How liberals dehumanize their adversaries
How liberals dehumanize their adversaries
I've noticed a peculiar phenomenon prevalent with the liberals. They have an inclination to diminish the complexity of those they perceive as adversaries by reducing them to caricatures or dehumanizing representations.
For instance, they liken Xi to Winnie the Pooh, depicting him in a manner that belittles his position and influence. Similarly, Putin is portrayed as a mad king, exaggerating his power and malevolence for dramatic effect. They characterize Russians as orcs, implying that they are inherently evil and lacking in humanity's essential qualities of compassion and reason.
This trend seems to suggest a reluctance among liberals to engage with opposing viewpoints on their own merits, instead choosing to dismiss them outright or diminish their significance through caricatured representations. This approach may serve as a form of psychological defense mechanism, allowing individuals to avoid the discomfort and cognitive dissonance that can arise from confronting unfamiliar or challenging ideas.
A group, claiming to champion values such as empathy, inclusivity, and respect for diversity, appears to be engaging in a peculiar behavior: dehumanizing their opponents by reducing them to caricatures or diminishing their complexity. This trend is as a form of naked hypocrisy.
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Because it's all sports to liberals. They have no stake in anything they believe in. Foreign presidents might as well be polytheistic trickster gods to them. They call Xi Jinping a cartoon bear in the same way someone in medieval Iceland would spit three times to keep dwarves away. Liberals believe their criticisms of Putin and Xi are heard by the respective parties and somehow weaken them.
They dehumanize their enemies because their enemies aren't real, tangible opponents for them. All their battles are in the realms of their own imagination. There's a good quote I've always liked from the German Ideology where Marx is dunking on Max Stirner.
Thus we see what holy motives guide Saint Max in his transition to egoism. It is not the good things of this world, not treasures which moth and rust corrupt, not the capital belonging to his fellow unique ones, but heavenly treasure, the capital which belongs to God, truth, freedom, mankind, etc., that gives him no peace.
Liberals believe their politics are over abstract concepts like truth, freedom, and mankind, not tangible things like people and capital.
That's a good insight, liberals often have to resort to creating straw man caricatures precisely because they can't produce convincing critiques of the ideas they disagree with. Likewise, focusing on abstract concepts moves conversation away from tangible things whose merits can be evaluated in a meaningful way. They're not interested in having an honest debate about the merits of their ideology, they take it as axiomatic that it's inherently correct.
Contempt for the enemy had been generated by the demonisation of the Ethiopians through the state‐controlled media; the dapper, dignified and highly acclaimed Ethiopian Regent who had charmed the crowds and been given a royal welcome by King Victor Emmanuel and Mussolini on his official state visit to Rome in 1924—the Emperor to whose imperial court Italian diplomats had long been proud to be accredited—was transformed by Mussolini’s propaganda machine into a caricature.
Haile Selassie was now a hideous, subhuman creature with an enormous beaked nose and gigantic deformed feet—a monstrous potentate ruling with revolting brutality over a horde of ignorant savages, who for their own good needed to be forcibly subjected to what Rome called ‘Italian civilisation’.
Many of the Blackshirt volunteers swallowed the propaganda, and against such a background the [Regio Esercito] commanders’ numerous written instructions for suppression of the local population through the spreading of terror, and demands for ‘merciless rigour’ and ‘the destruction of everything’, rapidly created a culture of brutality and impunity. It is not surprising that Italians who might not have been predisposed to abuse the Ethiopians often did so with enthusiasm, as can be seen from some of the photographs in this volume.
(Source.)