The Rhetoric of Genocide
Alarm bells are going off in the United States regarding growing right-wing hysteria, in which wild accusations of “grooming” are being used to attack the rights of LGBTQ+ people:
Following the recent passage of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and a wave of other homophobic and transphobic legislation throughout the country, current right-wing rhetoric has focused on accusations of “grooming.” The term — which describes the actions an adult takes to make a child vulnerable to sexual abuse — is taking on a conspiracy-theory tone as conservatives use it to imply that the LGBTQ community, their allies, and liberals more generally are pedophiles or pedophile-enablers.
The moral panic over “groomers” marks a new escalation, in the U.S. context, of the same political polarization taking place in countries all around the world as the crisis of capitalism deepens. In the absence of a mass workers’ party, the growing contradictions in society finds a distorted expression as the two major capitalist parties divert popular anger from the class war into the so-called culture wars. While Democrats and Republicans march in lockstep to defend the interests of the ruling class on the most consequential issues, the bourgeois media portrays them as bitter enemies locked in an endless Manichaean struggle.
Paradoxically, even as the real differences between the parties become more and more indistinguishable, the rhetoric grows ever more heated. Conservatives, reactionaries, and fascists have long attacked even the most right-wing liberals as “socialists”, “Marxists” and “communists”. In the post-9/11 era, conservative pundits began to attack liberals and leftists as treasonous terrorist sympathizers. The struggle over abortion rights led to so-called “pro-life” voices equating abortion with murder, which had real-world consequences. The murder of Dr. George Tiller, who performed abortions for women in Kansas, followed years of broadcasts by Fox News blowhard Bill O’Reilly attacking him as “Tiller the Baby Killer”.
Things only got worse in the Trump years, which saw the rise of Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories. The increasing demonization and dehumanization of political opponents was by no means an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. The humiliating loss of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election led to the institutionalization by the U.S. establishment of another conspiracy theory: Russiagate, which was amplified for years by the media and the Democratic Party despite no proof whatsoever. Anyone who criticized Democrats, whether from the left or the right, was accused of being a “Russian bot”.
Vox explains: “QAnon’s main tenet involves the claim that powerful Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities are kidnapping children, both for sex trafficking and to harvest their glands to make youth serums.” However, leaders in both the Democrat and Republican parties have in fact been associated with notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The pilot of Epstein’s private jet says that the likes of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew regularly flew on the so-called “Lolita Express”.
Yet again, in the absence of a mass labour party, justified public anger takes a distorted form. The association of figures like Clinton and Trump with Epstein grows into talk of Satanic rituals, a full-blown child sex cult, and more far-reaching conspiracy theories that are variations on an old theme:
The threads of arcane rituals, anti-Semitism, and child endangerment are interwoven and embedded in many early stories, and sometimes they spilled into real-life conspiracy theories. The anti-Semitic belief that Jews were ritually murdering children became known as “blood libel,” which exists both as a term for ritual murder as well as a metaphoric expression of the idea that the Jewish people crucified Christ. Accusations of ritual child murder, usually accompanying accusations of witchcraft, cropped up throughout the Middle Ages, sometimes leading to anti-Semitic riots.
Scratch the surface of right-wing conspiracy theories and you’ll always find anti-Semitism. The term “globalists” has become popular among the far right, and is generally understood as code for “Jews”. There is much overlap here with the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, in which intellectuals from the Frankfurt School who happened to be Jewish were allegedly the guiding forces behind an ongoing plot to destroy the family, nation, Christianity, and “traditional values”; and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, in which policies such as mass immigration are supposedly part of a plot to exterminate the white race.
The current hysteria over “groomers” adds accusations of pedophilia onto these existing conspiracy theories, which are only more extreme versions of the basic worldview that has been propagated on conservative news sources for decades. Replace “Jews” or “globalists” with “liberals” or “leftists” and these far-right diatribes become indistinguishable from mainstream conservatism (e.g. the idea that “liberals control the media”). But the accusation that LGBTQ+ people and those who support them are now “grooming” children represents a dangerous new escalation, targeted in particular against marginalized people.
Accusing someone of being a pedophile, or supporting pedophiles, is the worst possible charge you can level at someone. Smearing millions of people with this label simply for standing up for the rights of LGBTQ+ people is dangerous and dehumanizing in the extreme. Observers have noted how such rhetoric can prepare the way for eliminationist violence:
LGBTQ+ people in the United States are already four times more likely than non-LGBTQ+ people to be the victims of violent crime. They face much higher rates of hate speech and harassment. Nearly half of LGBTQ+ youth in particular have seriously considered suicide.
The growth of ever more violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against LGBTQ+ people and their supporters, including by government leaders, will only lead to greater hate and violence against these already marginalized groups. A recent far-right gathering in Idaho, hosted by Republican state House member Heather Scott and billed as “Gameplan to Remove Inappropriate Materials in Our Schools and Libraries,” was an ominous sign of what is to come.
