A History of Scapegoating

The ‘anti-vaxxer’ is the latest in a long list of people we can blame

While researching ‘Scapegoat’, I made a strange but quite enlightening discovery. In ancient Greece, a scapegoat was known as the Pharmakos and the Greeks engaged in strange rituals that sometimes ended in slaughter/sacrifice.

Pharmakos? What an apt word for Scapegoat, especially in this time of pharmaceutically driven authoritarian rule. The scholar Todd Comptom explains that the Pharmakos was

‘…the human embodiment of evil who was expelled from the Greek city at moments of crisis and disaster’… The Greek ritual scapegoat is a complex religio-historical phenomenon…

Furthermore,

‘The name is probably, but problematically, connected with pharmakon, ‘medicine, drug, poison’. Both poison and drug were originally magical; so a pharmakon is a magical dose (Greek dosis ‘gift, dose’, cf. the German Gift ‘poison’) causing destruction or healing.

There you have it: the connection between medicine, witches and scapegoating is clear.

Today, at the height and the end of the Covid pandemic, we are again as in those days of old, in desperate need of someone to blame for the terrible state of the world. Things have never been this bad in our lifetime, wherever you look, it’s doomsday. From wokism to Climate Change to Covid and not to forget, rampant inflation, things are awful. And it’s got to be somebody’s fault. Yes, folks, roll out that old standby in times of trouble, the eternal Scapegoat/Pharmakos. They used to come in the form of witches, but in the West that has kind of died off. Not so in Africa and parts of Asia, however.

We tend to think of ourselves as civilized people and therefore view Africans who still stage witchcraft trials and murders today as uncivilized Untermenschen. We firmly believe that we have moved beyond that stage in history in which these deplorable people still exist. And we avert our eyes from the historical record that proves thar, in a crisis, scapegoating is what we continue to do.

Today, just as in ancient Greece, it is the creatives, the thinkers, writers and artists who decry and fight tyranny and always end up being blamed, persecuted and marginalized. It is not coincidental that it was the highly creative Dietrich Brueggemann ( a cousin of mine) who led the charge against the overreach of the German government with his Alles Dichtmachen initiative. As one of Germany’s top TV and Film writer/directors, he assembled a group of actor friends, and assisted them in saying their piece in front of a camera, and uploaded it here: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=allesdichtmachen+youtube&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

The result? He was demonized by the press and discovered that some of the actors who had signed up lost their nerve.

Fear is the driver for scapegoating and blaming. Whenever the population gets frightened, the need for a scapegoat becomes urgent. And if we know anything, it’s that we’re living through a time of extreme fear. That this fear is being systematically stoked by our dear leaders in the name of a virus is now having terrible consequences.

The blame game is very old, deeply entrenched in the human psyche, and that is why it should worry us. Last week saw its rebirth and we now have a brand new, modern outbreak of this deadly affliction. We’re heading into an updated, thoroughly modern version of the Salem Witch Trials. That particular period of American History has been documented, analyzed and described ad nauseum. We don’t need to go into the gory details here; suffice it to say that 

…a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months and 19 were hanged.

Clearly, the people who did this were deranged by something. What was it? Surely fear, or their extreme piety and determination to live an exemplary life. If you strayed from the path, you were punished. The Puritans were people who brooked no imperfections in themselves and others. Kind of like the woke mob, if you will. Also, life in the Colony was hard, they often starved and were beset by angry Indian tribes. There was constant, relentless anxiety and fear. But perhaps the most telling reason for this terrible event is that there was a smallpox epidemic. They had reasons to get hysterical, just as we do today. The witch trials of the Middle Ages were at their height during the Black Death. That’s no coincidence either.

Pieter Breughel the Elder: the Triumph of Death

In Salem, there was a long and painful aftermath where people came to their senses, apologies were made, and rights were wronged. But the 19 people they had hanged remained dead, and the dreadful legacy of the Salem Witch Trials became a potent symbol of what we now know as Mass Formation. The American author Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play The Crucible, which was clearly an allegory of the persecution of the creative class by the fiercely anti communist Senator Joseph McCarthy during the fifties. There does seem to be a persistent pattern.

Today, we have a pandemic with disputed death rates (garbage in/garbage out) an utterly panicked leadership class and a hysterically frightened population. And right on cue, the Scapegoat is back. It’s the ‘anti-vaxxers’, of course. Demonized, hounded, excluded from normal life, they are being blamed for the state of our underfunded and mismanaged health care systems, the death of grannies, and indeed, everything.

Leading the charge is none other than French President Emmanuel Macron, who has never hidden his distaste for some of his constituents. He has called them ‘those who are nothing’ and very recently promised to ‘piss off’ the unvaccinated by passing a draconian law that basically turned them into non citizens who are only allowed to shop for groceries and do nothing else, period. That the law wasn’t passed is thanks to the demonized Marine le Pen and the entire opposition including Melenchon. You could argue that French democracy is still working as it should. The shock is that a world leader publicly turns his own citizens into scapegoats.

While lacking Macron’s elan, this must have emboldened the ueber-woke Canadian PM Trudeau, who blamed the desperate straits of our ineffective, mismanaged and underfunded health care system on the vaccine hesitant and their refusal to ‘do the right thing’.

“People are seeing cancer treatments and elective surgeries put off because beds are filled with people who chose not to get vaccinated; they’re frustrated. When people see that we're in lockdowns, or serious public health restrictions right now because [of] the risk posed to all of us by unvaccinated people, people get angry,” the prime minister said on CTV.

This is a not so subtle message that ‘being angry’ at your friends and family who may not wish to be victimized by an agenda run by Big Pharma, is okay, even patriotic. He must have been reading Mein Kampf. He also lied about these terrible people being responsible for high infection rates when it is a scientific fact that the vaccinated carry high viral loads and infect others. And also end up in hospital with Covid. Then he went further, threatening fines, a method already making inroads in Australia and Europe. And as I write this, the province of Quebec has just announced that there will be a ‘health tax’ coming down on the heads of the unvaccinated. The premier, Legault, thinks it should be enough to hurt. It will be rolled out with the tax form. Very convenient and of course, unavoidable.

And not to be outdone, former PM of Britain, Tony Blair, has labeled the unvaccinated ‘idiots’. This from the man who chose to join Bush in the invasion of Iraq, causing thousands of deaths and the destruction of that country. Yes, he clearly has the moral high ground.

All of this is nightmarish. But it is also quite odd that these dear leaders made these enlightened comments during the same time frame, using the same kind of language. Just as if they were reading from a script. As if there were a hidden agenda, perhaps a conspiracy. If there is, then these honourable men outed themselves. Perhaps they are a confederacy of dunces, after all. Even the naïve and trusting will have noticed that there is a remarkable similarity to the ‘messaging’ coming from world leaders. That something smells fishy.

Nonetheless, when politicians feel compelled to scapegoat large minorities, the entire western liberal democratic house of cards begins to collapse. We know what it leads to. I for one don’t feel like getting hanged. I suffer from dark visions of getting arrested by burly cops because I am protesting against the new Scapegoating Totalitarianism. That Trudeau will simply deduct huge fines from my government pension or that Premier Horgan will follow Quebec’s lead. I hope that this is simply a paranoid chimera. That nothing as sinister as that could ever happen here.

We will know by the Ides of March where all this is heading.