Character Assassination throughout the Ages

M. Icks, E. Shiraev, M. Icks, E. Shiraev

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349485123, 9781137397867
• eBook ISBN: 9781137344168
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Using a variety of cases from history and today's life, the book examines character attackers targeting the private lives, behavior, values, and identity of their victims. Numerous historical examples show that character assassination has always been a very effective weapon to win political battles or settle personal scores.

1

Character Assassination: How Political Psychologists Can Assist Historians

Eric Shiraev

Political psychology can provide a useful framework for studying character assassination for at least two reasons. First, as a discipline, political psychology examines the complex interaction between the world of politics, on the one hand, and people’s experience and behavior, on the other. Because most character assassination cases involve individuals in the context of politics, political psychology can suggest empirical methods to study such cases. Second, it provides theories to explain them. Since the inception of this scholarly discipline in the 1960s, political psychologists have felt comfortable assisting historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Political psychologists borrow research methods and explanatory models from the behavioral and cognitive sciences, design their own research methods, and use them to study specific cases. Public figures, for obvious reasons, are unavailable for direct experimentation. Many of their actions, however, are on display and available for empirical analysis. Political psychologists learn from historians and then attempt to explain historical facts.

Conditions of Attacks

Why does an individual attack another person’s character? First, for the sake of argument, we assume that the attacker’s actions are mostly rational and pursue a reasonable goal. Of course, individuals may turn to personal attacks spontaneously, under the influence of strong emotions, such as anger, or in self-defense. Such attacks are usually brief. Do we not all from time to time call some people bad names when we feel frustrated and later regret this? In other cases, a person’s motivation to attack reflects the attacker’s desire to harm the reputation of the victim (see the book’s introduction, where the key terms are defined). This reputation is judged in the court of public opinion. In other words, the attack should be public. The attack should diminish, shatter, or even destroy the victim’s chances to succeed in a political campaign, a business endeavor, or a career. In the United States, public opinion has tended to view more negatively those political candidates who were accused of sexual or financial misconduct, lying, or hiding certain embarrassing biographical facts. Such candidates usually spend considerable energy and resources defending themselves against such attacks even if the accusations are grossly inaccurate or untrue.1 During the 2008 presidential campaign and later, opponents of President Barack Obama repeatedly hinted that he was a Muslim and was hiding this fact. John McCain, his opponent, during the same campaign was accused of fathering an illegitimate child with a black woman some years ago. These allegations were untrue (Obama is Christian, and McCain had legally adopted a girl from Bangladesh), but the attacks caught the eyes of many. Uncertainty and prejudice become favorable conditions for attacks. For example, it was not very helpful to Obama that even in 2012, according to polls, 44 percent of Americans said they could not identify his religion.2

It must be noted, however, that a victim of character attacks is not necessarily an innocent individual falling under a barrage of lies. Some attacks may be completely untrue while others are based on facts. Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, whose case was introduced in the introduction to this book, had a long history of placing himself in embarrassing situations. What is important is that these blunders were later exaggerated and used to attack him. Opponents of U.S. president Bill Clinton repeatedly called him a liar or “liar-in-chief” in the late 1990s, in the aftermath of his infamous sex scandal involving a female White House intern. Clinton tried to cover up this incident and publicly stated that he “did not have sexual relations” with the intern. Although he later apologized for his misleading statement, the “liar” label stuck and was repeated in numerous character attacks, as we will see later in chapter 11.

Who then becomes a victim of character assassination? What are the typical conditions under which a person’s character is attacked?

Public Competition

One potential victim is a person who is engaged in a political or other type of competition requiring people’s support or approval. An electoral campaign, a pageant, or any competitive selection procedure can provide favorable conditions for character attacks. Character assassination is the ultimate goal of the attacker because it eliminates a victim’s chances of success. U.S. Senator George Allen of Virginia, during his reelection campaign in 2006, committed a verbal blunder when he during his speech jokingly called a person in the audience who was of Indian descent “macaca” (similar to the French word “macaque”). Allen then acknowledged his mistake and apologized. His opponents, however, immediately labeled him a racist and repeatedly stated that his gaffe was a reflection of Allen’s deep-seated prejudice against minorities. It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of character attacks, but in Allen’s case they coincided with his substantial drop in the polls in a very tight race and his subsequent defeat in the election two months later.3

