The correct analogy

Two and a half years ago, a cyber lynching took place in Sri Lanka. To understand what I mean by this, you would need to know what lynching is, and the circumstances in which it occurs.

People today are using the word ‘lynching’ to describe the murder of an African American man, George Floyd, by U.S. policemen, and it has a history which enables us to see the pattern of how it is used, as an instrument of deliberate violence, to harass, intimidate, and humiliate.

It’s ritualistic and performative. It is used to dramatically enact a person’s isolation and powerlessness, when outnumbered by a gang of thugs.

Descriptor Credit: Wikipedia

I think of Tom Robinson in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’. And the bathroom scene in ‘Ender’s Game’. I think of Andy Dufresne in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, being systematically got at by ‘The Sisters’. Of the images sent out from Guantanamo Bay of guards positioning prisoners in pyramid forms, blindfolded and immobilised while they let the dogs out. The horrors perpetrated against Jewish and Gypsy and homosexual prisoners by Nazi guards in the 1940s for entertainment. Of Aslan in the first Narnia book, ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’, taunted and put to death by his ghoulish enemies. Of the piñatas in Mexico, where, during fiestas, lifesize dolls or animal figures full of sweets are hung up and beaten with clubs, or stabbed in the stomach, until they burst open for the benefit of the cheering crowd.

There’s an overtly dramatic element in the rituals of lynching. It’s a tribalistic bonding experience. The sadism is shared, and delighted in by the perpetrators. The victim is positioned and framed in a myriad ways as an object of scorn and contempt. There is humor generated by the victim’s fear of their own imminent and painful death and their pleas for mercy are met with shouts of jubilation.

While researching this, I’ve seen several photographs of people who participated in these events. Their faces broadly smiling, grinning, unshadowed by any negative feeling. Their victim tied up and gagged, trussed up in a body bag like a cocoon of cloth, hung by the neck from a nearby tree: hung high, so everyone can see. Silenced and forcibly made passive, no longer any kind of threat to those who outnumber him.

Descriptor Credit: Wikipedia

Cyber lynching is not physical. It describes the orchestrated ganging up of a group of people online, on Facebook or Twitter, attacking one person who has said or done something to which someone takes offence. In online lynching, the weapons are words. And the intended effect of cumulative comments is the equivalent of cudgels or batons on the persona of the victim.

Many of these ‘events’ are participated in for fun — people joke about getting popcorn to be bystanders as if they were at the movies, and watching the performance in front of them, quite good humouredly. If there is a more sadistic or malicious intent, this becomes clear in the comments thread, especially in comments which have a sensationalist gloss, and attract multiple Likes, the trophy of the online cyber bully in their quest for viral transmission of their wit and verbal dexterity.

A lot of verbal arguments take place on Facebook and Twitter. Jousting, duelling, give and take of provocation and puncturing. It’s a fair fight. But not if one party is not even there, to participate. Online lynching can take place without the victim being actually present, either in person or in words, if they are not part of the conversation in which their reputation is being attacked, and their identity trashed.

So two and a half years ago, a cyber lynching took place in Sri Lanka, in the form of a Facebook post and a comments thread in which the perpetrator invited a few tagged people to participate in publicly attacking someone against whom he had a personal grudge.

His visible attempts to make it go viral did not succeed, and the post was taken down by him about 24 hours after it was first posted. But because he had set it to public setting, the post and comments thread were visible on the FB platform, and were photographed in their entirety as evidence of defamation, slander and libel.

The degree of malicious intent was quite remarkable in several aspects, centered on his attempt to frame the object of his anger as someone to be avoided, and shunned, as someone unworthy of respect, devoid of value and undeserving of the dignity of social recognition. It was — at its core — an unjustified, cowardly and one-sided attack. But justice was not its aim. Lynching is not an act of justice, even in the self-justifying minds of its perpetrators. It is a brazen, blatant and explicit act of dehumanization.

The person orchestrating this event was summoned and charged with malicious harassment by the police, because of the evidence in the post and comments thread. This apparently came as a surprise to him, because in Sri Lanka on Facebook and Twitter gross violations of decency are normalized and even admired, among his peers. A culture of online impunity and unaccountability for wrongdoing was prevalent. Many people felt entitled by this to act any way they wished, behind the relative anonymity of their screens and keyboards, or the safe spaces of their echo chambers of like-minded netizens.

Many of the comments and responses on that post were banal and predictable. But the most interesting part about it was the perpetrator’s conscious awareness of what he was doing.

As we can see, he described the woman he was ranting against as a ‘black dude (who) wanted the KKK to join HIM’. By calling this ‘the correct analogy’ for the situation over which he was presiding, and calling the woman he was attacking a ‘black man’ attempting to recruit support from the oppressors who outnumbered ‘him’, he was knowingly equating himself and his mates with the Ku Klux Klan, those white-robed, hooded, racist vigilantes, enactors and symbols of inhumane behaviour against African American men, whom they outnumbered and killed by the hundreds in the 19th and 20thC, their criminal acts made anonymous, apparently impervious to reprimand, and rendered unaccountable by their covering, concealing hoods.

The lawyers and police who read the thread found it very interesting that he described himself and his friends in such a way. Who in their right mind would voluntarily ally himself publicly on the side of the perpetrator in such a contemptible ritual?

After George Floyd’s death was filmed and recorded on video, and his dying words were made available on audio recording and in text form, and started appearing on placards in protest marches, he became an icon. Because he died, he achieved martyr status, and activists were quick to point out that the racism was not new, but that it was now being recorded, and thus impossible to deny.

A few days earlier, in New York’s Central Park, a man himself had recorded on video the threats of violence made against him by a woman walking her dog, in an area of the public park where he was peacefully birdwatching. His asking her to comply with the park rules and put her dog on its leash triggered a furious outburst from her, caught on video and audio.

She identified him to police on the phone as an ‘African American Man.’ Mere identification? Or racial profiling in a racist societal context, where she could frame his actions as dangerous to her merely by invoking the systemic injustice which she knew would endanger him, and which would immediately render him powerless in relation to her?

The Central Park incident illuminated the workings of white privilege. But the murder of George Floyd exposed the injustice and violence of the police, and because it is seen as racialised violence, which has become routine and normalized, and because hundreds of thousands of people all over the world find it unjust, ugly and unacceptable to them, it is being used as a catalyst to channel the people’s collective anger at injustice into a global revolutionary movement.

Debates about whether #alllivesmatter negates #blacklivesmatter have caught alight. People of all colours and creeds are educating themselves about racism, the ideology of white supremacy, and the destructive structures that have supported and sustained it.

In an obscene defiance of this rise in awareness, there have been people on home videos shared on Facebook ritualistically recreating George Floyd’s death scene as a dramatized joke, the person playing the perpetrator laughing with his foot on the neck of the victim; the ‘victim’ writhing in a facsimile of exaggerated agony.

In real life, George Floyd could not writhe in agony, because he was held down by several men and could not move or breathe. He was overpowered and immobilized.

How can people who witness such planned and deliberate damage which is done to another human being, not only stay silent and observe it, but actively participate and re-enact such an event?

To do this, they would have to feel disconnected from the person being targeted: to see the victim as not sharing in their own humanity, and disqualified from the entitlements to dignity and respect and safety and courtesy and sovereignty that come with it. They would have to objectify him/her, otherise them, and feel no pain — and even positive pleasure — at being a spectator of their suffering.

Do any contemporary or historical analogies come to mind?

If so, let’s call them what they are. And by all means, let us use the most accurate terminology.

Image credit: Polygon