Why Do Political Persecution Campaigns Rely on Smear Tactics and Humiliation?

Research on political persecution and transnational repression offers several interconnected mechanisms that help explain why these tactics are used.

1. Turning Political Questions into Attacks on Personal Character

This is one of the central mechanisms.

The original questions are straightforward:

Does an individual have the right to criticize the government? Does the state have the right to persecute someone for exercising their freedom of political expression?

Through smear campaigns and character assassination, however, public attention can be redirected toward entirely different questions:

Is this person morally questionable? Can they be trusted? Do they deserve to be socially excluded?

The focus shifts from the legitimacy of state power to the victim's private life, moral character, and social reputation.

Political persecution is reframed as the supposedly justified treatment of a "problematic" individual.

The objective is not necessarily to convince everyone that the allegations are true. Sometimes, creating enough doubt is sufficient.

2. Undermining the Victim's Credibility

A crucial question in political persecution is: Whose testimony will be believed?

When someone is portrayed as dishonest, unstable, immoral, or untrustworthy, their credibility may be undermined even before they have an opportunity to speak about what happened to them.

This mechanism can be understood through philosopher Miranda Fricker's concept of testimonial injustice: a form of epistemic injustice in which a person's credibility is unfairly diminished because of identity-based prejudice.

Not every instance of defamation necessarily constitutes testimonial injustice. Nevertheless, the concept provides a useful framework for understanding how prejudice can influence whose accounts are taken seriously.

3. Using Humiliation to Produce Social Isolation

Humiliation is different from ordinary criticism.

Criticism addresses particular actions or decisions. Humiliation, by contrast, often seeks to degrade a person's identity, dignity, and standing within society.

When humiliation occurs publicly, or when it targets someone's private life, gender, or sexuality, its consequences may extend beyond emotional distress. It can affect personal relationships, professional opportunities, and an individual's sense of security.

The purpose may not simply be to make the target suffer. It may also be to discourage others from associating with or supporting that person.

As social support weakens, the practical costs of further repression may decrease.

4. Exploiting Existing Social Prejudices

Smear campaigns do not necessarily need to invent new prejudices. They can exploit those that already exist.

These may include:

• Double standards surrounding women's sexuality and sexual autonomy;

• Stigma associated with mental health;

• Stereotypes about immigrants, minority groups, and political dissidents;

• Moral judgments directed at individuals whose private lives do not conform to conventional social expectations.

This helps explain why sexual shaming, character assassination, and attempts to portray someone as mentally unstable can become instruments of political stigmatization.

By exploiting existing prejudices, perpetrators may make false allegations easier to circulate and more difficult to challenge.

The burden of disproving those allegations is then shifted onto the person being targeted.

5. Forcing Victims to Defend Themselves Instead of Exercising Their Political Rights

This mechanism is particularly significant.

Consider someone who has been publicly criticizing state power.

If that individual becomes the subject of repeated allegations concerning their character, private life, or morality, they may find themselves spending considerable time responding to accusations:

"That is not who I am."

"Those things never happened."

"I did nothing wrong."

Time and attention that could otherwise have been devoted to political expression, education, work, relationships, and ordinary life are redirected toward defending personal reputation.

This is a form of agenda diversion: the focus shifts from holding those in power accountable to demanding that the targeted individual continually justify themselves.

Even when the individual refuses to participate in this process of self-defense, the stigma may still influence how third parties perceive them.

6. Creating Moral Justifications for Abuse

This is perhaps one of the most disturbing mechanisms.

When someone is portrayed as dangerous, immoral, or undeserving of respect, mistreatment of that person may become easier to rationalize.

This connects to psychologist Albert Bandura's concept of moral disengagement, particularly mechanisms involving the dehumanization of victims and the attribution of blame to those being harmed.

The underlying logic can become:

"We are not persecuting an innocent person. This person is the problem."

In this way, perpetrators may attempt not only to evade responsibility but also to claim a position of moral superiority.

The person responsible for the harm is presented as morally justified, while the person subjected to that harm is portrayed as deserving of it.

A Deeper Question: Why Target Morality and Human Dignity?

Political power can directly restrict an individual's actions, but it cannot necessarily change that individual's convictions or understanding of their own political position.

Smear campaigns, however, seek to operate through social relationships and public perceptions, influencing how much trust, support, and freedom to participate in society an individual can retain.

The objective is not merely to inflict harm, but to make the victim bear the social stigma manufactured by those responsible for that harm.

This is why moral smear campaigns in political persecution are not always incidental insults. They can function as deliberate instruments of political repression.

An important distinction must nevertheless be maintained: the fact that a campaign can produce humiliation does not mean that the person targeted possesses the moral defects alleged against them. Nor does a socially manufactured reputation constitute evidence of wrongdoing.

Ultimately, one principle deserves particular emphasis:

When state power is challenged, attacking the private morality of the person raising that challenge does nothing to answer the original political or legal questions.

Whether someone's private life conforms to the expectations of others is entirely separate from whether the state has the right to surveil, harass, intimidate, or persecute that person.

Even if an individual genuinely has moral shortcomings, those shortcomings do not strip them of their fundamental human rights.

This is one of the foundational principles of modern human rights law: rights are not rewards reserved for the morally perfect.