Letters to the Editor
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Demonizing those who dissent
As Seymour Hersh puts it: "We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,508394,00.html
An older article: ""For most human beings, it takes an awful lot to allow them to kill another human being," said Anthony Pratkanis, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "The only way to do it is to justify the killing, to make the enemy look as evil as possible."
Propaganda, both by governments and the private media, has evolved over the years as media has evolved. But, some say, the principle remains the same.
"The secret in propaganda is that when you demonize, you dehumanize," said James Forsher, a film historian and documentary filmmaker who has studied propaganda films, and who is an assistant professor of mass communications at California State University, Hayward.
"When you dehumanize, it allows you to kill your enemy and no longer feel guilty about it," he said. "That is why during World War II, a lot of caricatures became animals. … You can kill a monkey a lot more easily than you can kill a neighbor."
http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=79071