A few days ago, Trump made a very interesting statement. I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that if he lost the presidential election, it would be because the Jews didn’t vote for him. In other words, as one commentator said, it was as if he was setting the Jews up as the cause for his potential failure. He was using the Jews as potential scapegoats. Now Trump is a master scapegoater. He focuses a lot on immigrants, both illegal and legal, as the cause of all the ills of American society, both real and imagined. Recently he has focused on legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio as the reason that so many pets, in particular cats and dogs, have supposedly disappeared. Supposedly, the Haitians have been stealing other people’s cats and dogs and eating them. The whole story was total nonsense, but Trump and Vance, his vice=presidential candidate, have continually harped on it. The more government officials and news commentators delve into the absurdity of the story, the more Trump and Vance insist that its true. So why would Trump and Vance continue to insist on the veracity of their story, when there is so much evidence to the contrary? In this case, the reason for their incredible lie seems to be to deflect the attention of the American public from the fact that there is a paucity of constructive ideas that Trump and Vance seem to have for presenting to the American people as the building blocks of their, how shall we say, new vision.
Now in the case of the Jews, the accusations are much more serious. The Jews are being accused, in effect, of somehow potentially undermining Trump’s entire campaign. So, if Trump loses the election, he and his followers can turn around and say that they had nothing to do with the loss and that the loss was all in the hands of the Jews. And then both vigilante groups and lone wolves can start focusing on those people (the Jews) that they magically feel are the cause of Trump’s election loss and then they can wreak all kinds of havoc back on the Jewshyperbolic as punishment, as revenge for all that they have supposedly done against Trump and his allies. It potentially has all the makings of another Kristallnacht. This may seem like a gross hyperbolic melodramatic exaggeration on my part, but there has already been such an enormous spike in antisemitic acts in the United States recently, that what has seemed impossible before, now appears quite feasible at the present.
So let us stop for a moment and look at the process through which scapegoating develops. The foundation upon which scapegoating first appears is that of numbness and the experiential vacuum which is the result of making the modern living environment excessively frictionless. As has been discussed in previous articles, there are many different ways of dealing with this state of affairs among people in today’s world. Almost all of them involve people shocking themselves to life, whether it’s through taking drugs that involve kicks, doing a significant act of aggression against others or, for that matter, against oneself, or becoming a part of a cult that entertains ideas that go totally against the mainstream, and, in so doing, generates a lot of friction for all of the members.
Scapegoating involves projecting a lot of hatred and generalized hostile feelings onto a particular person or group of persons and, in so doing, generating a lot of consciousness-raising friction. The difference between scapegoating and serious criticism of someone or some people is that with scapegoating there is little or no connection between the criticism that is being leveled, on the one hand, and reality on the other. Haitians in Springfield Ohio are not eating the pets of their neighbors. The Haitians are so upset, that they have filed charges against Trump and Vance as a result of the chaos and threats that have been created as a result of Trump’s and Vance’s lies.
Anyway, to make a person or group of persons one’s scapegoat can have very dire consequences for the person or group of persons involved. Because what the scapegoat(s) is being accused of has no basis in reality to begin with, it becomes impossible for the accused to formally demonstrate his innocence to the accusers. Unfortunately, some people will continue to have lingering doubts about the Haitians continuing to eat cats and dogs even after the accusation has been knocked down for the majority of people in the U.S. And as for the accusation that if Trump loses, it will be the Jews fault, Jews have been scapegoated in so many different ways, by so many different people, that many people today will see what has happened in the past with past accusations and assume that Jews are guilty as charged. Some things never change.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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