In March, the Trump administration deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador, allegedly for being a member of the criminal organization of Aragua. According White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, these men were “terrorists” and “atrocious monsters.” President Trump echoed it, Calling them “monsters” on their social media platform, social truth. In May, Propublic reported That the White House knew that most men had no criminal convictions in the United States, and previous reports indicated that more than 50 of them had legally entered the United States and had not violated the immigration law.
“Monster” evokes a different threat from “foreign”, “different”, “another” or even “alien”. Here implies that deportees are different from “normal” people (they read “White, Anglo, Native”) so that it goes beyond simply committing a crime of garden variety. His transgression of the social contract apparently even exceeds the violent crimes of those who are accused, because American citizens suspected of being “rapists, murders, kidnappers”, the Administration accusations On these “monsters”: they do not traffic it to Gulags abroad.
Monstrify these people was part of a strategy to justify deporting them by invoking Alien enemies law of 1798 without proof of any crime or gang membership. In doing so, the administration threatens to normalize not only the deportation of a handful of individuals, but also deprive all residents (legal and undocumented) and US citizens of the right to challenge the legality of their detention or imprisonment. Because one cannot prove legal residence or citizenship without due process, deporting people without legal procedures is to deny the rights that must be extended to all if they will exist for someone, a larger rape when people are sent to a prison from which, in the words of the Salvadoran president, “the only exit is in a coffin.”
Monstrify individuals and groups is nothing new. The chronicler of the eleventh century, Gerald of Wales, descended from the Norman conquerors and the Welsh nobility, ruled out the English as “the most useless of all peoples under the sky … the most abject slaves” and Ireland as an island inhabited by werewolf, humans of oxen and other human-lively hybrids. In 1625, an English Puritan Travel editor published a claim (without having set foot in North America) that the alonchies had “little humanitia but form … more brutal than the beasts that hunt.”
In 1558, the Scottish Protestant and the Fire Brand preacher John Knox published a brochure against the government of Mary I of England, arguing that a woman who ruled in her own right was “a monster monster”, his country a monstrous political body, unlikely that survived for a long time. In the era of the slavery of the Atlantic, the legal instruments known as “black codes” invented black Africans transported to the colonies as a new category: the slave Chattel that served for life and had less rights than the white Christian servants.
The history of the current president of the monstruration of people extends to US citizens. In August 2016, Trump Called Hillary Clinton “A monster”: supposedly “weak”, “deranged”, “unbalanced”, someone who would be “a disaster” as president and who allegedly threatened “the destruction of this country from the inside.” In October 2020, Trump twice Called Kamala Harris “This monster.”
The distinctions drawn by people in power who try to divide a population are often unfeasible. How do you tell a person respectful of the law of a member of the terrorist gang? Of their tattoosAccording to this administration. Neither citizens nor immigration status are visible in the body of a person or audible in their voice, however, the color people of each state of immigration and citizenship have faced a racial profile for a long time. Attempts to define visible signs of the monster are not new either; Nor is it the fact that the manufacture of barre monsters to an immense number of people in their drag network.
But the monsters are never hermetically sealed from the group whose borders were invented to define. This ham attempt for a reason based on evidence for human trafficking to El Salvador echoes previous attempts to identify different groups in a population where the human variety existed in a continuum. Among these examples, monstructure and massive killing, in Nazi Germany, of Jewish, Romanis, Sinti, LGBTQ+, disabled and neurodiverse, as well as political dissidents.
In the United States today, tolerate, allow or encourage the monstrification of any non -citizen and, consequently, denying due process is to tolerate, allow and encourage this to happen to US citizens.
The human category is being reduced as politicians, technological brothers and right -wing experts monstruct all those who are not a white man of CIS. Today's dehumanizing language extends beyond the deported Venezuelans that this administration labeled as “monsters.” It extends to women, minorities and people LGBTQ+ when questioning their right to body autonomy, privacy and dignity. It extends to people who are disagreed, poor, disabled or elderly, as social services are cut.
These narratives return to a broader western tradition, of centuries of looking at other people and frame them as monstrous: as beings that supposedly broke the category of “human” and could be legitimately denied fundamental rights.
Monster manufacturing campaigns always have a purpose. For European colonizers, affirming that indigenous peoples were less than humans disguised as European land hoisting. The laws that define enslaved black Africans such as the property of Chattel legalized their slavery and broke labor solidarity between white servants and enslaved Africans. And the Nazis affirmed that the Jews and other minorities had caused Germany to lose the First World War and be responsible for the economic collapse of the Nation.
Again today, the objectives of the monstrification serve the myth of white supremacy, including the notion that the United States was destined to be a white ethnostate. Thus, while the Trump administration finished a refugee program fleeing from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, welcomed the White Afrikaners from South Africa calling them refugees.
In addition, by exploiting the proximity of the Jews to White, this administration is monstructing the Palestinians to justify the human rights violations of the Israeli government. In stating that protesters, including those who are Jews, ask for the end of the Matanza de Gaza, are anti -Semitic, and by retaining research funds from and interfere with universities by calling the seeds of anti -Semitism, the administration tries that Palestinian civilians do not deserve food, homes, security or even life, and that they recognize the humanities of the Jews that require that the Jews require that the Jews require that the Jews require that the Jews require To deny the Jews who convince humans and humans. However, administration anti -Semitism is clear: Trump has forgiven the leaders of Supreme and White Supreme Organizations and has housed prominent anti -Semites as guests at dinner.
This multiple monstrification campaign strengthens the personal loyalty of white supremacists and Christian nationalists towards Trump's discord and cembra and venom solidarity between their goals and critics.
Monstrous narratives have been undermining the possibility of a more political body for millennia. But there is an antidote for us, the messages of hatred, fear and exclusion that claim that only a small minority of people is truly human. That antidote is to realize that by recognizing the humanity of others we do not reject our own humanity: we demonstrate it. It is up to us to demand that all people receive equal protection under the law, and call the monstruration narratives that, in the end, dehumanize us all.
Surekha Davies He is a historian, speaker and consultant for television, film and radio monsters. She is the author of “Human: a monstrous story“And write the newsletter”Strange and wonderful: notes of a science historian. “
