religiondispatches.org Open in urlscan Pro
104.154.221.88  Public Scan

Form analysis
2 forms found in the DOM

GET https://religiondispatches.org/

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="https://religiondispatches.org/" role="search">
  <input type="text" name="s" id="s" value="Search" onfocus="if(this.value=='Search')this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value='Search';">
  <button type="submit">
    <i class="icomoon-search"></i>
  </button>
</form>

POST

<form id="mc4wp-form-1" class="mc4wp-form mc4wp-form-23475 mc4wp-form-theme mc4wp-form-theme-red" method="post" data-id="23475" data-name="Default sign-up form">
  <div class="mc4wp-form-fields">
    <p>Our newest stories, in your inbox.</p>
    <p></p>
    <p></p>
    <input type="email" id="mc4wp_email" name="EMAIL" placeholder="Your email address" required="">
    <p></p>
    <p>
      <label>First Name:</label>
      <input type="text" name="FNAME" placeholder="Your first name" required="required">
    </p>
    <p>
      <label>Last Name:</label>
      <input type="text" name="LNAME" placeholder="Your last name" required="required">
    </p>
    <p>
      <label>How Frequently?</label>
    </p>
    <ul>
      <li><label for="mce-FREQUENCY-0"><input type="radio" value="Every Day" name="FREQUENCY" id="mce-FREQUENCY-0">Every Day</label></li>
      <li><label for="mce-FREQUENCY-1"><input type="radio" value="Every Week" name="FREQUENCY" id="mce-FREQUENCY-1">Every Week</label></li>
    </ul>
    <p></p>
    <p>
      <input type="submit" value="Submit">
    </p>
  </div><label style="display: none !important;">Leave this field empty if you're human: <input type="text" name="_mc4wp_honeypot" value="" tabindex="-1" autocomplete="off"></label><input type="hidden" name="_mc4wp_timestamp"
    value="1671468441"><input type="hidden" name="_mc4wp_form_id" value="23475"><input type="hidden" name="_mc4wp_form_element_id" value="mc4wp-form-1">
  <div class="mc4wp-response"></div>
</form>

Text Content

 * About
 * Submissions
 * Contact
 * FAQ

 * Racial Justice
    * Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing
      Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It
    * Despite Reports, GOP Has Not ‘Turned on Trump’ For Call to Terminate the
      Constitution — Fascism isn’t a Dealbreaker for Today’s GOP
    * Colorado Springs Massacre Captures the Christian Nationalist ‘Monster In
      The Mirror’

 * Politics/Law
    * What Protests and Executions in Iran Can Tell us About America and the
      Fall of Roe v. Wade
    * Is There Anyone in the Press Who Can Recognize the Bad Faith in
      Evangelical Faith?
    * Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing
      Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

 * Sex/Gender/Justice
    * What Protests and Executions in Iran Can Tell us About America and the
      Fall of Roe v. Wade
    * 303 Creative Is Not a ‘Religion v. Gay Rights’ Case — But Here’s Why the
      Christian Right is Happy with the Media Suggesting Just That
    * Despite Reports, GOP Has Not ‘Turned on Trump’ For Call to Terminate the
      Constitution — Fascism isn’t a Dealbreaker for Today’s GOP

 * Christian Nationalism
    * What Protests and Executions in Iran Can Tell us About America and the
      Fall of Roe v. Wade
    * Is There Anyone in the Press Who Can Recognize the Bad Faith in
      Evangelical Faith?
    * Despite Reports, GOP Has Not ‘Turned on Trump’ For Call to Terminate the
      Constitution — Fascism isn’t a Dealbreaker for Today’s GOP

 * Russia Invades Ukraine
    * Espionage Allegations Against Russian Church Raise Religious Freedom Issue
      in Ukraine
    * As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable
      Weapon
    * Putin’s Violent Holy War Rhetoric Made it to the Christian Right Fringe —
      And There’s Reason to Believe it’ll Go Mainstream

 * * 
   * 
   * 

 * About
 * Submissions
 * Contact
 * FAQ

Religion Dispatches
 * Racial Justice
    * Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing
      Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It
    * Despite Reports, GOP Has Not ‘Turned on Trump’ For Call to Terminate the
      Constitution — Fascism isn’t a Dealbreaker for Today’s GOP
    * Colorado Springs Massacre Captures the Christian Nationalist ‘Monster In
      The Mirror’

