[From this article]
“We cannot expect bystanders to sacrifice their lives for others. But we can expect individuals, groups, and nations to act early along a continuum of destruction, when the danger to themselves is limited, and the potential exists for inhibiting the evolution of increasing destructiveness. This will only happen if people–children, adults, whole societies–develop an awareness of their common humanity with other people, as well as of the psychological processes in themselves that turn them against others. Institutions and modes of functioning can develop that embody a shared humanity and make exclusion from the moral realm more difficult.” (Staub 35)
“Similarly, the philosopher Beryl Land has written about how very often, before the Nazis exterminated Jews, they first reduced them to a ‘subhuman state’ through ‘systematic brutality and degradation.’ This, he argued, made killing them more ‘palatable,’ because it is easier to kill a person once he or she no longer resembles a human being. [….] [P]erpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justification for both their past and future victimization, even though the perpetrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.” (Newman 59)
I know that people defending our President’s characterizing people trying to come to America as “animals” by saying that he just meant some Mexicans–members of a dangerous gang. And that’s a common move. He didn’t mean everyone; he only meant one part of that group, and it is a justifiable and accurate way to characterize that one part. Thus, Trump’s use of the term “animals” for some people trying to come into the country is nothing like Nazi rhetoric.
Nope, that makes it exactly like Nazi rhetoric about Jews. It’s also exactly like pro-internment rhetoric about Japanese Americans, anti-immigration rhetoric directed at Italians, eastern Europeans, the Irish, the Germans, Muslims, red-baiting, and, well, every argument for disenfranchising, expelling, or exterminating some group.
Nazis regularly acknowledged that not all Jews were bad. What they argued is that some part of that group was so dangerous that none of them should be treated as full citizens (the same argument about all the groups mentioned above), and all should be treated with extreme suspicion.
That kind of move–allowing the worst members to stand for the entire group–is only something that happens with an out-group. But it does happen. And Trump’s rhetoric is vague; he does seem to be talking about all Mexicans, and he is heard as doing exactly that.
Trump’s rhetoric won’t necessarily hurt his chances with Latinx–it’s fairly common for recent immigrants to band together against this set of immigrants (my own family history demonstrates that), and so they are likely to hear him as criticizing some immigrants. It’s easy for people to acknowledge exceptions within the in-group. But non-Latinx aren’t.
But Trump’s way of talking about parts of some immigrant group is vague. A friendly reading says he’s talking about a small group and just failing to make clear that he doesn’t think that subset represents the whole group. A less friendly reading wonders why he keeps making that mistake.
Another friendly reading says he doesn’t make the group/sub-group distinction because the sub-group is a synecdoche for the group as a whole. After all, that’s how thinking about the out-group works–any member can be taken as representative of the whole. And, clearly, that is how many supporters of Trump hear him, especially the non-trivial number of his supporters whose racism motivated their support for him.
More important, that is how exclusionary rhetoric works, including Hitler’s, by allowing or encouraging the public to think that a group is dangerous because its representative members are. What Trump is doing, and has been doing for a long time, is encouraging people to fear immigrants because some of them might be bad. And it’s working.
