I have been thinking about the tactic of dehumanizing an enemy. It has long been used in warfare to make it easier to legitimize harming and killing other people. It starts with language. By calling your adversary an animal, particularly something like a rat, you begin the process of conceptualizing people as vermin. From there, the propaganda generally transforms into pictures, these might include political cartoons--but with the advent of computers, people have gotten very creative. The images are often dismissed as humorous, but the level of acceptability keeps getting pushed to more extremes. There tends to be a lack of reality in the propaganda of dehumanization. It is about changing the viewpoint of the population to seeing a person or more likely a group of people, as inferior and not deserving basic human rights. Truth is not important. While it has been in the realm of politics, more recently, perhaps with the rise of Donald Trump, dehumanization reached new heights in polit...
The thoughts of a writer.