Social Ontology of massacres

There is a very contentious debate being conducted in the newspaper pages and social media as to what exactly constitutes a “massacre”. As with all abstract nouns, massacre points to a particular lived experiences of persons that have been given social meaning. The debate brings the old philosophical distinction made by Searle between what he calls “Brute Facts vs. Institutional Facts”. The former being physical realities that exist completely independent of human opinion like Mt Roraima or crude oil. Institutional Facts on the other hand are social realities that only exist because we collectively agree they do (e.g., money, citizenship, or massacres). They are socially constructed and their nature is examined through a field of study called “Social ontology”.
The question for the interlocuters of the debate as to whether the May 25 events at Wismar in 1964 constitutes a “massacre” to satisfy the perspective of Social Ontology. This posits from concrete historical observations that massacres begin with the systematic unmaking of a human group’s social existence prior to, during, and after their physical attacks. Viewed through social ontology, a massacre is never just a collection of spontaneous individual murders, for instance. It is a highly structured institutional event made possible by rewriting the social status of the victims. In Wismar, then, we have to ask whether the leaders of the group that attacked the other group sought to show that the latter were in some way, shape or form lesser beings. That they are guilty by association through group membership of behaviour that are deserving of condign punishment through murder, rapes or other attacks.
The first step in called ontological degradation or dehumanization in which the perpetrators alter the status function of the victims. So in Wismar while the attacked target group might have been counted as neighbors preceding the attack, they are now defined as parasites, murderers, greedy, and generally not worthy of being treated as humans. We see this psychology playing out in Gaza and Lebanon by the Israelis. This shift turns murder from a crime into a perceived institutional chore or act of social purification. Philosophers call this onticide—the killing of the victim’s social being before their physical heart stops beating.
The second move is that of practicing radical “groupism” through the destruction of singularity or individuality. A massacre forces a transition from a world of individuals to an absolute dichotomy: the “we-group”(the pure, historical subjects) versus the “enemy-group” (the threatening objects). Individual traits—such as being a doctor, a child, or a friend—are erased. The victim’s physical body is viewed purely as a node of an explicitly targeted collective entity to be violated and exterminated.
From the actions of the perpetrators, we see the imposition of collective intentionality and spatial dominance that rejects the implied rationale of humans living together as a community. A massacre relies on a perversion of collective intentionality. Instead of cooperating to build public institutions and infrastructure, the perpetrators align their shared mental states toward a joint goal of erasure of the target group’s entire existence including their homes and livelihood. The widespread destruction of the target groups’ homes is not a coincidence: the ontology of the massacre extends to physical architecture to ensure the targeted group’s way of life becomes structurally impossible to revive.
What we see playing out right now in the public sphere between those who are documenting the events of May 26 and those who deny it was a massacre is the operation of epistemic objectivity after the fact. Once a massacre is concluded, its social ontology shifts into memory, law, and documentation in what is called “bureaucratic inscription”. This is achieved through state declarations, manifestos, or media spin or denials where perpetrators try to solidify a social reality where the massacre was a “necessary defense.”
On the other hand survivors fight back in a counter ontology using document acts (such as COI Reports, tribunals, and historical archives) to forcefully classify the event as a massacre. This turns an unacknowledged historical trauma into an epistemically objective, globally recognized crime.