By: Zayd Hamid, CARP Intern After World War I, the German state transformed from an illiberal constitutional monarchy to a semi-liberal republic. That republic decayed into a fascist dictatorship approximately a decade later. That latter transformation also gave rise to one of history’s most brutal dictators: Adolf Hitler. Hitler established a hegemonic cult of personality …
Continue reading A Broken Crown: the Kaiser’s Rebuke of Hitler
By Henri van Nispen Please allow me to begin with a question: Do you, dear reader, think that allowing music from Jewish composers in the Bayreuth opera house in Germany can compensate for Richard Wagner’s character assassination of the Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer? The Bayreuth opera house was built under strict guidance by Wagner and …
Continue reading “Effects without cause”: Wagner’s character assassination of Meyerbeer
By Mikayla Knutson French reverence of the monarch shifted dramatically between Louis XIV to Louis XVI as the pendulum shifted from extreme character enhancement to rampant character assassination. Under Louis XIV (1643-1715), a comprehensive program glorified the Sun King and engineered his reputation and image to further his political power. This initiative channeled French elite …
Continue reading Part I: Image Control and Character Enhancement under Louis XIV
If you missed the webinar on May 15, 2020, featuring Martijn Icks and Eric Shiraev discussing Dr. Icks's chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Mangement, it's now available here on YouTube. Martijn Icks and Eric Shiraev delved into how women throughout history have become targets of character assassination. From Cleopatra to …
Continue reading Webinar #3: Evil Queens and Wicked Empresses
By Martijn Icks On June 21st, Edwina Hagen and I organized the colloquium “Character Assassination! Media and Mudslinging from Caligula to King Gorilla” in Amsterdam. We invited experts on various periods in Western history to discuss practices of character assassination from an historical perspective. Comparing various case studies, we hoped to shed light on some …
By Martijn Icks In my previous blog, I argued for the importance of historical perspectives on character assassination. However, historical research also comes with its own challenges and limitations. Let’s have a look at some of these. Perhaps the most obvious challenge is the danger of anachronism: we should be very careful not to assume …
Continue reading Character Assassination: The Historical Perspective [Part 2]
By Henri van Nispen Oderint, dum metuant. “Let them hate, so long as they fear.” It certainly is an adage appropriate for a creature like Wolverine. The saying, attributed to the Roman emperor Gaius Caligula (12-41 CE), would also fit someone like President Trump, even though Nobel laureate Paul Krugman thought Caligula the better of …
By Sergei A. Samoilenko In 1888, a French newspaper published an obituary headlined "Le marchand de la mort est mort" ("The merchant of death is dead"). It stated, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune by finding a way to kill the most people as ever before in the shortest time possible, died yesterday.” The …
Continue reading Alfred Nobel and Posthumous Reputation Management
By Martijn Icks When did character assassination originate? The question is impossible to answer. We can safely bet that the art of defamation is as old as human civilization itself, if not actually older. Even in prehistoric times, it’s all too easy to imagine some ambitious caveman spreading nasty tales about a rival for a …
Continue reading The Ancient Roots of Character Assassination
Today, the most notable character attacks of Thomas Jefferson derive from widely-circulated newspapers, campus protests, or national figureheads. But Jefferson’s character is also questioned in students' history texts. This has not always been so. In the mid-nineteenth century, instruction books devoted considerable space to Jefferson, casting him in a favorable light. Publications from 1835, 1842 …
Continue reading The Character of Thomas Jefferson: Then and Now [Part 2]
Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab 