Shedding light on propaganda and enemy images
Kristian Steiner's book offers a detailed understanding of ‘enemy images’, which are used in political rhetoric to dehumanise adversaries for various purposes, such as to legitimate violent conflicts.
What happens when a negative image of ‘the other’ takes hold in society? What happens to our morals and our way of thinking? Questions that Kristian Steiner poses in his book about how images of the enemy are created and how we can counter them.
“The rhetoric of ‘us and them’ reflects our need for simple explanations. Enemy images give us just that,” says Steiner, associate professor of peace and conflict studies.
We need to break down the hate images that are spread, educate people in source criticism, and increase their knowledge of the intentions behind them.
Kristian Steiner
“An enemy image creates a divide where one's own group is considered superior. A recent example is Putin's claim that Nazis rule Ukraine. Steiner also refers to how our welfare society is sometimes portrayed as threatened by those, usually immagrants, who supposedly constitute a liability."
He emphasises that enemy images often combine notions of superiority and vulnerability. The Nazis, for example, claimed that Aryans had better genetic traits while claiming to be threatened by inferior groups with ‘dominant genes; the enemy image explains why the ‘other’ is a threat.
Indoctrination can be a more powerful weapon than recruiting mercenaries, as it motivates people to voluntarily defend their ‘own group’. “To send young men to the front, the enemy has to be portrayed as evil and as an immediate threat,” says Steiner.
Another typical feature of enemy images is that they dehumanise the opponent. Whereas the ‘we’ evolves, the enemy is said to be unchanging, a pattern Steiner sees in neo-racist rhetoric.
“The ‘we’ do not have the same values as our grandparents, but Muslim values are set in stone and are passed down unaffected through the generations. In some cultural racist rhetoric, the concept of culture approaches the concept of race.”
According to Steiner, there are three main reasons why leaders create enemy images: to legitimise hostile actions, to mobilise people to make sacrifices for these policies, and to desensitise ‘us’ so that we lose our empathy for the enemy.
So, what can be done to counteract this demonisation between groups? Steiner believes that we need to work on four levels: the sender of the message, its recipient, the message itself, and the social structure.
“We need to break down the hate images that are spread, educate people in source criticism, and increase their knowledge of the intentions behind them. Other messages that point to a common future need to become the dominant ones. When this becomes possible. It is also important to create meetings between the parties in a conflict,” Steiner adds.
