The Wound of the Negative: History Written by the Victims
Stories We Tell Ourselves, or Stories We Are Ourselves, Part 14
“It is impossible to call up the forces which weaken or destroy religion without simultaneously calling up those which restore it. They are the same forces . . .” —Rene Girard, All Desire is a Desire for Being (p. 34)
Scapegoats of Schismogenesis
“The conscious element of manipulation is stronger in totalitarian worlds that were formerly Christianized than in those that were never aware of the truth of the scapegoat. Our contemporary world revives primitive violence without rediscovering the absence of knowledge that endowed former societies with a relative innocence and prevented them from being unlivable.” —Rene Girard, All Desire is a Desire for Being (p. 159)
The idea that Hitler was, far from a monster, “a fair-minded statesman of considerable chivalry,”1 is one I would instantly, almost kneejerkingly, reject if it was made about any other world politician, past or present. This includes the most universally admired figures, such as Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi.
Yet when I hear it inferred about Hitler, I find myself tempted to believe it! Why would this be so? The answer should be obvious.
When all the cultural idols have been smashed to bits, the most reviled figure, the anti-idol of the ages, becomes the last call on a quest for someone, somewhere, to believe in. If the good guys are all revealed to be evil—so the pre-verbal “logic” goes—maybe the most evil is actually the good?
Such an irrational (or anti-rational) “flip-over” is only possible because we have been so thoroughly mis- and dis-informed about Hitler, however, and this is only possible because we haven’t looked long or hard enough into that dark looking glass ourselves (at ourselves).
We have left it to “experts”—and we continue to leave it to “experts”—to form our opinions and beliefs for us.
In the above quote, Girard is making the point that totalitarian propaganda and thought control has undergone a “revolution” as a reaction to Christianity’s revealing of the scapegoat mechanism as fundamental to all religious/social arrangements.
“Our contemporary world revives primitive violence without rediscovering the absence of knowledge that endowed former societies with a relative innocence and prevented them from being unlivable” means this:
When we compulsively reenact patterns of retributive violence, behind which is the scapegoat mechanism to empower and justify us, we no longer have the luxury of amnesia-ignorance to cover up the innocence (or arbitrariness) of the victim—or to conceal the hypocrisy of our subterfuge—and so the scapegoating fails (in the long-term) to unify the community.
And more than merely failing, it backfires.
National Socialism scapegoating the Jews backfired by empowering Zionism and the Allied forces to create Israel. The scapegoating of the Nazis by the Allies, and the Palestinians by Israel, is likewise backfiring now, leading to a renewed scapegoating of Jews that is paralleled by a global counter attack that proceeds by scapegoating “Neo Nazis,” “white supremacists,” and “anti-Semitism.”
Each time the absolute guilt of a selected scapegoat comes into question, the mechanism starts to falter, a polar shift occurs, and a new (or new-old) scapegoat is found and pushed forward to stem the newly-opened wound.
And so on, ad nauseum, spinning eternally nowhere, with exponentially increasing violence.
Resisting the Pull of Narrative
“The mere fact of a dialogue between victims and persecutors is a Christian phenomenon. In a situation where persecution is taken as far as it can go, there is no dialogue between victim and persecutor. In general, history is written by the victors. We’re the only society that wants history to be written by the victims. And we don’t see the unprecedented nature of the reversal. That reversal makes new historical research necessary: there aren’t a lot of traces of the victims, because until now the victors have been the ones doing the talking.” —Rene Girard, All Desire is a Desire for Being (p. 169, emphasis added).
As discussed in last week’s post, a foundational myth is a good vs evil narrative that is too powerful for the average (or even the above-average) psy-opped mind to resist. Disrupt the elements (the facts) and the narrative—like a magnetic field drawing iron filings back in line—reassembles them into the same basic pattern.
Only now, North is South and South is North.
If to deny the Holocaust is to invoke a real one, then, by the same token (or totem), to affirm the Holocaust is likewise to express an unconscious desire for it to become reality (reoccur).
To be in a state of not-knowing about a question of such seeming magnitude—caught inside the falsely-asserted dichotomy of a real Holocaust vs. a hoax Holocaust—is to be unable to confidently assign labels of good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, victim or persecutor. Yet right here is the real opportunity for every cognitive dissident worth his or her salt.
It is the opportunity of entering an open-ended narrative with no possibility of closure.
Which is to say, existence, in every way infinite.
Very few have the courage (as exemplified by Job) to leave the Final Judgment-Solution—and the Vengeance—to the Lord.
Yet in the end, what other choice do we have?
