Anti-victim

In her third book – following *What White People Don’t Want to Hear About Racism, But Should Know* (2019) and *Identity Crisis* (2023) – Alice Hasters has examined the evolution of the term ‘victim’ and, with it, the shift in the discourse: For increasingly, the term ‘victim’ no longer refers to people who have suffered injustice, but to those who disrupt harmony, who are regarded as effeminate, who drag others down or seek to place themselves above them.

Harshness towards others is increasingly seen as something to be aspired to – and whilst inhumanly high demands are placed on victims, powerful alliances of patriarchal complicity are changing our world for the worse.

Alice Hasters describes a cultural shift that is no coincidence that it goes hand in hand with a resurgence of authoritarianism and fascism.

What happens to a society in which sensitivity is regarded as elitist? And the law of the strongest as authentic?

With intellectual restlessness, Alice Hasters counters the current distortions in discourse with a call for an analysis of real power dynamics, and opposes the new proto-fascist harshness with the political power of solidarity. Moderated by Dr Anna Hankings-Evans, she will now present her book *Anti-Victim: Why We Despise Vulnerability*, published in April this year, at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße.

Everyone is talking about victims. Some become victims; others stage themselves as such. There are the victims of climate change and the victims of high petrol prices; there are the victims of racist violence and those who see themselves as ‘threatened by foreigners’.

This word, which triggers such strong emotions, is so overused that one feels like covering one’s ears to block out all the whingeing – though in doing so, one would risk stifling one’s own capacity for discernment and one’s own sense of justice. A dangerous process of obfuscation and dehumanisation.

How can people regain clarity and, with it, the energy to act in solidarity?