The Hardline Justification of Mass Killing

Abstract

AbstractWhile an increasing number of scholars agree that ideologies matter in mass killings, there is huge disagreement over which kinds of ideologies or ideological themes are most crucial in encouraging such violence. This chapter engages that debate, critiquing the dominant focus of ‘traditional-ideological perspectives’ on ‘revolutionary’ or ‘utopian’ ideological goals or values that contrast with pragmatic strategic goals and/or invert conventional morality. The chapter instead emphasizes the principal roots of mass killing in radicalized versions of what are nevertheless highly familiar claims about security politics. Specifically, the chapter identifies six principal ‘justificatory mechanisms’ in the hardline narratives that underpin mass killing—threat construction, guilt attribution, deidentification, valorization, futurization, and the destruction of alternatives—and presents a mixture of historical and psychological evidence to show that such mechanisms have real causal power to encourage support for and participation in violence.