How ‘ghoul’ became a go-to insult in politics

The daylight is getting shorter, the wind is getting colder, and the date fast approaches when people are supposed to beware of “ghouls” — no, not October 31, but November 3, Election Day.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, “is an absolute ghoul,” the former Obama and Biden administration official Andrew Weinstein posted to Bluesky . “Vivek is a ghoul,” Pennsylvania Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, the Democratic Party vice chair, wrote on X .

That chorus of people crying “ghoul” was inspired by a Ramaswamy campaign ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, whose husband was charged with raping Acton when she was a child. But Ramaswamy is far from the only accused ghoul in today’s politics. In recent weeks, members of the public have also leveled the insult at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his plan to livestream a firing squad execution and at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after his speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

Use of the pejorative crosses party lines. Earlier this year, a Republican strategist called former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee a “soulless ghoul” for a social media post he made after a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. President Donald Trump’s White House applied the term last year to a journalist who accused Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of running away from a medical emergency in the Oval Office; it also called a writer who questioned Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops in Washington, DC a “ sick, disgusting ghoul .”

What does it mean to call someone a “ghoul”? And how did the mythical creature become a go-to insult in politics?

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“It’s in a sense a dehumanization tactic,” said Fielding Montgomery, a researcher and author of “Horror Framing and the General Election.” “It’s that they are a monster … that they are particularly taking advantage of people or preying on people.”

The word “ghoul” derives from the French “goule” and the Arabic “ġūl,” which in turn comes from the Arabic “ġāla,” meaning “to seize.” Originating in pre-Islamic Arab traditions, the ghoul has long been a source of fear and fascination in Arab folklore, the scholar Ahmed Al-Rawi wrote in a 2009 article . People believed ghouls had the power to change form, and the concept of their underlying essence was likewise malleable — Al-Rawi noted that the ghoul has variously been considered “a kind of devil, genie, enchantress of genies, devilish genie, and spirit.”

Generally, though, the ghouls of Arab folktales were ugly female predators that wandered the desert, steering travelers astray.

Ghouls morphed again in the early 18th century when the orientalist Antoine Galland translated “One Thousand and One Nights” into French. Galland embellished his ghouls with new characteristics not found in the original Arabic, chiefly the macabre practice of digging up graves to feast on human flesh.

Galland’s depiction cemented the ghoul’s image in the Western world as a cemetery-dwelling cannibal. The Galland-style ghoul appeared in other European adaptations of the tales in “One Thousand and One Nights” — in “The Story of King Yunan and Duban the Sage,” a prince meets a ghoul who presents as a beautiful woman only to transform later into a grotesque, cannibalistic monster.

It was also a source of intrigue for writers of the Gothic era, featuring in William Beckford’s 1786 novel “Vathek” and in Lord Byron’s poem “The Giaour.” Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1849 poem “ The Bells ,” wrote that “They are neither man nor woman— They are neither brute nor human— They are Ghouls.”

By the 19th century, the word “ghoul” had also developed a figurative sense, applied to people who seemed to delight in others’ misfortune. In his 1854 novel “The Newcomes,” William Makepeace Thackeray wrote of “Ghouls feasting on the fresh corpse of a reputation.”

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Ghouls continued to evolve in fiction and entertainment. The writer H.P. Lovecraft further iterated on the monsters in his 1927 short story “ Pickman’s Model ,” which depicted ghouls as subterranean creatures with “dog-like features,” Rehan Hyder wrote in “The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters.” In Lovecraft’s later novella, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” the character Richard Pickman reappeared as a ghoul — capturing the idea of the ghoul as a less-than-human form that a human could devolve into, Hyder noted.

Other popular depictions of ghouls conflated them with monsters such as zombies and demons. The 1933 film “The Ghoul” and the 1943 film “The Mad Ghoul” seemed to have little to do with the ghoul of Arab folklore, Hyder wrote, besides a connection to death and burial grounds. And though the 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead” is often described as zombie horror, director George A. Romero said he thought of his antagonists as ghouls.

The ghoul had become an emblem of desecration, a predator violating the boundary between life and death, a corruptor of what was wholesome and decent. Naturally, then, it was drawn into politics.

In the early 1920s, as the corruption of the late President Warren G. Harding’s administration came to light, Sen. George Wharton Pepper, a Republican like Harding, attacked those who pounced on “the mistakes of a beloved leader” as “political ghouls.”

“When any man for campaign purposes or to gain a partisan advantage undertakes to disturb the repose of that leader I brand him as a political ghoul and declare him to be unfit for the society of decent people,” Pepper said.

But the insult was thrown back at him. “[T]he Senator states that he is ‘speaking of the mistakes not of the living but of the dead’ when he lays upon the late President Harding’s shoulders the entire responsibility for the disgraceful condition of the Republican Party today,” the progressive political activist J. A. H. Hopkins declared . “Senator Pepper therefore does what he says only a political ghoul would do.”

