Based on this presentation, I can clarify the relationship between aspects of René Girard’s theories and my own:

• I prefer the term “sacrificial victim” rather than “scapegoating” to describe the mechanism that unifies societies.
• The fundamental sacrificial victim that produces group unity is not an “outsider” group, but rather is an “insider” group.
• The soldier is the fundamental sacrificial victim. Douglas MacArthur told graduating West Pointers in 1962 that soldiers “above all other men” were required to practice “the greatest act of religious training—sacrifice.” An American veteran interviewed on Memorial Day in 2002 said, “The basic hero is the dead soldier.”

When we say “hero” and “dead soldier” and “sacrificial victim,” we actually are saying the same thing. The soldier sacrifices his life so that his country might live. Nations are unified by warfare, which creates sacrificial victims.

When one says that the victimage mechanism is “hidden,” requires “collective unknowing,” we actually are saying that people don’t wish to acknowledge that their societies are held together based on the creation of sacrificial victims.

Further, we prefer to hide the results of sacrificial death. We like the idea of heroic death, but would rather not see the bodies of dead or maimed soldiers. This is why we conceal “body bags,” and forbid soldiers’ coffins to be photographed.

Sandor Goodhart (Click image to view video). Hiding the Victim War as a unifier of works best when people are able to avert their eyes from the sight of the victims; when we don’t have to look closely at what happens to the bodies of soldiers. People enjoy the idea of war, but would prefer to participate at a distance. Sight of a soldier’s maimed body drains warfare of its glory. The son of Douglas Haig, British Commander-in-Chief responsible for the disastrous Battle of the Somme, reports that the General "felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty stations because these visits made him physically ill." French Commander Joffre, after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier, said to his Staff: "I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack." In war, the body of the soldier is given over to slaughter—in the name of the sacred ideal. We want the "beautiful" ideal, but don’t want to look too closely at what happens to the body of the soldier.

Society identifies a "scapegoat"—toward which members of the group safely may displace violence. By virtue of the scapegoat mechanism, divisions in the community are reduced to but one division: the division of all against one common victim or minority group.

Prime candidates for scapegoating, Girard says, are the "marginal and the weak," a minority group, or those isolated by their very prominence. Summarizing Girard’s theory, S. Mark Heim (2001) states that the scapegoating process does not just accept innocent victims, but prefers them—outsiders who are not closely linked to established groups in society.

"The sad good thing that happens as a result of this bad thing," Heim states, is that “scapegoating actually works." In the wake of murdering the victim or victims, communities find that the "sudden war of all against one has delivered them from the war of each against all."

Exposing the Victimage Mechanism

According to Girardian scholar Duncan Ragsdale (personal correspondence), "All the kingdoms of the world are based on the scapegoat mechanism." This mechanism, Ragsdale says, depends on a "collective unknowing" for it to work. The title of one of Girard’s books, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (2003), alludes to this idea of a concealed dynamic that has worked to maintain civilizations from their beginnings.

People perform scapegoating, but are not aware of what they are doing, or why. Girard suggests there is profound resistance—in the psychoanalytic sense of the term—toward becoming aware of the victimage mechanism; what amounts to a taboo against knowing.

The First World War

I have written extensively on the First World War as a form of national sacrifice. See, for example, my online publications, Aztec Warriors/Westerns Soldiers and First World War as Sacrificial Ritual.

Observing the war as it took its course, French nationalist Maurice Barres (1918) wrote that nothing was "more beautiful yet more difficult to understand than these boys, today cold in their graves, who gave themselves for France." Barres called the early years of war—during which thousands of French soldiers were slaughtered on a daily basis—"marvelous times, in which one may again find himself, times in which the splendor of our profound unity is revealed."

While the young soldiers had been learning the lessons of war through sledgehammer blows and in the furnace of fire, Barres said, the "differences and the divisions, which yesterday seemed insurmountable have today completely disappeared." The French people came together, according to Barres, not because of the death of an outsider or scapegoat, but by virtue of the sacrificial death of French soldiers.

Barres was thrilled and exhilarated by the death of young men. Barres links the achievement of unity within the French nation—disappearance of "differences and divisions"—directly to the fact that soldiers have been willing to sacrifice their lives. How does the soldier’s death function to produce national unity? Perhaps sacrificial death in warfare is the means by which a people demonstrates that it is devoted to and united behind its sacred ideals. Willingness to send young men to die is the way a nation "puts its money where its mouth is."

Hiding the Victim

We’ve noted that Girard believes that in order for it to be effective, the sacrificial mechanism must be disguised or hidden. We avoid knowing what is going on by averting our eyes from the victim. S. Mark Heim states that the working of mythical sacrifice in society requires that people "know not what they do."

The scapegoating mechanism, he says, is "most virulent when it is most invisible;" effectiveness of the mechanism of sacrificial killing depends on "blindness to its workings." To "avert one’s eyes from the sight of victims," Heim says, is that "characteristically human act" that lies at the essence of scapegoating.

Perhaps a similar dynamic is operative in the case of warfare. War as a unifier of the national community works best when people are able to avert their eyes from the sight of the victims; when they don’t have to look closely at what happens to the bodies of soldiers. People enjoy the idea of war, but would prefer to participate at a distance. They would rather not see the maimed bodies. Sight of a soldier’s mutilated body drains warfare of its glory.

The son of Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief responsible for the disastrous Battle of the Somme, reports that the General "felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty stations because these visits made him physically ill."

The French Commander Joffre, after pinning a military decoration on a blinded soldier, said to his Staff: "I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles. I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack." In war, the body of the soldier is given over to slaughter—in the name of the sacred ideal. We want the "beautiful" ideal, but don’t want to look too closely at what happens to the body of the soldier.

Hypocrisy lies at the heart of the institution of warfare. People plug into the spectacle and relish the fantasy of their nation's power and glory. They embrace war as a righteous struggle between good and evil. However, most people themselves do not wish to be put in harm's way. War is enjoyable to the extent that killing, suffering and dying are delegated to someone else. Further, people would rather that the carnage take place somewhere else, at a distance from the homeland.

Awakening from the Nightmare of History

What would it mean to "awaken from the nightmare of history?" In the first place, the ability to awaken means recognizing that we already exist as if in the midst of a bad dream, one however that is occurring within the space of reality or waking life. Many aspects of political history possess the characteristics of a nightmare. One need only read or watch “the news” to apprehend the "waking nightmare" to which I refer.

The fact that one is present within "reality"—or awake—does not mean, however, that one is not dreaming. It is a mistake to equate "reality" with that which is real. War, I suggest, may be conceived as a shared or collective fantasy, like a bad dream that many people are having at the same time. What is the nature of the shared fantasy that is the source of the ideology of war?

The ideology of war is generated based on the fantasy that nations are real entities—bodies politics—that substantially exist. This fantasy of the nation as an actual body politic is complemented by another one, namely the fantasy that these bodies will continue to exist to the extent that we feed them with sacrificial victims. It is this grotesque fantasy—of sacrificing human bodies for the body politic—that is the source of collective acts of mass-murder manifesting as war and genocide.

Awakening from the nightmare of history means that we become aware of this sacrificial fantasy and how it functions. Becoming aware of the sacrificial fantasy means: perceiving how the "victimage mechanism" operates within human communities (Girard); revealing the "totem secret" (Marvin); and "making conscious the unconscious on the stage of social reality" (N. O. Brown).