Social Status

The victim of an attack is sometimes an individual who, though not competing for any office at the time, has already achieved high social status, an important and powerful social position, or an esteemed reputation (for example, a government post or an elevated place in the social hierarchy). Certainly, one needs a socially approved “character” before it can be attacked, damaged, or assassinated. For instance, accusations of being a Nazi sympathizer were launched against Pope Benedict XVI during his tenure. The attackers used the pope’s biography to exaggerate the fact that in his youth he had to join the Hitler Youth. However, the attackers failed to mention that almost every boy in Germany at the time was forced to join this organization. American comedian Bill Maher in 2008 and actress Susan Sarandon in 2011 called the pope a “Nazi” as they were lashing out at the Catholic Church.4

Professional Accomplishments

A victim of character assassination is often someone who is successful in a certain field such as business, science, or an artistic arena. If one is socially or professionally successful or productive, this is a condition for character attacks. Such attacks usually have little to do with the victims’ scientific or artistic input, but rather with their missteps in private life or other liabilities. Sigmund Freud was frequently accused during his life of being a “pervert” and “sex maniac.” Freud, in his works published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emphasized the role of human sexuality in psychological disorders as well as everyday life. Sex was a delicate subject in the relatively conservative upper-class social atmosphere in Europe at that time. Freud’s scientific interest in human sexuality served as a suitable excuse for his opponents to launch persistent character attacks against the psychiatrist.5

Affiliation

The victim may represent a powerful ideology, theory, or social or political cause, party, or movement. In these cases, the attackers attempt to weaken and trivialize the ideas for which the victim stands or stood. Another goal is to diminish future support and the number of followers. Some critics of Communism have long emphasized that Vladimir Lenin, the most prominent leader of the Russian Communist revolution, had contracted syphilis in his youth, which hastened his death in 1924.6 Although the accuracy of these accusations is almost impossible to establish, this is rather unimportant in this case. Diehard Communists expectedly reject any associations of Lenin’s name with sexually transmitted diseases. Anticommunists, on the other hand, may welcome such character attacks.

Before we further discuss the reasons behind character attacks, we should consider their different types.

Types of Attacks

Character attacks and character assassinations differ in terms of the scope of their targets (individual and collective), timing (“live” or postmortem attacks), and momentum (planned or spontaneous).

Scope: Individual and Summative Character Attacks

Most examples of character attacks refer to individuals as victims. Are there summative character attacks to smear a group of individuals? As mentioned in the introduction, such attacks are common during international conflicts.7 Summative character attacks can also be designed to advance the attacker’s domestic political goals. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, China in the 1950s, and Vietnam in the 1950s, the ruling authorities conducted massive attacks against so-called rich peasants. Government newspapers routinely published stories about individual rich peasants, portraying them as greedy, mean, arrogant, and uncaring. By attacking an individual’s character, the authorities were attacking a large group. In doing so, the Communist leaders were setting up the conditions for the most significant collectivization reforms in history, which placed most peasants in collective farms. Although there could be an interesting discussion about whether a group can have its own “character,” this book is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Character Assassination: How Political Psychologists Can Assist Historians
• Ancient Rome
• 2 Character Attack and Invective Speech in the Roman Republic: Cicero as Target
• 3 Reports about the “Sex Life” of Early Roman Emperors: A Case of Character Assassination?
• 4 Creating Tyrants in Ancient Rome: Character Assassination and Imperial Investiture
• The Middle Ages
• 5 Falsifying the Prophet: Muhammad at the Hands of His Earliest Christian Biographers in the West
• 6 Louis of Orléans, Isabeau of Bavaria, and the Burgundian Propaganda Machine, 1392–1407
• 7 A Newcomer in Defamatory Propaganda: Youth (Late Fourteenth to Early Fifteenth Century)
• Editorial Reflections: Medieval Cases
• The Early Modern Age
• 8 The Ass in the Seat of St. Peter: Defamation of the Pope in Early Lutheran Flugschriften
• 9 Odious and Vile Names: Political Character Assassination and Purging in the French Revolution
• 10 “As Awkward and Deficient as His Wife Is Amiable and Accomplished”: The Character Assassination of the Dutch Statesman Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761–1825)
• Editorial Reflections: Early -Modern Cases
• The Modern Age
• 11 Character Attacks and American Presidents
• 12 The Gao-Rao Affair: A Case of Character Assassination in Chinese Politics in the 1950s
• 13 A Character Assassination Attempt: The Case of Václav Havel
• Editorial Reflections: Modern Cases
• Epilogue
• Index