A typical tactic used by narcissists, collectively, to address atrocities is, of course, to avoid them. But when they are so obvious that they must be mentioned, they will be mentioned as briefly as possible and with as little context as possible. And there is a great example of this discussed in ‘The Peoples History of the United States’ where Zinn references a textbook which mentions that Christopher Columbus committed genocide and then drops it to talk about all the great things that Columbus did. And the point that he’s making there is that, yes they say the word genocide, yes they mention it in one sentence which means that they can’t be accused of not raising it at all and this inoculates them. It inoculates them against the larger criticism, it takes control of the criticism and internalizes it and then shunts attention in the direction that they want it to be shunted.

Derrick Jensen