Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes & State Crimes in the War on Terror

Chapter 3: Scapegoating and Social Insecurity

CHAPTER THREE Scapegoating and Social Insecurity In general terms, throughout history of [hu]mankind, sacrifice, vengeance, and penal justice were not separate notions but different facets of the same process, needed alike to protect the state against the wrath of gods. —Nigel Davies, Human Sacrifice: In History and Today, 1981 P olitical leaders in the United States depict the problem of terrorism in richly coded mystical rhetoric, issuing broad proclamations about the threat of evil and evildoers, along with the axis of evil (Frum and Perle 2003; Kirkpatrick 2004a; Nunberg 2004). Framing the issue in that manner reflects and reinforces not only public fear of terrorism, but also an undifferentiated social anxiety over national security , economic woes, crime, racial/ethnic minorities, immigrants, and foreigners. Those tensions compound the need to assign blame even if it means falsely accusing innocent persons for terrorism along with a host of other social problems. That phenomenon, referred to as scapegoating , has a significant cultural, religious, and theoretical history. According to Tom Douglas: “The ancient process of the transfer and of evil, which has come to be known as ‘scapegoating,’ seems to have existed 35 03-R3894 7/28/06 12:46 PM Page 35 ever since human beings held the concept that they were under the supervision of divine beings” (1995, ix). Beyond serving certain mystical purposes, the functions of scapegoating are widely recognized, in particular from the perspective of social constructionism. “When, in times of turmoil, new forms of deviance are needed by a society in order to provide scapegoats for deep social tensions , they will usually be invented” ( Jeffrey 1992,1). Modern scapegoating departs from its ancient past insofar as there is less emphasis on mysticism , atonement, and purification. Still, scapegoating nowadays serves other potent social and psychological needs, ranging from the need to assign blame to the need to reduce psychic discomfort. Despite satisfying those needs—however neurotic they may seem—scapegoating in the war on terror is self-defeating since it undermines efforts to identify the real causes and solutions to political violence. This chapter delves into the phenomenon of scapegoating, tracing its cultural and theoretical progression. The notion has evolved tremendously since it was first introduced as a biblical device to explain the expulsion of evil. Anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists have all engaged in its conceptual development in attempts to interpret the universal need to blame others for social crises. While reviewing the distinct contributions of those theories, attention is turned toward integrating certain facets of cultural theory with risk society theory, thereby advancing criticism of an emerging culture of control and the criminology of the other. Regrettably, some versions of contemporary criminology have embraced questionable methods of assigning blame; such “othering” produces criminal justice policies that are tightly contoured along images of race and ethnicity—as well as social class (Welch 2005b; Young 1999). This chapter applies those dispositions to the war on terror, revealing the counterproductive nature of scapegoating in a post-9/11 society. Scapegoating Theories Scapegoating theory has a lengthy and complex history, rooted in religion , anthropology, and social psychology. In the biblical sense, scapegoating refers to a ritual described in a key passage in the Old Testament in which the first of two goats is sacrificed in an act of atonement while the other is chosen to escape, carrying symbolically the sins of the Hebrews into exile. “ . . . and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the inequities of the people of 36 SCAPEGOATS OF SEPTEMBER 11TH 03-R3894 7/28/06 12:46 PM Page 36 Israel and all other transgressions, all their sins, and he shall put them upon the head of the goat and send him away into the wilderness. . . . The goat shall bear all their iniquities upon him to a solitary land” (Leviticus 16, 8–10). In recognizing the significance of rituals, anthropologists in the nineteenth century expanded the concept of scapegoating in an effort to explain a wide range of rites for the expulsion of evil (Stivers 1993). Often scapegoatingmergeswithbanishmentinsofarascertainpeopleareforced from their communities. Occasionally the Athenians would expel from the city people chosen for their distinct attributes—the poor, the deformed , and the ugly—as a campaign to purify it. The view of scapegoats as tainted and polluted, prompting the need for societal purification, is widely recognized by key...