Talia Lavin: Anatomy of a Pogrom

[Nevilledog]

https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich/archive/anatomy-of-a-pogrom/

How does ethnic violence start, and how does it spread? Who uses it, and for what purpose?

The past few weeks have provided an object lesson in the durability and utility of blood libel in the United States, as first vice-presidential candidate JD Vance and then his oleaginous boss promoted a baseless lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs. That the story was false in the first place—hearsay sourced from a Facebook post about third-hand rumor and denied by city authorities—was never particularly important.

In recent weeks a hateful jacquerie has been inflamed by the far-right media, particularly since Trump repeated his dark fantasy in a debate watched by 67 million Americans. The fact-check was swift, but irrelevant: the existence of the lie, its provocative quality, mattered far more than the particularities or truth of the matter. As Vance told CNN this weekend, defending his continual spraying of the body politic with this shit, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

In other words: the details don’t matter—hence the proliferation of AI slop memes of Donald Trump riding a cat into battle while wielding an AK-47, the widespread adoption of kitten posters by such pustulous figures as Ted Cruz. The story was always the point, and it’s always the same story: they—whoever “they” are—are not like us, they are inferior, and they demonstrate that inferiority through violence. (This was illustrated quite piquantly by the National Review’s editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, who, in a discussion of Haitians in Springfield, used a racial slur while discussing the false animal-eating stories.)

We have names for this kind of deliberately seeded provocation, whose particulars matter not in their truth but in their form: the sinister picture of a disfavored outgroup—in this case the roughly twenty thousand Haitians living in Springfield’s environs, engaging in grotesque acts of violence—in clandestine gatherings for the purposes of perverse pleasure.

*snip*