I think something more akin to "putting down the rabid wolves trying to kill us all" would be a bit more effective. "Assassinate" is a word that makes them seem legitimate, whereas "put them down" and "rabid wolves" is phrasing that identifies them as the subversive anarchist terrorist group they really are.
I think that Taylor just generally has the idea of legitimacy rather skewed in her head. i.e. she sees no real difference between the two besides who is currently in power.
Yes, but she's playing for an audience. She knows how PR works and is working the crowd here. Phrasing that makes them feel like they're fighting against rabid animals needing to be put down, gets into their headspace, and makes them feel like they're doing a good thing. It also encourages them to start actually dealing with the problem in a final manner, rather than the catch-and-release program they've been doing.
Eh, it might be counterproductive when you consider the specific audience. They might react with revulsion when faced with dehumanization rather than go along with it.
You think outright saying they're assassinating people is going to be better than putting them down? Death Eaters act worse than rabid animals, killing and tormenting indiscriminately, just because it's fun. I don't think describing them as such is particularly inaccurate. And describing it as assassination gives them a legitimacy that they don't (and shouldn't) have.
Yeah, I do think that it would be better. Because, as you said, she's playing to an audience. And the audience has refused to admit that their own society's people can be monsters time and time and time again, with only select individuals getting to lose the "human" quality.
Then she needs to find someone else to back, because they're just going to get themselves and everyone else killed (or worse). They refuse to actually fight or do anything at all useful. These are monsters that need to be destroyed. They gleefully feed innocent people, including children, to soul-eating abominations. And imprisoning them clearly won't work, given how much they've corrupted an already unstable and horrible system.
Thing is: I don't think there's anyone else to back. Moody, the newly traumatized Harry, maybe Amelia Bones in charge of the Aurors, but that's about it.
Except they're trapping them in literal hell on earth. You don't do that to people you empathize or sympathize with. You do that to things you don't think are worthy of any actual effort beyond the minimum, and you don't find them to be worth the consideration it takes to not completely destroy them on a psychological and emotional level. Just putting up some anti-teleportation wards and taking away their wands would be enough to subdue the vast majority of magicals, but no, they had to stuff them in the worst hell they could manage without putting in too much effort.
Because, again: they don't empathize with them. But neither do they dehumanize them. Because that would require them to be treated as anything.
Which is dehumanizing. People are worthy of consideration, of remembering. A thing is stuffed in a drawer and forgotten about.
Except it leads to a very, very different reaction than proper dehumanization.
But they do accept "throwing them in a mortal hell," "killing them out of hand," "sucking their souls out so they're denied an afterlife," and "throwing them in the Veil of Death" to be perfectly fine.
Yeah. Because they ignore that all of that is a thing as well and put it out of their mind. They don't think about things that might cause them mental distress to such a degree.
And yet they don't decry them when they're brought to the forefront of attention. It doesn't particularly bother them. They're not fighting against it. They just let that kind of thing happen, because the people it's being done to aren't people, to them. If it were them or someone they cared about, they'd rail against it, but people they don't know aren't people, just like statistics you read about in the paper aren't people; they're just numbers.
I don't think we'll agree about this, because the specifics of HOW they dehumanize people don't lead to decisive action, it leads to trying to scoot away from them and hope that they don't notice them. They habitually ignore issues rather than doing anything about them, and when they are forced to deal with them they immediately put it out of their mind and pretend it never happened.
And if that's the case, then Harry and Taylor should go their own way and start their own faction, because they cannot win with soldiers who refuse to fight.
Magic makes things more messy, but doxies, pixies, and fairies might all be considered 'bugs' by Taylor's power (though they're humanoid)... Recall it also works on crabs, and worms, neither of which are insects...
Here's what I could dig up from the Fantastic Beast book and some of the video games:
Blast-Ended Skrewts! Hagrid will be overcome with joy that someone else appreciates them as much as he does.
Huh, now, that's a thought. For an interlude. Could be interesting but man it would be so short…
