Terroristretorik
Via Gudmundson hittar jag följande artikel av Gabriel Weimannn, "Mass-Media Theater".
Weimann listar där Albert Banduras teori om "moral disengagement,". Detta används ju också av terrorister som Weimann påpekar.
Weimann listar där Albert Banduras teori om "moral disengagement,". Detta används ju också av terrorister som Weimann påpekar.
- Displacement of responsibility—This involves distorting the relationship between one's actions and the effects of those actions, and/or blaming the victim or circumstances for violent actions and innocent deaths.
- Diffusion of responsibility—This is done by segmenting duties, where each individual action by itself is fairly benign, but the totality is harmful. Group decisions can also be used to diffuse individual responsibility for an action.
- Dehumanization of targets—Committing violence against innocents is easier if they are not perceived as fellow, individual humans. One can minimize the brutality imposed on others by focusing, instead, on the impersonal character of the attacks and the targets' symbolic meaning, and by naming and viewing the victims as less than human—vermin, dogs, and so forth. Osama bin Laden, for example, bestializes Americans as "lowly people" perpetrating acts that "the most ravenous of animals would not descend to."
- Euphemistic language—This includes making injurious conduct respectable and reducing personal responsibility by referring to it in impersonal terms. For example, al-Qaida always refers to the 9/11 events as attacks on symbols of American power and consumerism, never to the murder of some 3,000 men, women, and children.
- Advantageous comparisons—Reprehensible conduct is masked by comparing it to other, more injurious behavior. Again, the deaths of innocent people, including children, in the 9/11 attacks during peacetime are compared to the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan to end World War II, in which hundreds of thousands were killed, but the United States was never the aggressor, not even in victory.
- Distortion of sequence of events and attribution of blame—Disregarding facts or distorting the consequences of a violent action on fellow citizens by arguing that a terrorist attack was only a retaliatory action or defensive measure against a previous provocation of the enemy allows terrorists to reduce personal feelings of guilt. The victim gets blamed and others are accused of bringing about reprehensible actions, as when kidnapped hostages are beheaded because their governments failed to meet terrorist demands.