Responding to accusations through denials

Within CDS, van Dijk (1992, p. 92) considers strategies of denying racist or prejudiced attitudes towards minorities to be part of constructing a positive image of the in-group. These strategies are:

• Act-denial (‘I did not do/say that at all’)

• Control-denial (‘I did not do/say that on purpose’, ‘It was an accident’)

• Intention-denial (‘I did not mean that’, ‘You got me wrong’)

• Goal-denial (‘I did not do/say that, in order to ---’)

Disclaimers, such as ‘we are tolerant, but’, as van Dijk maintains, are forms of denial strategies that aim to promote a positive image of the in-group whilst articulating at the same time negative attributes to those discriminated against. Moreover, offering

justifications, excuses, blaming the victim and victim-perpetrator reversal are other forms of denial. In denying racism, the last two strategies are considered the strongest forms because they are used to identify the group that should receive the blame (ibid.). In

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contrast, van Dijk notes that mitigation strategies, such as downtoning and euphemisms, are used to trivialize one’s negative actions and hence evade blame.

In her analysis of Austrian politicians’ attempts to deny anti-Semitic rhetoric and prejudices, Wodak (2105) observes that most of these denial strategies are used. In the context of denying anti-Semitism and constructing blame-takers, Angouri and Wodak (2014) assert that blaming and denying employ various justification strategies. These strategies include: denying direct responsibility, redefining and reformulating actions in terms of accepted moral values, providing fallacious generalizations and false analogies, providing causal explanations, narrating, drawing on collective memories, claiming victimhood, constructing scapegoats, shifting the blame onto others and blaming the victim, etc. The cumulative function of these strategies is to turn blame into credit (Wodak 2006, 2015). Moreover, various argumentation strategies are used to justify and legitimise negative actions taken by the in-group, as well as to delegitimise the actions and policies advocated by the out-group. For example, ad verecundiam, ad populum and false analogies are used to justify and maintain a positive representation of the Self, whereas tu quoque, ad baculum, ad hominem, admisericordiam and the straw man fallacies are used to construct a negative image of the Other. The latter set is most likely employed in creating scapegoats onto whom responsibility is shifted, i.e. victim-

perpetrator reversal (tarjectio in alium, Reisigl & Wodak, 2001).

Wodak (2015) posits that the construction of a conspiracy is another discursive strategy involved in denying and avoiding blame. In her view, the construction of a conspiracy serves the creation of scapegoats, who are identified as the original culprits, thus shifting the blame onto them, whereas the accused is portrayed as the victim of these

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conspiratorial scenarios. In his innovative typology – which synthesizes the different strategies identified for blaming and denying in discourse analysis, politeness research and argumentation theory – Hansson (2015) maintains that ways of framing events through narratives constitute one of the main strategies for creating scapegoats, thereby legitimising shifting blame onto others.

Following Lakoff (2008), Hansson asserts that, through narratives, in particular Rescue narratives, speakers attempt to avoid blame by portraying themselves as performing good and praiseworthy deeds, i.e. construct themselves as saviours, while simultaneously constructing villains/ scapegoats to whom blame is attributed.51 Rescue narratives, according to Lakoff (2008), have specific semantic roles, such as Hero, Villain, Victim and Helpers. The actions that structure a Rescue narrative are as follows: the Villain harms the Victim, the Hero struggles against the Villain, the Helpers together with the Hero defeat the Villain, the Victim is rescued, the Hero is rewarded and the Villain is punished. Lakoff (ibid.) considers Self-defence narratives to be a variant of the Rescue narrative in which the Hero is the Victim, i.e. the Hero rescues himself. Victimisation or claiming victimhood and defence, then, are the basic elements of Rescue narratives.

To escape blame, accused parties can attempt to reframe events in terms of rescue narratives via which blameworthy deeds are turned into heroic acts. It is through these narratives that the Other/ Villain is constructed as posing an imminent threat, signalling

51_{Hansson also emphasizes the function of the Bad Apple narrative in finding a target to be blamed.}

According to Lakoff (2008), the Bad Apple narrative is based on the proverb: ‘one bad apple spoils the barrel’, which evokes a simple moral: get rid of the bad apple and the rest of the barrel will be saved.

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that an action of some kind should be taken to alleviate the danger. The evil in these narratives catalyzes the binding of a community or nation around a common desire to fight the threat, provided that the path proclaimed by the leader is followed (see Chapter 2, section 3.1).

In this study, I propose that rescue narratives play a role in legitimating

actions, inasmuch as these narratives appear as premises in arguments, such as argument from fear appeal and argument from negative consequences (see Chapter 4, section 4.2). The justification of practices and policies is not limited to strategies involved in denying and avoiding blame. Justification also employs the full range of legitimation strategies (Hansson, 2015). Responding to criticisms and accusations through legitimation strategies is the subject of the next section.