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DISCOURSE<br />
2.0<br />
BLAMING<br />
THE<br />
VICTIMS<br />
“<br />
B<br />
By Sara Elise Brown and Henry C. Theriault<br />
laming the victim” is a tried and true<br />
method of genocide rationalization and<br />
denial, and has been used in case after case:<br />
“The Jews” were against Germany to undermine<br />
it (by supposedly creating “Bolshe-<br />
vism,” for instance, they had traitorously<br />
sold Germany out in World War I, or had<br />
even declared “war” against Germany).<br />
Armeni ans were in revolt, or were in league<br />
with the Russians against the Ottoman<br />
Empire, or even were committing genocide against Turks and<br />
other Muslims. Rwandan Tutsis were going to commit genocide<br />
against the Hutus if they were not killed off first. Indigenous<br />
Guatemalans were in league with leftist guerrillas and communists.<br />
Bosnians were committing mass rape against Serbian<br />
women and were the military aggressors. Tasmanians were killing<br />
English settlers’ livestock. The “Indians” were warlike savages who<br />
went around scalping (an English invention, for use in Ireland, by<br />
the way) any whites they could find, kidnapping and raping<br />
European women, massacring innocent whites, and anything else<br />
colonists could think of—that is, all of the atrocities that the<br />
Europeans were committing against the Native Americans—<br />
including being soulless heathens undermining Christianity.<br />
Just as blaming the victim is a denial tactic, it is also a frequent<br />
motivator for participation in a genocide. Part of the reason this<br />
tactic is so popular with deniers is that it resonates with the propaganda<br />
used by perpetrators to motivate participation in a genocide<br />
This page is sponsored by Hagop and Sonia Ergenian<br />
itself. For instance, as Rwandan genocide survivor Yannick Tona<br />
explains, one young Hutu man who was raised by his parents<br />
turned against his family as a result of extremist propaganda that<br />
blamed the Tutsis for their alleged violent and oppressive agenda<br />
against the Hutus. Similarly, by blaming the victims for their real or<br />
perceived threat, denialists go so far as to lay the blame for any acts<br />
of violence squarely on the shoulders of the victims. No longer are<br />
the victims blamed simply to rationalize violence that will be recognized<br />
as the perpetrators’, but perpetrator violence itself is recast as<br />
if perpetrated by the actual victims. Through shamelessly circular<br />
reasoning, deniers’ own victim-blaming lends credence to documents<br />
capturing the rhetoric that incited genocide in the first place,<br />
while those sources lend credence to deniers’ arguments as “historical<br />
evidence.”<br />
The tactic is not unique to genocide and related mass violence,<br />
of course. This month we learn that a girl in Maldives who was<br />
sexually abused by her stepfather for years, a stepfather who murdered<br />
the baby she bore as a result of his rapes, has been convicted<br />
of having sex outside of marriage and will be whipped with 100<br />
lashes (a horrifically painful and quite possibly permanently disabling<br />
torture, for those used to Hollywood glorifications of the<br />
whipping victim), while her demented torturer faces no responsibility<br />
for his inhuman brutality against a child. A recent rape in<br />
Steubenville, Ohio, is another illustration. In that case, the victim<br />
of the sexual assaults documented on video is being blamed for<br />
consuming alcohol and is, in the most predictable fashion, being<br />
castigated for prior sexual conduct.<br />
www.armenianweekly.com APRIL 2013 | THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY |<br />
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