In 1966, when World War II veteran Robert G. Thompson was denied a burial in Arlington National Cemetery over his communist sympathies, his widow Sylvia Thompson decried the decision: “The Pentagon has yielded to political ghouls,” she said. “Are they now saying that Arlington is only for political conformists?”

Today, calling someone a “ghoul” suggests a moral depravity so stark that it renders the person inhuman.

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Robert L. Ivie, a scholar of political rhetoric, sees the ghoul as another iteration of the “evil enemy,” a longstanding trope in political and militaristic discourse. In today’s culture of politics as warfare, calling someone a “ghoul” can create a sense of fear and anxiety that heightens the stakes.

“It’s associated with darkness and death and savagery and tyranny and irrationality,” he said. “Where on the other side of that notion is, ‘We’re on the rational side, we’re on the side of the light instead of the dark, we’re on the side of life instead of death.’ That kind of dialectic.”

Using “ghoul” is just one part of the suite of horror imagery politicians use to signal an opponent’s inhumanity. Montgomery said he found an uptick in the use of horror tropes in presidential campaign advertisements after 9/11, but especially in the 2016 election. He pointed to one particular ad about Hillary Clinton from the Trump campaign: Narrated in a deep, ominous voice, the ad shrouded her in darkness and featured red lettering typical of monster flicks.

Though the ad didn’t explicitly refer to Clinton as a ghoul, or any kind of monster, the implication was obvious, Montgomery said.

“Do you attack someone for being ghoulish, or foolish?” he said. “The ghoulishness is really going to get at the inhumanity.”

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白昼渐短，寒风渐凉，人们应该提防“鬼怪”的日子也迅速临近——不，不是 10 月 31 日，而是 11 月 3 日，选举日。

俄亥俄州共和党州长候选人维韦克·拉马斯瓦米“简直是个十足的恶魔”，奥巴马和拜登政府前官员安德鲁·温斯坦在Bluesky网站上发帖称。“维韦克​​是个恶魔，”宾夕法尼亚州众议员、民主党副主席马尔科姆·肯雅塔在X网站上写道。

民众纷纷高喊“食尸鬼”一词，起因是拉马斯瓦米的一则竞选广告，广告中出现了他的对手艾米·阿克顿疏远的母亲，她的丈夫曾被指控在阿克顿年幼时强奸了她。但拉马斯瓦米远非当今政坛唯一被指责为“食尸鬼”的人。最近几周，公众也曾用这个词来侮辱国防部长皮特·赫格塞斯，因为他计划直播枪决；此外，以色列总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡在联合国大会上的演讲也遭到了同样的指责。

使用这个贬义词并不局限于党派。今年早些时候，一位共和党策略师称前华盛顿州州长杰伊·英斯利为“冷血的食尸鬼”，原因是他在白宫记者晚宴枪击案后在社交媒体上发表了一篇帖子。去年，唐纳德·特朗普总统的白宫也用这个词来形容一位记者，这位记者指责卫生部长小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪在椭圆形办公室逃避医疗紧急情况；白宫还称一位质疑特朗普在华盛顿特区部署国民警卫队决定的作家为“令人作呕的病态食尸鬼”。

称某人为“食尸鬼”是什么意思？这种神话生物又是如何成为政治中常用的侮辱性词汇的？

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“从某种意义上说，这是一种非人化策略，”菲尔丁·蒙哥马利说道，他是《恐怖框架与大选》一书的作者和研究员。“这让他们看起来像是怪物……他们特别在利用人们，或者说是在捕食人们。”

“食尸鬼”（ghoul）一词源于法语“goule”和阿拉伯语“ġūl”，而“ġūl”又源于阿拉伯语“ġāla”，意为“抓住”。学者艾哈迈德·拉维（Ahmed Al-Rawi）在2009年的一篇文章中写道，食尸鬼起源于伊斯兰教传入之前的阿拉伯传统，长期以来一直是阿拉伯民间传说中令人恐惧又着迷的存在。人们相信食尸鬼拥有变形的能力，其本质的概念也同样变化多端——拉维指出，食尸鬼曾被认为是“一种魔鬼、精灵、精灵的女巫、邪恶的精灵和幽灵”。

不过，阿拉伯民间故事中的食尸鬼通常是丑陋的女性掠食者，她们在沙漠中游荡，引诱旅行者误入歧途。

18世纪初，东方学家安托万·加朗将《一千零一夜》翻译成法语，食尸鬼的形象再次发生变化。加朗为他的食尸鬼增添了阿拉伯原文中没有的新特征，最主要的是他们掘墓食人这种令人毛骨悚然的习俗。