 * Politics/Law
    * What Protests and Executions in Iran Can Tell us About America and the
      Fall of Roe v. Wade
    * Is There Anyone in the Press Who Can Recognize the Bad Faith in
      Evangelical Faith?
    * Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing
      Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

 * Sex/Gender/Justice
    * What Protests and Executions in Iran Can Tell us About America and the
      Fall of Roe v. Wade
    * 303 Creative Is Not a ‘Religion v. Gay Rights’ Case — But Here’s Why the
      Christian Right is Happy with the Media Suggesting Just That
    * Despite Reports, GOP Has Not ‘Turned on Trump’ For Call to Terminate the
      Constitution — Fascism isn’t a Dealbreaker for Today’s GOP

 * Christian Nationalism
    * What Protests and Executions in Iran Can Tell us About America and the
      Fall of Roe v. Wade
    * Is There Anyone in the Press Who Can Recognize the Bad Faith in
      Evangelical Faith?
    * Despite Reports, GOP Has Not ‘Turned on Trump’ For Call to Terminate the
      Constitution — Fascism isn’t a Dealbreaker for Today’s GOP

 * Russia Invades Ukraine
    * Espionage Allegations Against Russian Church Raise Religious Freedom Issue
      in Ukraine
    * As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable
      Weapon
    * Putin’s Violent Holy War Rhetoric Made it to the Christian Right Fringe —
      And There’s Reason to Believe it’ll Go Mainstream

By Annika Brockschmidt Archive, Christian Nationalism, OMFG,
Sex/Gender/JusticeOctober 10, 2022


MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE’S GENOCIDE RHETORIC CREATES A PERMISSION STRUCTURE FOR
THE RIGHT — BUT PERMISSION TO DO WHAT?

Georgia Republican, Marjorie Taylor Greene at the 2022 Student Action Summit in
Tampa, Florida. Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Facebook794Tweet

Even for her, it was a chilling statement. “We’re all targets now though, for
daring to push back against the regime,” Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed at a
Trump rally in Michigan last Saturday. This is not the first time she and other
right-wing Republicans and media figures have railed against what they call “the
regime”—the democratically elected US government. But, while this is familiar
territory for Greene, this time she escalated her rhetoric. The Georgia
Republican, who refers to those convicted for their role in the insurrection as
“political prisoners,” declared:

> “I’m not going to mince words with you all. Democrats want Republicans dead.
> And they have already started the killings.” 

This is a startling escalation—even for Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s also a
bold-faced lie: The example she proceeded to give of a teenager killed, “because
he was a Republican,” referred to a hit-and-run that had—as the local police
department and even Fox News report—nothing to do with politics. Greene also
claims that “even last week an 83-year-old woman was shot in the back for
advocating for the unborn.” 

The implication here seems to be that the woman was killed. Again, however,
Greene is egregiously misrepresenting the facts: An 84-year-old woman got into a
heated argument while campaigning against abortion with the wife of the man who,
according to his own testimony, accidentally shot her while trying to move her
clipboard away with the butt of his rifle. She was hit in the shoulder and drove
herself to the hospital where she received treatment. The man is facing charges
for felonious assault. Greene—whether out of ignorance or a lack of concern for
the facts—misconstrued these two incidents as “killings” of Republicans, ordered
by Democratic officials.  

Many articles have been written about how much of Republican warnings of an
authoritarian state seem to be projection. But Greene’s claims go one step
further than that. What she employs here is referred to by scholars of genocide
as an “accusation in a mirror”—a tactic that’s been used by genocidal movements
or parties for decades as preparation for the commission of unspeakable
atrocities. 

The term was first introduced in a paper written by French psychologist Roger
Mucchielli in 1970, as a method by those planning to commit genocide to build a
basis of justification against their enemy. In a cruel twist of fate, after the
Rwandan genocide, scholars found a memo, in which a Hutu propagandist cited
Mucchielli’s work—in which he had warned against such rhetorical tactics—and
used it as a tool to prep Hutus for the genocide against the Tutsis. The
propagandist explains: “In this way, the party which is using terror will accuse
the enemy of using terror.” 

