Massacres and their staging in the media impact our everyday lives more than we realize. Whether it’s the latest news about the horrors unfolding in the Middle East or shocking images from Ukraine, the media coverage of these events is brought directly into our living rooms. This information penetrates deep into the collective memory of societies, as these incidents are not just local tragedies, but raise questions about humanity, responsibility, and international reactions.
Acts of violence are documented and interpreted selectively, which means that the media take certain events and mould and shape them into ‘massacres’ in the first place.1 Here, what takes centre stage is often the question of guilt, as well as whether the event can generally be classified as a massacre. The term ‘massacre’ evokes affective reactions such as fear and unease and implies a threat of brutal violence against defenceless victims. The media construction of events as massacres thus serves as an effective means of indoctrinating social groups. The term itself is derived from the French massacre, which comes from the Old French for ‘butcher’s bench/slaughterhouse’. During the French Wars of Religion at the end of the sixteenth century,2 it became associated with collective violence against defenceless victims, taking on a meaning that survives until today. This definition was shaped in particular by the so-called St Bartholomew’s Night (1572), which, due to the considerable number of victims and unbridled cruelty, became firmly anchored in a European culture of remembrance. The media staging of acts of violence as ‘massacres’ suggests the construction of cruelty and injustice is more relevant than the number of victims. An analysis of these media constructions must also look at non-European ‘massacres’, whose reception histories, despite their longevity, have often been forgotten.
Continue reading From Amboyna to Boston: How Massacres Become Media Events- I am using ‘media’ here as a collective term that encompasses various types of media (paintings, pamphlets, poems, newspapers, etc.) from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These vary in terms of their use, distribution, and target audience, but all aim to provide information and/or express opinions regarding the massacre. [↩]
- See Peter Burschel, ‘Massaker’, in Friedrich Jaeger (ed.), Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2008), vol. viii, Manufaktur – Naturgeschichte, 110–11; Cornel Zwierlein, ‘Die Genese eines europäischen Erinnerungsortes: Die Bartholomäusnacht im Geschichtsgebrauch des konfessionellen Zeitalters und der Aufklärung’, in Frank Bezner and Kirsten Mahlke (eds.), Zwischen Wissen und Politik: Archäologie und Genealogie frühneuzeitlicher Vergangenheitskonstruktion (Heidelberg, 2011), 91–129, at 91. [↩]
