Scapegoating

© Silke Hesse, 2013

Scapegoating

Silke Hesse

Under the Westminster System, the minister carries the responsibility for decisions made regarding his portfolio. This means, he accepts individual guilt for a complex procedure which he can often only partly influence. Subordinates may have been more directly to blame, or mainly to blame, but the minister bears the responsibility.

The citizens, however, bear the responsibility for voting in the party that chose the minister. They are responsible for their government, even though the choice of parties they had was limited, they did not choose the minister, they could generally not foresee what eventualities might arise, they may actually have voted for another party, and they may even have been too young to have the vote.

In other words, our political system recognizes some formal transferred or indirect responsibility though it hides this by encouraging citizens to think of themselves as one nation, as though a nation were the equivalent of a single person. If things go wrong, e.g. war is declared or lost, all members of a nation must consider themselves equally responsible.

According to the democratic system as developed in Britain, both Hitler and his ministers should be seen as responsible for the war and the Holocaust but so should the German nation in so far as it elected the Nazi party and more or less agreed to certain forms of government. The nation would have to accept that it would be punished in various ways.

This is one version of collective guilt. You are declared guilty as a “German national” but you feel reasonably innocent as an individual. This is political guilt.

A second form of collective guilt is where a whole culture in which people have grown up and which has shaped their personality has been declared deeply flawed in its centuries-old traditions, which, it is implied, could only have led in one direction, namely to evil and disaster. A concerted attempt was made by Germany’s enemies, particularly the academics among them, after the war, to prove this. These proofs were, on the whole, not very convincing, among other things because many of the ‘faults’ were associated with European culture or with the developments of modernity and were widespread; also because under a changed political system, the German nation could change its character quite quickly and reliably after the war. In its extreme version, Germans were apportioned a certain immutable national character, of the kind that had been used polemically in Europe since the beginning of nationalism in the 17^th century. This theory of the culturally perverted German was often little more than an excuse to take revenge with a disguised form of racist thinking.

A third type of collective guilt concerns individual representatives of the group. I am here not interested in those actually involved in the crimes. They obviously have to confront their consciences. I am concerned with those who committed no crimes, either because their actions were always as humane and honourable as the situation allowed, or because for one or the other reason they were no longer a direct part of the nation at war under Hitler, or because they had not yet been born, or for other reasons. It is of this group that I have some experience. Individual Germans have basically two options: Either to deny personal responsibility, as they are entitled to do, or to allow themselves to become scapegoats. It is the situation of the scapegoats that interests me here and because wars are governed by internationally accepted conventions and there is widespread experience of them, it is the Holocaust I shall concentrate on.

Why did the Germans persecute the Jews?  

It was ostensibly for racist reasons, but what is racism here where differences between Jews and Germans were usually all but invisible and had certainly been overlooked for decades?

1. There is an old-fashioned ‘aristocratic’ racism of blood-lines, ‘by the grace of God’, so to speak. (Thus the Jews as ‘chosen people’ were to be outdone by the pure and original Aryan race.)

2. There is an evolutionary racism in the wake of Darwinist theories, where the ‘higher’ is seen as in danger of losing its evolutionary advantages if mated with the ‘primitive’ (hardly applicable to the majority of German Jews but perhaps to the handicapped).

3. Lastly, there is the racism driven by a fear of miscegenation. This form of racism has appropriated concepts of breeding applied to domestic animals intended to serve humans in specialized ways, like race-horses, milking cows, and lap-dogs. With respect to humans, this variety of racism was scientific mumbo-jumbo.

Nazi racism was an untidy mix of these racisms; whatever came to hand and proved useful was used. But all three point to a pathological fear of loss of identity which almost certainly had more to do with Germany’s lack of secure geographical borders, her recent political unification, her loss of dignity and power after Versailles, her international pariah status, and the economic insecurities associated with inflation, depression and reparations payments, than with perceptions of race. To put it bluntly, the Jews were scapegoats, officially welcomed as the great enemy so that the fight against them might help restore German confidence; for in the modern scientific world biological superiority meant fundamental superiority.

In reality, envy of a group that had preserved its identity for two millennia of Diaspora existence, a group that, once emancipated, was proving itself to be more creative and successful than their Aryan compatriots, was almost certainly the real motivation that seduced the ordinary German to racism. (There are few instances in history where racism has not been an excuse for power politics.) The Jews, which meant millions of individual Jews, neighbours of individual Germans, and innocent of any wrong-doing, were scapegoats for these Germans: their insecurities, their anger, their desire for revenge. Therefore, one might argue, individual Germans who are innocent of any offence against Jews now, in turn, deserve to become scapegoats for their anger. They can count themselves lucky that they, the German scapegoats, are more than likely to escape annihilation. This type of scapegoating is a diminished form of ‘an eye for an eye’ justice. Of course the justice of revenge, even of incomplete revenge, does not get us far as human beings.

I have tried, over the years, to live as a scapegoat according to the following rules:

1. A scapegoat must never forget that though he may be symbolically guilty, he is in real terms innocent.

2. A scapegoat must abhor the crimes of which he is symbolically guilty.

3. A scapegoat must acquiesce in his symbolical function.

4. Though a scapegoat must put up with a certain amount of discrimination or abuse, he must make sure that he does not suffer real injury which would only increase the guilt in the world.

5. A scapegoat always deals with real people and he must be genuinely fond, never resentful, of them.

6. A scapegoat must be knowledgeable about and empathize deeply with the hurt inflicted by the crimes he represents.

7. A scapegoat must try to live impeccably so that he will never provoke real rather than symbolic anger.

8. A scapegoat must make sure that his ‘sacrifice’ is not misused by people who have no genuine claim on him but simply want to evade their own conscience.

9. A scapegoat’s relationship with the injured party must be such that it solicits forgiveness.

10. A scapegoat must make sure that he lives a fulfilled life in spite of his symbolic function. His role should never be that of the martyr.

The function of the scapegoat for the injured person is perhaps best described in terms of the psychoanalytical process of transference, whereby the analyst becomes the screen onto which the anger and resentment of the analysand are projected so that they can be dealt with constructively and overcome. In this case, however, the final outcome of the transference should preferably not be professional withdrawal but friendship.