According to genocide historian Alison Des Forges: 

> “The unknown author of the memo claims that with methods like the ‘accusation
> in a mirror,’ propagandists could persuade ‘honest people’ that they were
> facing an existential threat by the enemy and it was therefore necessary for
> them to commit atrocious acts of violence ‘for legitimate [self-] defense.’” 

In Rwanda, and in other genocides, this strategy worked as intended, she says:

> “both in specific cases such as the Bugesera massacre of March 1992 … and in
> the broader campaign to convince Hutu that Tutsi planned to exterminate them.
> There is no proof that officials and propagandists who ‘created’ events and
> made ‘accusations in a mirror’ were familiar with this particular document,
> but they regularly used the techniques that it described.” 

The “accusation in a mirror” strategy has a long and bloody genocidal history.
Scholar and attorney Kenneth L. Marcus writes: 

> “In its genocidal form, AiM (Accusation in a mirror) has been used and refined
> by Nazi, Serbian, and Hutu propagandists. Adolf Hitler, for example, warned
> that Jews intended to engage in mass-murder while he devised his own plans for
> Aryan domination. Similarly, the International Criminal Tribunal for the
> Former Yugoslavia observed this phenomenon in Serbia: ‘In articles,
> announcements, television programs and public proclamations, Serbs were told
> that they needed to protect themselves from a fundamentalist Muslim threat . .
> . that the Croats and Muslims were preparing a plan of genocide against
> them.’  Indeed, this form of propaganda has been so widely used as a means of
> inciting genocide that it can properly be classified with demonization and
> dehumanization as a basic form of genocidal rhetoric.”

It’s a bad sign when an elected official—any elected official—engages in what
scholars of genocide describe as “genocidal rhetoric.” What makes it worse is
that Marjorie Taylor Greene is no outlier in her party. Although she’s long been
described as the fringe of the GOP, she and others, like Lauren Boebert, have
found their way into the mainstream. 

How can we possibly tell? Well, for one: she has not and will not receive any
meaningful pushback from her Republican colleagues on her incendiary, genocidal
rhetoric—at least not from anyone that still has political aspirations in the
party. Sure, a Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert might choose their words
more crassly than a Lindsey Graham would, but they’re united behind one
conviction, as Georgetown history professor Thomas Zimmer writes:

> “(…) what Greene is saying has been fully normalized on the Right, maybe not
> in the exact formulation she uses, but certainly in substance. That is true
> for her extremist Christian nationalism in general as well as for her embrace
> of political violence more specifically. The reason why so many Republicans
> are willing to embrace Greene’s extremism is that her core message is fully in
> line with what’s become dogma on the Right: Democrats are widely seen as a
> radical, dangerous, “Un-American” threat that has to be stopped by whatever
> means.”

This is far from the only example where Greene has used flat-out lies in order
to stoke violence as a form of imagined “self-defense” against “the Left.” She’s
previously called the Democratic Party the “party of pedophiles” and even called
her three Republican colleagues who voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson
“pro-pedophile.” 

Greene might have seemed an outlier in the Republican Party only a couple of
years ago (former Congressman Steve King was stripped of his committee
assignments for white nationalist statements in 2019 that are run-of-the-mill
for Greene today), but is firmly rooted in its mainstream these days. We must
recognize this for what it is: Not just rhetoric, not just mere words, but one
of the characteristic warning signs of genocidal ideation. And while it’s all
too easy to become numb to the ongoing radicalization, Zimmer proposes we
continue to ask ourselves a question:

> “What are they giving themselves permission to do? That is the key question,
> analytically as well as politically, when dealing with the Right. And an
> honest assessment should leave little doubt that democracy and the rule of law
> are currently in an acutely perilous situation.”

Statements like Greene’s are all about creating a permission structure for the
Right, about deploying violence—genocidal violence, even—against their political
opponents or anybody else whose existence endangers what they see as the
God-given order of the world—like LGBTQ, and especially trans people. 

Months earlier, Lauren Boebert was praying at a political rally for Biden’s
death. But she wasn’t even the first in the GOP to use Psalm 109:8 against a
political opponent—Senator David Perdue had done the same in 2016 against
Obama. 

Political and religious violence is emerging as a core theme of Republican
politics in 2022—an ever-present theme on the campaign trail—and one that’s
neither being disguised nor disavowed by the party, but rather celebrated and
reveled in. What are they giving themselves permission to do, indeed. 

