Hatred and the Scapegoats: The Same Mechanism, a New Target Each Generation
CICNS
Hatred
… and the Scapegoats
by the CICNS
Footnote on the subject of Punishment Park
Alain Bouchard (2001) has shown how the model of the cult that emerges from newspaper articles seems to belong to the “urban legend”, those fictional stories which become socially plausible and which express in an unconscious way the preoccupations of the individuals who create and propagate them. These rumours are cathartic narratives which furnish the social group with an acceptable scenario for substituting an order for the dissonance generated by the evolution and the destruction of the traditional forms of socialisation.
One then takes up the typical scenario of the “stranger” and the “abduction”. The ogre of the fables resurfaces under the mask of the cults. As in urban legends, the media narratives about the new religions point to the preoccupations of an era and identify a scapegoat revealing of the anxieties of a society. The cult threatens the future of the group (the young) by tipping them into the irrational, which is the inversion of the modern founding myth: rationality, science. The cult is more than the other. It is finally the inversion of us.
Fanaticism and hatred feed on ignorance, on fear, on disinformation and on half-truths.
On the Internet, numerous hate sites practise the hunt for the scapegoat. They attribute to certain targeted groups (the “cults”, for example) the responsibility for all sorts of political and social problems. Their assertions rely on the ignorance of the public and on “proofs” created out of whole cloth (see, for the phenomenon of the spiritual minorities, Jonestown, Waco and the recurring defamations of the anti-cult activists).
These hateful assertions come to stimulate prejudices, often unconscious, which influence our perceptions and our actions. These instincts are, in our era, presented in a socially admissible light (it is a sophisticated form of barbarism, as we shall see).
When pressure groups come to give hatred a quasi-legal character, a feeling of immunity awakens along with the primary instincts of discrimination and ostracism, so convenient in a period of “crisis”.
The reality of this phenomenon can escape us when we are personally confronted with it, when we have “our nose in it”. But our so-called “civilised” society must very urgently look into this infernal mechanism.
That is why I present below a few examples, beyond our borders, which allow a more neutral look to be taken at it, before quickly observing to what extent the situation is identical everywhere and in every generation.
In 1830, with the adoption of the Indian Removal Act, the government of the United States of the time launched a campaign against the American Indians in order to drive them from their lands. During the displacement of the Indian populations, who sometimes had to walk for hundreds of kilometres, thousands of Indians perished, in addition to those who had been killed previously. Yet the artists of the time represented the Indians as aggressors, rather than as the victims of an unjust government expulsion order. The image of the “demonic” Indian or of the “ignoble savage” became deeply anchored in the country up to the first westerns of the cinema, which still represented them in this manner (remember, it was yesterday). Very few people at the time were capable of calling into question this incredible reversal of the situation, in which the oppressor presents himself as an oppressed with the assent of the majority of the witnesses of a whole generation.
The image of “Daniel Boone fighting an Indian” is a sculpture that still forms part of a stone bas-relief on a rotunda of the Capitol in Washington DC. The Indian there is imposing, his features are demonic, he appears violent. He is presented in a manner designed to frighten. It is a veritable manipulation.
Later, McCarthyism managed to feed a blind and repressive hatred of the communists in the space of a few years (there exists a terrifying film from 1971 of a murderous “manhunt” in the desert, with minorities as prey, partially banned in the United States on its release: see note). This phobia, this madness! towards a “target” group already recalled, for some, “the witch hunts” of the past.
Another example that has been practised by graphic artists: the image of Father Christmas — nothing frightening, it can even evoke pleasant childhood memories. But it is enough to change the red hat for a turban for our perception to change totally and for other emotions to appear (Father Christmas becomes a Muslim fundamentalist).
Where does this perception come from and to what emotions is it attached? It is interesting to observe for oneself the mechanisms that are at the origin of our judgements and emotions. Do these judgements and emotions really belong to us? Can we speak of liberty when we come to feel hatred or attraction by simple conditioning? And if the turban is replaced by another ritual headdress of a religion? If it recalls a report on the “cults” in which the spiritual minorities are always presented in a “folkloric” manner? What happens?
The habit no longer makes the monk, but has it managed to make “the cult” or “the danger”?
Since 11 September 2001, the perception of Muslims, and by extension of “Arabs” or of “foreigners”, has changed and fear has been amplified.
The turban has the power to transform Father Christmas into a threat.
It is in any case this perception that is inculcated in the populations (this situation is to be set beside the adoption, in France, of the laws against the “Islamic veil”).
Today, in France, the stigmatisation of the spiritual minorities rests on the same schemas of hatred, of the designation of scapegoats and of repression of ways of life or currents of thought which present, no doubt, a danger for the system in force or for large-scale projects of which the population is ignorant. But if the population — you and I — are ignorant of what is being plotted behind the repression, we are nonetheless the playthings of these collective manipulations, while often believing we “think for ourselves”. There is nothing exaggerated in all this. One need only see how we react blindly on the basis of information we have digested without calling it into question. We become the instruments of a hatred that does not belong to us.
If reflection has a virtue — when it does not remain on the surface of automatisms and conditionings — it must be exercised now, in our country, by each one of us, on this question which deserves a genuine and sustained attention.
Hatred has the power one gives it. It currently has full power and numerous groups and numerous people are its victims.
I wish, once again, that history should not repeat itself indefinitely, and that thanks to the necessary becoming-conscious of that scourge which is the hatred of difference. Hatred is one and the same despite the renewal of the scapegoats and the fallacious arguments, primary and repetitive, which succeed in making us accept them.
Sources of the documents:
See the terrible “Punishment Park” by Peter Watkins (1971):
In the middle of the Californian desert, a handful of young men and women, accused of having undermined the security of the American state, appear before a special tribunal which justifies its existence by the aggravation of the North Vietnamese conflict. President Nixon, relying on the McCarran Act of 1950, which allows him to decree a state of emergency without the approval of Congress, has all the elements hostile to his policy inside the country imprisoned… Special tribunals are rapidly instituted. In the dock are found all the “protesting” minorities: Blacks, extremists, pacifists, humanists, communist militants…
They are condemned to heavy prison sentences which they can escape on condition of spending three days in “Punishment Park”.
All of them, without knowing what it involves, choose this alternative. The ordeal consists in covering 80 kilometres on foot in the desert, under a leaden sun, without water and without food, while “special forces” armed with rifles and pistols and using cars, jeeps and helicopters set off in pursuit of the fugitives, after having let them take a two-hour lead.
To those who might reach the American flag planted at the limits of the park safe and sound, a pardon is promised. But none reaches the end of the ordeal and a great part are pitilessly gunned down before the television cameras invited for the occasion…
This fiction is filmed in so realistic a manner that the viewer is profoundly shaken. It does not seem to him that all this is so far from reality. On its release, there was even talk of bans in certain cinemas… (The history of the film)
This report was broadcast on Arte in February 2002.
On the same subject of hatred, read also:
P. Barrucand, Haines d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, campagnes anti-juifs, anti-franc-maçons, anti-sectes.
Sources
- La haine ... et les boucs émissaires (archived copy of http://www.cicns.net/Haine.htm)
English translation of La haine ... et les boucs émissaires (French), originally by CICNS.
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