Bugs, cockroaches, vermin – how dehumanising propaganda sets the stage

"After today's festive gathering comes the Easter clean-up: the bugs have made it through winter. We are going to dismantle the financial machine that has been using corrupt dollars to 'buy' politicians, judges, journalists, bogus NGOs and political activists", Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in his speech at his party's event commemorating the 1848 revolution on 15 March.

Commenting on the statement, Péter Magyar, chairman of the Tisza Party, said, "I always think that the Prime Minister has reached the lowest point possible, but I think that today he truly managed to do that". Comparing those who don't agree with his policies to bugs was also condemned by the other opposition parties, with several intellectuals and civic personalities also speaking out against it. The Association of Hungarian Judges (Mabir) issued a statement rejecting the allegation that judges are being “bought with corrupt dollars”. "We also object to comparing judges to harmful insects or animals," they wrote. The leader of Fidesz's parliamentary group, Máté Kocsis wrote on Facebook on Sunday: Half the country refers to Péter Magyar as a bug”, and added that "what Klára Dobrev (politician of the opposition Democratic Coalition party – TN) the leftist pundits and the liberal press are doing about "the subject of bugs" is "amazing double-talk". Orbán, however, used the plural when talking about bugs, and it is obvious from his next sentence that he was not (only) talking about Péter Magyar.

Although calling people who disagree with the head of government or who do not serve the interests of Fidesz 'bugs' is harsh enough in itself, there have been numerous examples of those who have used similar rhetoric throughout history: dictators and autocrats dehumanised Jews during the Second World War, the Tutsis were described this way prior to the Rwandan genocide, and before and during the current Russian-Ukrainian war, Ukrainians have been dehumanised with similar tools.

Jewish bugs, cockroach Tutsis and Nazi Ukrainians

Before and during the Second World War, members of the German Nazi party referred to the Jews as a mindless herd and barbarians, often calling them animals, vermin and blamed them for the spread of some diseases. The core of Nazi ideology was racist anthropology: National Socialism saw itself as a political revolution and created a new image of mankind, while at the same time subjecting other groups of people who did not fit into this concept to massive ideological dehumanisation.

Propaganda material often referred to the need to cleanse the world of the 'Jewish pandemic', and during the Holocaust they were also referred to as rats and lice. After a while, they also began to use the term ‘Untermenschen’ to refer to them, which translates to something like: a subhuman race, or less than human.

In the 18 February 1933 issue of Egyenlőség (Equality) magazine they wrote: "The official newspaper of the German Chancellor, the Völkischer Beobachter, 'calls the Jews of Berlin "bugs" that "the capital must be purged of as soon as possible"'. According to the article, the German government also stated that it was time for Hitler to "settle the affairs of German Jewry". In the 1940s, similar rhetoric could also be found in Hungary: in 1942, Ferenc Szálasi, the head of the Arrow Cross Party, also spoke about bugs in Nagyvárad (Oradea in today's Romania), and at the end of his speech he "addressed the Jewish question with a joke, saying that when a housewife is having her house fumigated, she is not going to ask each bedbug whether they had bitten her, but will eliminate the whole lot".

The dehumanisation of the Tutsis played an important role in the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, some 800,000 people were killed in the country within a period of about 80 days, the vast majority of them belonging to the Tutsi minority. This was one of the worst genocides since the Second World War.

As Hungarian writer and literary historian Krisztián Nyáry recalled on Facebook: In a 1992 speech, Dr. Léon Mugesera, a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts of the National University of Rwanda and a member of the National Revolutionary Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND) party, called the Tutsi minority ‘bugs’, and argued that they should have been deported to Ethiopia or other foreign countries. (While Nyáry speaks of the term "bugs" being used, in reality the Tutsis were called ‘cockroaches’ in Rwanda.) He spoke in similar terms about members of the political opposition, threatening that if they did not leave on their own, they would find other ways to get rid of them.

