Friday, March 30, 2012

White Men as Modern Scapegoats



I look at the Gospels not so much as religion but as good practical wisdom about people, their motivations, and their behavior.

There are at least four archetypes in the Gospels that applied not only then but also today. They are the State, the Mob, the Leaders, and the Scapegoat/Human Sacrifice. The leaders incite the mob into a frenzy, and both then call for the scapegoat/human to be sacrificed through the power of the state.

The Gospels tell us that the leaders of Jesus' time saw him as a threat, one whom they erroneously thought would bring the Romans to destroy their nation. They incited and united the mob against him by claiming he was a danger. He was then turned into a scapegoat and sacrificed by using the power of the Roman state — and the mob howled for his death.

Those four archetypes exist today, and unfortunately White men are the current scapegoats.

Notice I did not write “White people.” It’s White men, because there is a wedge being driven in-between White men and White women, and has been since the ‘60s. Not so long ago I talked to a woman, in her late 40s, who told me men were responsible for almost all the trouble in the world. She was, not at all surprisingly, unmarried and childless.

Where did she get this idea? From being inundated with it from the media all her life? Ya think that might have something to do with it?

There is also a wedge driven between blacks and Whites, and “Hispanics” (whatever they are) and Whites. The target is White men, and everyone who is honest knows this.

Why is he the target? I think a lot of it is envy, and again I turn to the Bible for the explanation.

I consider a fair amount of the Bible to be myth, and by myth I do not mean “untrue,” but instead universally true, applicable to everyone, through the telling of fictional stories, and through the use of metaphor, simile and allegory.

Let’s take the myth of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve get kicked out for breaking the rules, and when they’re caught, Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent — which is a symbol of envy. Adam is telling Eve, “It’s your fault,” and Eve responds, “No, it’s the serpent’s fault.” In other words, Adam uses Eve as a scapegoat, and Eve uses the serpent.

And out the door they go, and human evil comes into the world.

There we have the explanation, and I believe it’s a true one. Almost all — probably not all, though — scapegoating is caused by envy. And people who are envious want to bring down those they envy — even if they destroy themselves in the process.

Since Whites have been so powerful and successful throughout history — and I’ll be the first to admit they has done a lot of wrong things (as have all races and ethnic groups), they of course will be the target of the less successful, and therefore envious.

If there is one emotion that has caused more trouble in history than any other one, I’d pick envy. Whoever wrote the story of the Garden of Eden apparently felt the same way. And Helmut Schoeck, who wrote a famous book, simply titled. Envy, thought so, too.

Where you have envy you have resentment and hate and the desire for revenge, and when you have all of them, you have revolutionaries who wish to destroy. As Eugene Ionesco wrote about the envious, hate-filled, wannabe-world-destroyer Karl Marx: “[He] must have suffered a secret wound to his pride, as did all those who want revolutions. It is this secret wound he hides, consciously or not.”

That “secret wound” was his envy — in his case of aristocrats, who were the only people he respected. And envy is probably the hardest emotion for anyone to admit. Marx never admitted it, or any of his immensely destructive followers.

There is another Biblical myth that is relevant — that of Cain and Abel, the first recorded murder. Cain slays Abel out of jealousy and envy, because Abel had something Cain wanted — for God to accept his offering. It was a murder born out of rivalry and vengeance.

The main weapons — propaganda — the envious use to bring down the envied are the attempts to instill guilt and shame. Tellingly, child researchers believe children feel shame before guilt, which is also illustrated in the story of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve don’t feel guilty about being naked; they feel ashamed.

The fact that shame becomes before guilt makes it a more primitive, powerful and more effective weapon. Saul Alinsky (perhaps unwittingly) noticed this is his Rules for Radicals, when he wrote the first weapon to use is ridicule.

Adam and Eve don’t feel shame until they become self-conscious. That’s important too, because these attempts to instill shame and guilt will not be successful until the scapegoat incorporates them into his self and becomes self-conscious about them.

If these attempts to instill shame and guilt work, the scapegoat will in fact participate in his own destruction, and even go so far as to pass laws against himself. In other words, he’ll commit cultural suicide.

Whites throughout history are supposed to have been the perpetual victimizer of the innocent (as the resentful, envious and vengeance-minded Susan Sontag so infamously claimed, “The White race is the cancer of human history”). Now White men have become the victims, but they still clamed to be the victimizers.

Whenever you have scapegoating, the scapegoat has to be determined to be not only guilty, but evil. Then he has to be destroyed or expelled.

White men have now become the victims, but that fact is denied — people’s eyes are averted from the truth. Even today, I still run across the terms “White privilege” and even “patriarchy,” neither of which I have ever seen.

What is happening these days is the belief in group guilt, a thing which does not exist. So now we have an entire innocent group considered to be guilty and evil, and scapegoated. And the scapegoat, I repeat, has to be destroyed or expelled.

I believe the whole sequence of this scapegoating starts with belief in a Golden Age in the far past. If it never existed, then create one. Call it Atlzan, or Afrocentrism, or Ice People and Sun People. What George Orwell wrote is true: he who controls the present, controls the past. And whoever controls the present, controls the future.

