When victimhood takes a bad-faith turn. Wronged explores how the practice of claiming harm has become the rhetorical province of the powerful.

Another, Chouliaraki argues, is that victimhood has too often become the rhetorical province of the powerful, sometimes even of the aggressor. We’ve gotten ourselves turned around.

But Chouliaraki’s biggest objection to our increasing emphasis on victimhood is that it creates a strange inversion wherein “claims to victimhood are claims to power.”

It kinda makes sense to me, but "has become"? I didn't have the easiest time trying to understand the article (if someone might summarize their understanding, that'd be interesting to read), but to me it feels like the powerful (and also the less powerful who are afraid of losing their status to those even less powerful than themselves) using victimhood as an aggressive tactic to advance their own agenda or to protect their own standing in the socio-economic hierarchy doesn't seem to be a new phenomenon at all. I would guess the degree of that rhetoric being used probably increases whenever people are afraid of losing their current status of power or feel threatened (for example during economic crises and so on).

I'm thinking of the narratives used by the national conservatives (and later national socialists) in Germany after WWI, for example. Conspiracy theories like the "Dolchstoßlegende" (claming the German Reich lost WWI because social democrats and Jewish bolsheviks betrayed the military), the idea of being a victim of unfair war reparations, of decadent art and Jewish science corrupting the German spirit, and so on. Even older examples would be the anti-Jewish pogroms which happened throughout Europe during the middle ages and later (where Jews were being blamed for plagues etc.).

The article claims contemporary victimhood rhetoric has an emphasis on overly individualistic "personal tales of pain", but that's also not intuitive or obvious to me (or I misunderstood what is meant by it). I would guess those personal tales of pain and the individualistic nature of victimhood rhetoric are way more visible and accessible nowadays due to how the internet is used, but I have a hard time believing those are new or increasingly common phenomena.
An idea to think about might be how victimhood also seems to be important in religions, and how the changing role of religion might have influenced victimhood rhetoric. Religions were probably often effective in upholding social order (you might be a victim now and are suffering, but your suffering is meaningful and you'll have it good in heaven if you behave and accept your lot; you are virtuous by being a victim; you are suffering because god elected you to be damned, and while it's not your fault, you cannot do anything about it).

In Wronged, this story is both a warning against “victimhood culture” and an illustration of how claiming victimhood can collapse “systemic vulnerability and personal grievance … into one vocabulary.” Chouliaraki wishes to undo that collapse. Another is to help readers “recognize the suffering of the vulnerable for precisely what it is: a matter not of victimhood but of injustice.”

Central to Chouliaraki’s exploration is the distinction she draws between victimhood and vulnerability. She argues that victimhood is not a condition but a claim—that you’re a victim not when something bad happens to you, but when you say, “I am wronged!” Anyone, of course, can make this declaration, no matter the scale (or even reality) of the wrong they’ve suffered. For this reason, per Chouliaraki, victimhood should be a less important barometer for public decision making than vulnerability, which is a condition.

That makes sense I think and seems like an interesting distinction, but I feel there's still the issue of someone having to judge whether the condition of vulnerability applies (even if it might be measured objectively in some cases), and what should follow from that condition. The difference seems to be that between a subjective self attribution (victimhood) vs. an attribution through others who have the authority and knowledge to determine it as objectively as possible (vulnerability), if I understood that correctly.

But even in cases where vulnerability can be measured somewhat objectively, people in power could still easily argue certain classes of measurable vulnerability (e.g. certain illnesses) are not worthy of support and protection because of their moral views (e.g. a vulnerability might just be a matter of personal responsibility or the result of immoral actions according to them), while other forms of measurable vulnerability might be worthy of such support. Social-darwinists for instance could argue there's no reason for public decision making in favor of people with poor socio-economic status (a somewhat measurable condition/vulnerability, but obviously there will also be arguments about different metrics that might be used) because that condition or class of vulnerability might be just/natural/inevitable to them.

She asks readers to rethink the language of I am wronged and turn instead to questions that are more basic, yet harder to solve: Who is in pain? What tangible protection can we give them? How can we keep others like them safe? She seems to appeal less to the truly influential, whom she may see as a lost cause, than to her many potential readers who occupy a social middle ground: vulnerable in some ways, yet close enough to power that victimhood culture might benefit them. If those of us who are in that place reassess the appeal of victimhood, Wronged suggests, we can decrease others’ ability to use it in bad faith, or to conflate having to do something they dislike (wearing a mask, let’s say) with genuine pain.

That makes a lot of sense (I think). But it still seems easy to argue about what genuine pain constitutes, because in many cases, there is no easy way to just measure it objectively. And beyond that, asking people to consider sharing resources with those below them in certain socio-economic hierarchies is an noble goal, but I feel pretty pessimistic about people being just willing to do that, especially if they feel threatened in their socio-economic standing themselves (whether justified or not) and internalized having to assert themselves in a competition for limited resources.

Archive link

The opressor claiming they were the victim of provocation and that they are the victim of their own behaviours is a very, very old trope.

I would go as far as saying it is one of the basic human behaviours. We always judge ourselves by our intentions (and how we want to be, regardless of how we actually are), and judge others by impact.

That's not to say there aren't people that are fully able to admit fault etc but the aggressor claiming they are the victim is hardly a new concept. Not even in literature.

The people such writings will reach are often the people that are already in a position to live life in a way that doesn't promote self-victimisation to begin with.

I am overly pessimistic about the impact of such work, but not blind to the fact that it does work. Just maybe not to the extent some people hope.

Anyone with more knowledge or understanding of slave/master dialectic would probably have some interesting insights here