War Of All Against All (TWOAAA)
“Any society in which the scapegoat resumes his immemorial role as founder and restorer of transcendence is totalitarian; but biblical and Christian knowledge has brought an awareness of the implications of the scapegoat that makes impossible the revival of the illusion of Job’s friends, and of all those who believe they live in a flawless universe.” —Rene Girard, All Desire is a Desire for Being (p. 160).2
In The Book of God: A Response to the Bible, Gabriel Josipovici writes:
The book of Job is about the impossibility of man’s ever understanding the causal links (the story), and yet his need to trust that God does indeed uphold the world, that there is a story there of which we are a part. It shows that man must neither simply accept that there is a story nor refuse to believe that there is one, but that it is his duty constantly to question God (and himself) about it. In Kierkegaard’s wonderful phrase, it keeps “the wound of the negative open” (p. 290).
In Girard’s view, the scapegoat mechanism allowed tribal communities to continue to expand without tearing themselves apart due to mimetic rivalry and violence. It made it possible for civilization to exist as “a thing.” For the scapegoat mechanism to work, there must be unanimous agreement about the guilt of the chosen sacrifice. The Gospels (and parts of the Old Testament, such as the Book of Job) consciously undo the myth of the guilt of the scapegoat by showing the persecution of an innocent, persecuted (or tested) because he is innocent (Joseph, Job, Isaiah, Jesus).
Girard began as a literary critic, and it was while reading of Dostoevsky, in preparation for his first book in 1961, that he converted from agnosticism to Christianity (Catholicism). He realized that scapegoating (as the basis for religion) was the way our ancestors had of preventing Hobbes’ War Of All Against All (TWOAAA) due to mimetic violence, by turning it into a war of all against one.
Christianity offered a radical solution—what Steiner called the Christ impulse—to turn the other cheek, resist not evil, judge not lest ye be judged, and cast no stones, due to an acutre awareness of our own complicity with sin.
Even so—as Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor admonishes Christ—few Christians can live up to the words of their Lord. By disabling the scapegoat mechanism, Girard also realized (after Dostoyevsky), Christianity makes inevitable . . . the Apocalypse.3
Ergo, in the end-times interim of TWOAAA (when Satan is full of wrath because he knows his time is short), the Christ impulse is the only mode of survival.
Not for the world-crowd, which has no survival mode, but for the divinely-sparked individual.
“Jesus dies to put an end to sacrificial behavior; he dies not to strengthen closed communities through sacrifice but to dissolve them through its elimination.” (Girard, p. 147, emphasis added).
The Final Solution to This World
“If religion once again dies a violent death in our world it will certainly be reborn in another form, it matters little which. The crisis of the modern world is but an episode in the middle of an unending process. The prodigious importance which we attach to our history is due to the narrowness of our vision.” —Rene Girard, All Desire is a Desire for Being (p. 36).
The narrowness of our vision is not only temporal but spacial. We inhabit infinity as well as eternity.
Jeshua said “My kingdom is not of this world”—because the world (the mob, the crowd, the tribe) can only continue as long as the scapegoat mechanism (the myth of the guilt of the sacrifice) continues unchallenged.
“Even the renunciation of violent mimetic desire cannot spread without being transformed into a social mechanism, into blind imitation. There is a stoning in reverse that is symmetrical to actual stoning and it, too, is violent to some extent. That’s what our era’s travesties clearly demonstrate” (Girad, p. 177).
There is no worldly solution to the War Of All Against All, because TWOAAA is the (final) solution to “the world.”
Now apply all of this to Adolf Hitler: the world-scapegoat about whose guilt everyone could always agree.
Until now.
Hitler is the boil on the face of humanity that reveals the inner toxicity of the system. All of that concentrated darkness which the image of Adolphus serves to (falsely) place outside of us, outside of our better-world-system, in fact, is an unintentional mirror to it.
And all of it has to be released. Only by cracking open the Hitler-imago-container can it be redistributed evenly among the entire human energy field.
Then we can all own our “inner-Adolf.”4
An Empty Vicious Circle
“A subtext of the Holocaust uniqueness claim is that The Holocaust was uniquely evil. However terrible, the suffering of others simply does not compare. . . . The unique evil of the Holocaust, according to Jacob Neusner, not only sets Jews apart from others, but also gives Jews a ‘claim upon those others.’. . . The claim of Holocaust uniqueness is a claim of Jewish uniqueness. Not the suffering of Jews but that Jews suffered is what made The Holocaust unique. Or: The Holocaust is special because Jews are special.” —Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (p. 47-48)5
Origins myths have always been stories of creation. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
The founding myth-text of Judeo-Christian civilization is Bereshit. Or is it all just horseshit?
