Character Assassination: the art of defamation throughout the ages
Character assassination – undermining or degrading the status of an opponent through personal attack – is a well-known yet not well-researched phenomenon in politics. Candidates running for office, politicians from opposing parties and rulers from countries at war commonly attempt to portray their opponents as weak, untrustworthy, or otherwise falling short of political and moral standards. Slander, mockery and insinuation become effective tools to achieve political and personal goals.
Ad hominem attacks on political rivals are not limited to modern times. In the dying days of the Roman Republic, Octavian and Mark Antony engaged in a fierce propaganda war, painting each other as a usurping social upstart and a debauched slave of ‘oriental’ vices, respectively. Nor does the victim always have to be alive. After their death, several Roman emperors suffered damnatio memoriae, a curse on their memory by the senate, causing their statues to be destroyed and their names to be erased from monuments. In a more gruesome example, the rotting corpse of pope Formosus (r. 891-896) was dug up from its grave by his successor and put on trial in the Cadaver Synod. The American and French Revolutions provide powerful examples of relentless character attacks against political opponents, both dead and alive. In the Soviet Union and Communist China, the names of erred and fallen political leaders had been erased from history textbooks. The campaigns for the US presidency provide many rich examples of character assassination attempts, such as a Bush/Cheney television ad presenting Democrat candidate John Kerry as a spineless flip-flopper who would go ‘whichever way the wind blows’ in the 2004 elections.
The victims of character attacks include not only politicians, but other public figures as well, such as scientists, artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, and writers. Interpreting the term more broadly, character assassination can also be applied to whole social groups through the construction of negative stereotypes. By painting an unflattering picture of ‘the Catholic’, ‘the foreigner’, ‘the heathen’ or ‘the Negro’, every individual who falls under that description is denigrated. Nazi propaganda against ‘the Jew’ as an untrustworthy, money-loving and vice-ridden enemy of the state is but one of many examples.
How does character assassination work? When and why do character ‘assassins’ decide to deploy their fatal weapons of facts and fiction? Why do people fall so easily when they are under character attack? This conference attempts to discuss these questions and to reveal the anatomy of character assassination. The participants will try to combine the existing historic evidence with an analysis of new cases, their origins, and consequences.
Contact:
Dr. Martijn Icks
Seminar für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik
Marstallhof 4
69117 Heidelberg
E-Mail: martijn.icks@zaw.uni-heidelberg.de
