Quotes About Scapegoating

People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don't just need an enemy, they need an explanation. And it's often useful, in unsettled times, where ignorance is everywhere, for people to believe in witches . . . Who do you think believed in witches?

Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the "folk devil" of the moment. A perfect partnership.

The Trump method of bluster, ambiguity, threat, and parry created a sense of ongoing crisis. It alienated critics, strained overseas alliances, and exhausted the patience of the electorate. Populism identified real problems and acted as a check on unaccountable elites, but it was also susceptible to demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories.

the president always needed someone else to blame; that nothing bad happened to him that was not directly caused by the failure or active malice of someone else.

All the political name-calling and putting blame on immigrants.

No doubt the Jews aren't a lovable people; I don't care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom.

El enemigo dice es el país el que tiene la culpa como si los países fueran hombres.

We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to look down on—a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed and punished for all or any troubles. We need this lowest class as much as we need equals to team with and to compete against and superiors to look to for direction and help.

These days, projecting blame is almost an art form.

I mean, that guy who wants to be President, that Jarret, he would call you all heathens or pagans or something." Indeed, he would. "Yes," I said. "He does seem to enjoy calling people things like that. Once he's made everyone who isn't like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn't cause. That's easier than trying to fix the problems.

Once he's made everyone who isn't like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn't cause. That's easier than trying to fix the problems.

Taken to extremes, scapegoating feeds the political pathology called fascism, a movement ideology centered on a "radical and authoritarian nationalism" that actively suppresses "openness and opposition" to the movement and the nation-state it hopes to commandeer.15 When this diseased brand of nationalism rushes in to fill our inner emptiness, its mildest manifestation is the belief that nation's critics are unpatriotic, even traitorous. At

Scapegoating is often a reenactment of a parent's abusive role. It is blind imitation of a parent who habitually released his frustration by indiscriminately raging. When a fight type parent scapegoats those around him, he enforces a perverse kind of mirroring. He is making sure that when he feels bad, so does everyone else. It is like a bumper sticker I saw the other day: "If Momma ain't happy, Nobody's happy.

Antisemitism is a categorical impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful and/or destructive

Antisemitism is a categorical impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful and/or destructive traits.