加兰德的描绘巩固了西方世界对食尸鬼的刻板印象，将其描绘成居住在墓地里的食人怪物。加兰德式的食尸鬼形象也出现在其他欧洲改编的《一千零一夜》故事中——在《王云南与智者杜班的故事》中，一位王子遇到了一位食尸鬼，她起初以美丽女子的形象出现，后来却变成了一个丑陋的食人怪物。

它也曾是哥特时代作家们着迷的对象，出现在威廉·贝克福德1786年的小说《瓦泰克》和拜伦勋爵的诗歌《吉奥尔》中。埃德加·爱伦·坡在他1849年的诗歌《钟声》中写道：“他们既非男人也非女人——他们既非野兽也非人类——他们是食尸鬼。”

到了19世纪，“食尸鬼”一词也衍生出了比喻义，用来形容那些似乎以他人不幸为乐的人。威廉·梅克比斯·萨克雷在他1854年的小说《纽科姆一家》中写道：“食尸鬼们正在享用名誉的新鲜尸体。”

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在文学和娱乐作品中，食尸鬼的形象不断演变。作家H·P·洛夫克拉夫特在其1927年的短篇小说《皮克曼的模特》中进一步完善了这一怪物形象。雷汉·海德在《阿什盖特文学与电影怪物百科全书》中写道，小说中食尸鬼被描绘成拥有“犬类特征”的地下生物。海德指出，在洛夫克拉夫特后来的中篇小说《梦寻秘境卡达斯》中，人物理查德·皮克曼再次以食尸鬼的形象出现——这体现了食尸鬼作为一种非人形态，人类可能退化成的形象。

其他一些流行的食尸鬼形象则将它们与僵尸、恶魔等怪物混为一谈。海德写道，1933年的电影《食尸鬼》和1943年的电影《疯狂食尸鬼》除了与死亡和墓地有关之外，似乎与阿拉伯民间传说中的食尸鬼几乎没有任何关系。尽管1968年的电影《活死人之夜》经常被描述为僵尸恐怖片，但导演乔治·A·罗梅罗却表示，他认为片中的反派是食尸鬼。

食尸鬼成了亵渎的象征，是侵犯生死界限的掠食者，是腐蚀一切美好和体面的罪魁祸首。因此，它自然而然地被卷入了政治漩涡。

20 世纪 20 年代初，随着已故总统沃伦·G·哈丁政府的腐败行为被曝光，与哈丁同为共和党人的参议员乔治·沃顿·佩珀抨击那些抓住“一位受人爱戴的领导人的错误”大做文章的人是“政治恶棍”。

“任何人为了竞选目的或获取党派利益而扰乱领导人的安宁，我都会称他为政治恶棍，并宣布他不适合生活在体面人的社会中，”佩珀说道。

但他的侮辱也遭到了反击。“这位参议员声称，他‘谈论的不是活人的错误，而是死人的错误’，却把共和党如今的耻辱现状完全归咎于已故总统哈丁，”进步派政治活动家JAH·霍普金斯宣称。“因此，佩珀参议员的所作所为，只有政治恶魔才会做。”

1966年，二战老兵罗伯特·G·汤普森因其同情共产主义而被拒绝葬于阿灵顿国家公墓，他的遗孀西尔维娅·汤普森对此决定表示强烈谴责：“五角大楼向政治恶魔屈服了，”她说。“他们现在是说阿灵顿只安葬政治上的墨守成规者吗？”

如今，称某人为“食尸鬼”暗示着其道德败坏到了极点，以至于丧失了人性。

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政治修辞学学者罗伯特·L·艾维认为，“食尸鬼”是“邪恶敌人”的另一种表现形式，而“邪恶敌人”是政治和军事话语中由来已久的修辞手法。在当今政治即战争的文化中，称某人为“食尸鬼”会引发恐惧和焦虑，从而加剧冲突。

他说：“它与黑暗、死亡、野蛮、暴政和非理性联系在一起。而与之相对的是，‘我们站在理性的一边，我们站在光明的一边而不是黑暗的一边，我们站在生命的一边而不是死亡的一边。’这就是一种辩证法。”

使用“食尸鬼”只是政客们用来暗示对手冷酷无情的一系列恐怖意象中的一种。蒙哥马利表示，他发现9·11事件后，总统竞选广告中恐怖元素的使用有所增加，尤其是在2016年大选中。他特别提到特朗普竞选团队的一则关于希拉里·克林顿的广告：广告以低沉阴森的旁白开场，将她笼罩在黑暗之中，并采用了怪兽电影中常见的红色字体。

蒙哥马利说，虽然这则广告没有明确地将克林顿称为食尸鬼或任何类型的怪物，但其含义显而易见。

“你会因为某人行为怪诞就攻击他，还是因为其愚蠢就攻击他？”他说道，“真正触及人性缺陷的是其怪诞的行径。”

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