
Limbaugh’s reaction to the vetoing of Arizona Senate Bill 1062, which would
have allowed business owners to discriminate against LGBT people on the basis
of religious belief. At the time, Limbaugh said that then Governor Jan Brewer,
who eventually vetoed the bill, had been “bullied” by the “homosexual lobby” to
further the “gay agenda”. Golan writes that Limbaugh’s response involves not
only “denying the victimization of the LGBT community, but actually
appropriating its victimhood”. He further notes that this is a common tactic of
bullies.
The reason I would
hesitate to subsume this under the title of “victimhood culture” is that it
would fail to note the power disparities involved. Which is not to say that
those who espouse “progressive” values are beyond criticism when claiming
discrimination. There may well be valid reasons to be concerned about certain
instances of people doing so overzealously, or at least for having reservations
about how such claims impact on our society and culture.
For instance, an
interesting example comes from Peter Tatchell, a famed campaigner for LGBT
rights, who has written about his concerns over a
legal ruling in which a Christian-run bakery in Northern Ireland was
found guilty of discrimination for refusing to produce a cake with a pro-gay
marriage message iced on it. Tatchell says that this sets a “worrying precedent”
since it criminalises discrimination against “ideas” rather than discrimination
against “people”.
This may well be a
reasonable concern, since there is no guarantee that the legal apparatus in
question will always be controlled by people with compassionate social values.
Tatchell therefore highlights the need to be cautious about social
manifestations of victimhood, even when we agree with the values of those
claiming it.
Nevertheless, the
fundamental fact is that that many minority groups have a right to be sensitive
to discrimination, since they have experienced oppression for decades,
centuries or longer. This is certainly not something you could say of Rush
Limbaugh or the anti-gay religious right. They may see themselves as victims,
but it is only insofar as they perceive themselves as suffering a loss of
privilege and power. They decry not true bullying, but the loss of their
culturally protected right to bully others with impunity, the fact that society
has rejected their archaic values.
This makes it a very
different proposition. And this form of appropriating victimhood appears to
have become a favourite tactic of the far-right in recent years. Donald Trump’s
successful presidential campaign was heavily premised on precisely this. The
idea that his refusal to be “politically correct” represented speaking truth to
power. The notion that a self-proclaimed billionaire businessman was somehow an
“anti-establishment” candidate. More recently, too, we
have seen him demand
an apology from the cast of Hamilton, whom he claims were
“very rude” to the VP-elect Mike Pence, despite all available evidence to
the contrary (the “post-truth” issue
is intimately tied to the ability of powerful people to fabricate victimhood).
There are, of course,
many examples not directly attributable to Donald Trump. But possibly the most
sinister is the concept of “white
genocide”: the idea that immigration in Europe and America has been
engineered by political forces to achieve the extinction of white people
through forced assimilation. For the time being, the term “white genocide”
remains the reserve of the conspiratorial far-right. But the ideas that this
fringe propagates are increasingly entering the mainstream, such as with
alarmist articles in UK national newspapers about the decreasing
white population and the “white
minority”.
Here we see an extreme
form of victimhood appropriation: the claim made by members of a traditionally
dominant majority that increased racial diversity is tantamount to the kind of
extermination suffered by various minority groups at the hands of powerful,
violent oppressors throughout history. Which is where we get to Hitler.
The reason that Hitler
and the Nazis have become obvious reference points for authoritarian evil in
our cultural discourse, especially online, is because they orchestrated possibly
the most horrific system of mechanised murder and oppression ever witnessed in
history. The Holocaust claimed the lives of around six million Jews, along with
five million non-Jewish victims, including homosexuals, Roma Gypsies, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, people with disabilities, leftists and others.
Only the most ardent
racists and far-right extremists deny that the Holocaust took place. And Hitler
and the Nazis’ war crimes extend far beyond even this. As such, in our
political and historical discourse, the Nazis are definitively victimisers, not
victims. Yet George Orwell’s review
of Mein Kampf, published in 1940, includes a line in which he
diagnoses the way in which Hitler “sees himself”: “He is the martyr, the
victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights
single-handed against impossible odds.”.. read more:
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