Leaders of the militia-oriented bikers’ group “Panhandle Patriots” are openly planning a confrontation by holding a gun rally in Coeur d’Alene on the same day as the city’s Pride march less than a mile away. Jeff White, the group’s “sergeant at arms”, used the most extreme fearmongering rhetoric. “They are trying to take your children,” White raved of LGBTQ+ people and their supporters, adding, “We actually intend to go head to head with these people. A line has to be drawn in the sand.”
The other day I watched the documentary The Look of Silence, which concerns the 1965-6 mass murders in Indonesia that saw the murder of 1 million communists, sympathizers, and others. A companion piece to The Act of Killing, the film follows a middle-aged Indonesian man whose brother was killed in the massacre as he confronts those who carried out the killings. He watches footage of some of the killers, now old men, laughing as they recount their participation in the horrific torture and murder of huge numbers of people, often their own neighbours. The killers were often not soldiers, but local vigilantes backed by the armed forces.
One of the most horrific aspects of the Rwandan genocide is how ordinary people were incited to rape, torture, and slaughter their neighbours in vast numbers. Radio broadcasts incited fear and anger among the Hutu against the Tutsi—accusing the Rwandan Patriotic Army of atrocities against the Hutu and labelling the Tutsi as non-human pests, “cockroaches” who must be exterminated. It is one of the most extreme examples of dehumanizing language setting the stage for mass violence.
Is that an unfair comparison to current politics? Certainly there is a spectrum of political rhetoric from “moderate” to “extreme”. But dehumanization of others, accusing them of the most heinous crimes or the intent to commit such crimes, is a consistent element in war and genocide throughout history. That is a historical fact.
Genocidal rhetoric doesn’t come out of nowhere. Ultimately it is the product of class society—in this case, capitalism, which is the root cause of imperialism, war, oppression, and other social ills that breed widespread insecurity and fear. The scapegoating of vulnerable populations and marginalized groups is a hallmark of capitalism in crisis. A ruling class that feels threatened will not hesitate to use the most extreme violence and killing to defend its interests against those it perceives as a threat: leftists, trade unionists, ethnic minorities, and so on.
Inge Eriksson, a university lecturer at Malmö University in Sweden, has written on how the Holocaust cannot be separated from the Second World War, which in turn was a product of the First World War. Both wars were, to use Lenin’s description of the first: “imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides… a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.” The Great Depression which paved the way for the Nazis’ rise to power was the result of capitalism’s own internal contradictions. The Second World War was the response of the capitalists to this impasse of their own system, and the Nazi genocide of European Jews was made possible by the war. Eriksson writes:
It was the war that gave the Nazis the possibility of carrying out the Holocaust. Only through controlling large parts of the continent and its transport systems was it made materially possible. Only through military battles chipping away at people's empathy and escalating the fear of dying, and through alienation produced by bureaucracy and lack of power over industrial processes and organisations, were the barriers sufficiently broken down to provide a big enough group of people for the actual carrying out of the Holocaust.
Today the world faces a crisis of capitalism even worse than the Great Depression, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and global climate emergency. Inflation is rampant, eroding the standard of living for the masses. Workers and oppressed people are increasingly realizing that existing institutions cannot solve their problems, leading to to the explosion of mass movements such as the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and an inspiring wave of strikes and unionizations in the United States. The ruling capitalist class, as it did in the 1930s, is aware of the threat to its own power posed by the rise of what it calls “populism”, the collapse of the centre, political polarization to both the left and right, their inability to rule in the old way, and growing class consciousness among workers.
Fascism, in the last analysis, emerged in the interwar period as a reactionary mass movement and response to the threat of socialist revolution. Basing themselves on the ruined petit-bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat, fascists sought to physically destroy the workers’ movement. As capitalism fell into crisis, the threat of revolution grew once more and the ruling class increasingly bankrolled fascist movements in countries like Italy and Germany.
The drive to scapegoat vulnerable populations is a recurring feature of capitalism in crisis. While racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression are always used by the ruling class to divide working people and prevent them from recognizing their common class interests, these divide-and-rule tactics become especially acute during periods of the the gravest crisis, such as war and economic depression. To divert mass anger away from those actually in control of society and responsible for the crisis—the capitalists—blame is placed on the most vulnerable and powerless groups: immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, women, gay and trans people, and so on.
That is precisely what we are seeing now. As the crisis creates new mass movements, radicalization of workers and youth, and growing class consciousness, the ruling class is striving to divert the struggle into culture wars. Attacks on LGBTQ+ people are just one example of this. Along with the deepening crisis of capitalism, the venom targeting oppressed and marginalized groups grows ever more poisonous, the language ever more dehumanizing and violent.
Lenin described capitalism as “horror without end”, while Rosa Luxemburg said that humanity faces a choice between socialism or barbarism. Genocide represents the lowest depths of barbarism to which humanity has sunk before, and will sink again so long as class society and the division between exploiters and exploited persists. Capitalism in crisis will always seek to provoke hate and division between working people and stoke the flames of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of prejudice. The only way to end such horrors once and for all is to end the profit-based system that feeds this hatred and brings out the worst in humanity—and its replacement with a socialist system, based on solidarity and the satisfaction of human needs, that brings out the best in us.