In 1994, the speech was repeatedly played on the privately owned radio station RTLM, which had close ties to the government. Building on this, the hosts started demanding the extermination of the cockroaches. The radio also called the Tutsis snakes. Hutus are typically shorter than Tutsis, so on the radio they also urged people to "cut down the tall trees". RTLM's listeners were mostly radicalised Hutus, so the call reached precisely those who already saw the Tutsis as inferior to themselves. Government propaganda portrayed the aggression as national self-defence and promised that the perpetrators would not be prosecuted.

The process of dehumanisation in Rwanda began long before the famous cockroach analogy: in 1959, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, the leader of the radical Hutu political party Aprosoma, openly called for the extermination of the Tutsi ‘vermin’.

Another example of dehumanisation is Vladimir Putin's virtually constant use of the term 'Nazi' to describe Ukrainians before and since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war and the Russian political leadership's use of other dehumanising terms to describe the population of the invaded country. For example, according to an analysis by the think tank RAND, Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the National Security Committee, has called Ukrainians cockroaches ("Various cockroaches that have been breeding in the Kyiv insectary are constantly threatening to return to Crimea."), but he has also referred to them as 'Khokhol', a Russian slur for Ukrainians.

It also isn't the first time Viktor Orbán has used a term to dehumanise a group of people: the Hungarian Prime Minister has previously referred to migrants as "poison". But using this kind of language is far from rare in Hungarian public discourse: When referring tot he opposition, Máté Böröcz, the head of the cabinet of the (Fidesz-member) mayor of Szekszárd, once wrote that "those who follow the herd always end up grazing grass covered in shit", while former MSZP politician, Ildikó Bangóné Borbély called Fidesz supporters "rats", and government pundig Zsolt Bayer referred to refugees as "vermin that should be exterminated". At the time, Fidesz politician Tibor Navracsics reacted to this by saying that "someone who considers a group of people as animals has no place in a community". But it may be worth going all the way back to József Torgyán (Hungarian politician who used to lead the Independent Smallholders' Party) to find a similar example: back in 1996, he referred to his political opponents as "disgusting vermin" and "vultures".

The playbook: first create fear, and then you can lie about anything

Research on dehumanisation intensified after the Second World War, with psychologists wanting to find out how people can be induced to go to war and commit genocide. Previous research had established that dehumanisation is a psychological mechanism that can facilitate inhumane acts. Social neuroscience has shown that people think about other people through a so-called social-cognitive network in the brain, and that this network is often not activated when faced with previously dehumanised targets. Another study has found that dehumanisation by comparing a group of people to animals or attributing animal-like characteristics to them increases people's willingness to accept aggression (whether verbal or in action) against the affected group because it changes their perception of what is socially acceptable and desirable.

Dehumanising language is often sait to be a precursor to mass violence. According to the theory of moral disengagement, degrading some people or a group of people, and denying their human qualities may facilitate extreme violence. The terminology implies that since the opponent is not seen as a human being, anything can be done to them, and there is no need to act according to the rules of morality.

Marcel Danesi, professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, writes in Politico that "Once someone is tuned into these metaphors, their brain actually changes in ways that make them more likely to believe bigger lies, even conspiracy theories." According to Danesi, in the political arena, the scenario is simple: first, one has to instill fear or insecurity in people, either about economic instability or using pre-existing cultural prejudices, but the emotional basis must always be fear. The brain then responds by producing cortisol and adrenaline through its built-in defence mechanisms, and initiates a fight-or-flight response.

In this state, dehumanising metaphors can prove to be highly effective, and people are less likely to notice the lies. Research has shown that after a while, switching off these associations becomes impossible, and lies can become a new conviction, even an absolute truth. And once people have started believing this rhetoric, there is little chance that they will change their minds later, even when faced with evidence to the contrary. Instead of changing their well-established beliefs, they subconsciously only seek information that confirms their ideas.

This proves that the use of language that might seem like harmless hyperbole can literally change the way people think, which in turn modifies their behaviour, and this is beneficial for manipulative politicians.