For some time I have been reading around the notion of René Girard and the Scapegoat. The idea is that when a human society is hopelessly divided and involved in blame and revenge, it tends to resolve the problems by uniting against a single person, usually marginalized or diseased, and blaming that scapegoat for everything. Then, after the scapegoat is ritually killed, the community is "healed," ending the divisions and recriminations and blame and endless revenge. Until next time.
That is Girard's argument in Violence and the Sacred. In another book, The Scapegoat, he proposes another notion, that in our human religions and myths we get embarrassed about the crimes of our ancestors and our gods, and start to whitewash them. Because, after all, our ancestors and our gods could not have been that bad.
Girard uses a mistranslation of the death of Remus -- of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome -- as an example.
Romulus and Remus are contesting the kingship of Rome. Girard quotes a translation of Livy:
An argument ensues, which comes to blows; anger degenerates into a murderous struggle. It is, then, in the scuffle, that Remus falls dead.
Only, Girard writes, the Latin translated as "in the scuffle" is "in turba" which means "in the crowd" and "the word turba has an almost technical meaning; a crowd that is confused, perturbed, and disturbing" and Livy often uses the word "turba" to describe "collective murders."
Do you see what he is describing here? Nothing to see here, only a "scuffle:" not a collective murder by the mob.
In a related topic, see reports on the current move by Wikipedia to delete its "Mass killings under communist regimes" page.
On the other hand, we note that our lefty friends spend a lot of their time hyping the crimes of imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, to represent the recent past as a violent and oppressive horror show in which the whole of society, except for activist lefties, is guilty.
I suppose that none of this is remarkable. If you are spinning the narrative of continuing the current regime you propose that it is all for the best, although maybe "mistakes were made." But hey, we don't want to be too hard on our ancestors. If you are trying to change the regime, then you want to present the regime's doings as a horrible crime.
I would say, in addition, that the scapegoat mechanism of re-uniting the society around the victimization of a single individual has been replaced with the victimization of a small minority group. Thus Girard writes about blaming the Jews for the plague in medieval Europe. Thus, in a divided and demoralized Germany after World War I Hitler and his propagandists united the Germans against The Jews.
In another context Girard discusses the murder of the Scandinavian god Baldr through the machinations of the trickster god Loki. He proposes that Baldr was probably a victim of the scapegoat mechanism but that the story of his collective murder by the whole community was covered up in later versions of the myth: the evil trickster did it.
If you try too hard to prove something you prove nothing. This is the case of the myth of Baldr: guilty people make too many excuses. They fail to realize that a simple excuse is more effective than many excellent ones. If you want to deceive your audience you had better not let them see what you are trying to do.
This story puts me in mind of our lefty friends. Don't you think that they try too hard to blame everything on guilty racist-sexist-homophobes. And imperialists and colonialists? I wonder why.
Obviously, the scapegoat mechanism is connected with Nazi Carl Schmitt's notion of politics being the friend / enemy distinction, made "real simple" by Curtis Yarvin in the maxim: "there is no politics without an enemy." Politics, then is the uniting of the community against a common enemy. Just as in the distant past a community without an organized politics would combine against a scapegoat.
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