By its fruit shall ye know it. (This is the same text used to justify the Anglo-Zionist occupation of Palestine. )
We are now in a new era, a post-Judeo-Christian age, a secular time of material, technological modes of worship, indenture, and slavery. And if the foundational myth of this age is World War 2, then we have an origin myth, not of creation but of destruction.
Its god is Adolf Hitler, and its sacrificial offering (the scapegoat by which it was consecrated) is “the Holocaust of the Jews.”
What makes the Jews the chosen people in our current age (now that Yahweh has been murdered by His own creation)? It is the same thing that makes Hitler the destroyer -god/Satan.
And all of this is an empty vicious circle around the corpse of God.
Because Hitler killed the chosen people, he is Satan. Because they were sacrificed by Satan (God’s left-hand, as Job discovered) the Jews are shown, again, to be the chosen people. Ecco Israel.
And hence now, again, on the flip side, they become the evil schemers hell-bent on world domination.
All this is (partly) because the only explanation offered for the unique evil of Nazi-persecution of Jews (besides that the Nazis were uniquely evil) is that the Jews are uniquely special.
In a word (or two): pride and envy.
The sins of Lucifer.
The Challenge of the Children of Job
“It is now no longer to persecute except in the name of victims.” —Rene Girard
The two central tenets of this (largely unacknowledged, because fully integrated and distributed) 21st century secular religion are:
1) The unique evil of Hitler
2) The supreme horror of the Holocaust.
To bring into question either of these, publicly at least, is to risk the Inquisition.
Even to begin to doubt either of these internally is to invite a crisis of consciousness (and of conscience), due to an awareness of the possibility of ostracization from society, from our fellow men and women.
A veritable casting out into the wilderness.
Agreement as to Holocaust of the Jews™ and the corresponding guilt of Hitler and the Nazis™ is what keeps the Scapegoat Mechanism of this Foundational Myth turning and burning.
“History is a test. Mankind is failing it.” —Rene Girard
Speaking personally, the greater tension, the greater risk, of the two “heresies” is that of doubting the supreme evil of Hitler. Because to start to doubt this, to really doubt it and confront the evidence of why it has to be doubted, is to allow, even for an instant, the possibility that “Hitler was right.”
And such a momentous and catastophic instant in consciousness is only for the truly bold of heart. It is all the spark that is needed, to burn an entire edifice of consensus down.
Herein lies true disorientation, and potentially existential terror, equivalent to the religious soul doubting the existence of God.
Yet the scapegoat, in the earliest traditions, was not slaughtered but set free.
In such terror, there is a growing sense of liberation. For what could be more terrifying—and hence more liberating—than to consciously risk losing one’s soul to Satan, from an unbudging commitment to the truth?
It is the challenge of Job. And we are all Job’s children.
(Thus ends this current series. There will be an appendix next week, also free. To support this site, subscribe, share, like, comment, upgrade to paid.)
Charles W. Sydnor, describing David Irving’s Hitler’s War, quoted by Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 510.
The quote continues: “The friends naively describe a universe governed by infallible justice, a universe that is undoubtedly atrociously cruel. Even without a lapse into neo-primitivism, we can admit that the unshakable conviction of those who inhabit such a world implies a kind of innocence and freshness lacking in the stifling totalitarian parodies of the modern world” (Girard, p. 160).
“Christianity will be victorious, but only in defeat. . . Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse.” (Girard, p 279, 280).
Or our inner Rothschild, if you already took the #Hitlerwasright black pill.
Something similar is happening in the increasingly undisguised, genocidal Jewish supremacist rhetoric (and policies) at Gaza. See this recent interview with Rabbi Barclay, by Candace Owens:
And see this recent report from the :
I was hoping for a higher level of commentary : /
In Eastern Europe the myth of the supremacy of the Holocaust over other peoples sufferings is not believed. It’s a western phenomenon. Neither is Hitler as evil incarnate believed - during WW2, Eastern Europeans were faced with two evils: Stalin or Hitler. Most chose Hitler, at least those who were not ethnic Slavs. In fact, they are actively hostile to the Holocaust as the supreme genocide for obvious reasons: to believe it would be to diminish their own suffering under the Bolsheviks, which lasted a good 35 years with at least 9 million innocent men, women and children murdered by the regime during that time. And countless others fleeing the terror to form quite substantial Eastern European diasporas in the west, particularly in the US and Canada. The previous figure was 25 million dead but that was likely propaganda during the Cold War.