How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Fascist leaders portray themselves as the father of the nation, casting all threats to patriarchal manhood and the traditional family as attacks against which the fascist authority must defend the nation. Accordingly, fascist propaganda characterizes race mixing as a corruption of the nation purity. LGBTQ+ individuals are also cast as particular threats.

Irrational conspiracy theories that depict Jews intentionally plotting for Black men to rape White women as a means of undermining racial purity are prominent in the thinking of Adolf Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, and others. Myths of Black rapists are frequently conjured to justify racist violence in the United States. Although many Americans assume that rape perpetrated by African Americans was the main rationale for lynching, research in the late 19th century shows that the majority of victims were never even accused of rape.

In Myanmar, the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by Muslim Rohingya men set off a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya people throughout the country. Similar paranoia has sparked among Hindus in India about minority Muslim populations. In the United States, rape accusations against Syrian refugees spurred a wave of hostility, although there is little evidence that any attack of this type ever occurred.