Claim this Golden Age no longer exists, not through any fault of your own, but because of someone evil, usually engaged in a conspiracy. These evil people become the scapegoat that must be eliminated.

An example of this belief in a (mostly nonexistent) Golden Age are Arab Muslims who blame every one of their problems on Israel, and who believe if it is destroyed, their Golden Age will magically return. How? Somehow.

The French philosopher and theologian Rene Girard, author of Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, writes there are two functions to the scapegoat: to unite society, and renew it through the destruction of the scapegoat. By focusing on White men as the scapegoat, aggrieved minorities are united in blaming their problems on them.

Girard’s believes societies, especially in their beginnings, were subject to plagues of rivalry and vengeance (the introduction of murder into the world by Cain and Abel). In fact, he considered these perpetually escalating cycles of vengeance, retaliation and murder to be the original cultural disease. Original Sin, if you will.

Societies always found a way to treat this disease — the use of a scapegoat. At some time, sometimes spontaneously and always irrationally, mob violence erupts against some person or group. They are accused of the worst crimes imaginable, crimes that by their enormity have caused the terrible plight the community now experiences. They are then, in one way or another, lynched.

Girard noticed that in myths there is always a “founding murder” on which societies are based. As an example, the killing of Jesus was the founding murder of Christianity. The difference with this murder, Girard writes, is that it was the first time in history the murder was told from the point of view of the scapegoat.

As such, Girard believes Christianity finally broke the function of the scapegoat (and also introduced repentance and atonement). Unfortunately, since American society these days is more pagan than Christian (no matter what people claim) the scapegoating mechanism is back in place — and White men are now supposed to be the founding murder for societies based on the non-existent Golden Ages, ones created by envious, revenge-minded anti-American “intellectuals.”

Those who are lusting for the destruction of White men and their culture are convinced they are innocent and oppressed, so there will be no repentance and atonement. In a nutshell, they have no conscience.

You’d think the tens of millions of illegal aliens the United States has allowed in, in their search for a better life, would be grateful. Unfortunately, mobs (in this case “ethnic tribes” might be a more accurate word) always respond with envy and resentment and never gratitude. They always believe they are entitled to handouts from their “oppressors.”

Girard identified the founding principle of societies as “Satan,” since that term mirrors Jesus’ description of “the Prince of this world,” who was motivated by envy and hubris and was “a liar and a murderer from the first.” (Martin Luther, in a similar vein, referred to the world as “the Devil’s Inn.”)

By sacrificing his life to expose and then overthrow this kingdom built on lies, envy, hubris and violence, Girard believed Jesus introduced the world to a new world built on repentance and atonement for sins (actually hamartia — literally “missing the mark”) instead of the catharsis of scapegoating, and love of God and neighbor instead of war. It’s not working all that well today.

Identifying a scapegoat allows envious groups to unite, these days through the creation of a false, idealized history, then after blaming all of their ills on the scapegoat they try to get him to disarm himself through the use of shame and guilt, and then after his expulsion or destruction through the use of political power, they believe once they are the majority their Golden Ages will return.

The only way the scapegoat can be successfully attacked is through political power, that is, the State. This means passing laws that give special rights to anyone, or especially any group, is the worst possible thing that can be done. It is, again, cultural suicide.

All propaganda is ultimately based on scapegoating, on splitting things into a narcissistic “all good” and “all bad.” The all-good is idealized (the non-existent Golden Ages) while the all-bad is devalued as evil, and determined to be the cause of all problems.

Girard, however, considers propaganda to be a parody of scapegoating, because, as he claims, “There is no such thing as conscious scapegoating,” and those who use propaganda are conscious of what they are doing.

When people are aware they are the objects of the envy, hate, resentment and revenge of the envious, when they are aware of what’s being done to them, that is the first step to becoming immune to the propaganda, and refusing to feel guilt and shame.

To the ancient Greeks Dionysius was the Mob (I am reminded of the Biblical scene in which the demons say “My name is Legion [sometimes translated as “Mob”] for there are many of us”). And the followers of Dionysius, in their riots, murdered, dismembered, and sometimes devoured their scapegoats. That is a warning for today.

Mobs don’t always necessarily act on their own, spontaneously. They usually have leaders, to excite them, to justify their beliefs and actions. This means those aggrieved minorities attacking White men and their culture have intellectuals who are leading the mobs. Those intellectual leaders are the ones who are truly the enemy.

Mass Man — the mob — has no intelligence and is incapable of reason. This herd, which is motivated by the most primitive of feelings, can be easily manipulated, and is in fact little more than sheep led by wolves.

Today these enemies are in the government, the media, the universities, and business. They are prime examples of the old saying that cultures usually don’t collapse from attacks from without, but from within.

What will happen if these envious minorities ever gain enough political power? That result is foretold by an old German proverb: “No sword cuts more brutally than a peasant who becomes a lord.”

As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote in Leftism Revisited, “In the last two hundred years, the exploitation of envy — its mobilization among the masses — coupled with the denigration of individuals, but more frequently of classes, races, nations, or religious communities, has been the key to political success.”

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