Facebook794Tweet


TAGS

AR-15genocidehitlerlauren boebertlindsey grahammarjorie taylor greenerepublicans


SHARE ON

 * Facebook
 * Twitter
 * Pinterest
 * Google +
 * LinkedIn
 * Email

 * Bio
 * Latest Posts

Annika Brockschmidt

Annika Brockschmidt is a freelance journalist, author, a podcast-producer who
currently writes for the Tagesspiegel, ZEIT Online and elsewhere. Her second
non-fiction book America's Holy Warriors: How the Religious Right endangers
Democracy was published in German in October 2021 and was an immediate
bestseller. She co-hosts the podcast "Kreuz und Flagge" ("Cross and Flag") with
visiting professor at Georgetown University, Thomas Zimmer, which explores the
history of the Religious Right.

Latest Posts By Annika Brockschmidt
 * Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing
   Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It
 * Despite Reports, GOP Has Not ‘Turned on Trump’ For Call to Terminate the
   Constitution — Fascism isn’t a Dealbreaker for Today’s GOP
 * A Tale of Two Fascisms: ‘Douchey’ JD Vance vs. ‘Creepy’ Blake Masters

Previous articleWhite Nationalist Ideology Shines Through at Elite MAGA
Conference: Inside NatCon Part II
Next articlePutin Escalates Ukraine Invasion to ‘Cosmic War’ — But There is Hope


YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

WHEN VIOLENCE IS INEVITABLE: CLUB Q AND THE SUCCESS OF THE SYSTEM

COLORADO SPRINGS MASSACRE CAPTURES THE CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST ‘MONSTER IN THE
MIRROR’

DESANTIS IS MORE POLISHED AND LESS BOMBASTIC THAN TRUMP — BUT IS HE LESS OF A
THREAT TO DEMOCRACY?


OMFG

 * We Declare You Restored: How Christian ‘Forgiveness’ is Deployed to Enable
   Abuse and Corruption


POPULAR

 * A Tale of Two Fascisms: ‘Douchey’ JD Vance vs. ‘Creepy’ Blake Masters
 * Not Only is the Right Unapologetic For Violent Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric — It’s
   Doubling Down
 * Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing
   Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It


#RDISPATCHES

- 2 days ago


"I’m not claiming that right-wing demagogues are deliberately taking cues from
late Victorian texts," writes @KwongLucas. "[But] Victorian literary art [has]
furnished the subconscious of White Christian America for over a century."
https://t.co/HPhauzqL3x
h J R

- 1 hour ago


"The Club Q shooting feels inevitable: the natural consequence of
nearly-unrestricted access to large-capacity semi-automatic weaponry, fueled by
months of disinformation and violence and years of anti-LGBT rhetoric," writes
@herong for RD: https://t.co/Ul6b6cPkTR
h J R

- 2 days ago


"Despite many of its critics’ assumptions, Iran—and for that matter, Islam—have
no unique claim to repression," writes @AndrewLSeidel. "As Iran protests
theocratic tyranny, the U.S. slides toward it. The Supreme Court is pushing us
toward that end." https://t.co/k59mfHOA8q
h J R

- 2 days ago


"I’m not claiming that right-wing demagogues are deliberately taking cues from
late Victorian texts," writes @KwongLucas. "[But] Victorian literary art [has]
furnished the subconscious of White Christian America for over a century."
https://t.co/HPhauzqL3x
h J R

- 1 hour ago


"The Club Q shooting feels inevitable: the natural consequence of
nearly-unrestricted access to large-capacity semi-automatic weaponry, fueled by
months of disinformation and violence and years of anti-LGBT rhetoric," writes
@herong for RD: https://t.co/Ul6b6cPkTR
h J R
PrevNext

Follow @RDispatches


GET THE WORD | RD NEWSLETTER IN YOUR MAILBOX

Our newest stories, in your inbox.







First Name:

Last Name:

How Frequently?

 * Every Day
 * Every Week





Leave this field empty if you're human:



RELIGION DISPATCHES

Religion Dispatches is your independent, non-profit, award-winning source for
the best writing on critical and timely issues at the intersection of religion,
politics, and culture.

 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 

© Religion Dispatches
Back to top