The Psychology of the Scapegoat: Jews and Kurds
Part Two: Legitimacy and Recognition in a Fragmented Age
Psychology and politics meet precisely at this junction. Projection, displacement and coalition formation all provide inner fuel. Legitimacy and recognition supply the outer casing. The enduring role of the Jews in the European imagination helps explain why the same individual can be treated as a citizen in one sentence and as a symbol in the next. The endurance of Kurdish presence across frontiers explains why the same family can be told they are loyal villagers and then, by a shift in vocabulary, presented as proof of a cartographic flaw. The lack of closure in fractured orders magnifies both tendencies. Cleanness of explanation becomes a luxury item. Those who sell it find reliable customers.
Events of the present fit neatly into these older grooves. When a crisis elsewhere is domesticated for local consumption, Jews are assigned the role of avatar for distant villains. The person standing in the square is recoded as a theatre in which international wrongs can be tried. The ease with which this conversion is achieved tells its own story about symbolic utility. Something similar occurs when Kurds make ordinary civic requests. A sign in a municipal office, a line of text in a schoolbook or a place-name restored to its older form acquires a strategic meaning far larger than the act deserves. The scale is altered because the figure has already been chosen. The mechanisms then proceed without friction.
Against that background, differences should not be flattened. The Jewish story includes the existence of a state that has been told repeatedly to prove its legitimacy as if legitimacy were a license renewed quarterly. The Kurdish story concerns a people for whom recognition remains an unsettled public matter. The symmetry is not exact. It is, however, instructive. In both theaters, a refusal has been formalized at the level of status. Legitimacy withheld offers a convenient line for anyone who wishes to return difficult policy to the realm of existential debate. Recognition withheld excludes an argument before it starts. These are efficient techniques in a cluttered age.
The record is not only a chronicle of persecutions. It preserves moments that complicate the neatness of the pattern and therefore help to explain it. There are instances of municipal life in which Jewish neighbors were defended because familiarity was stronger than symbol. There are provincial archives in which Kurdish petitions were answered with ordinary civility because officials preferred routine to drama. These undramatic interludes sit awkwardly inside heroic narratives of resistance or oppression, yet they show that scapegoating depends on ambient conditions being favorable. It is a habit rather than a fate. When routine holds, the habit is less tempting. When institutions are brittle or grandstanding is cheaply rewarded, the habit looks like a remedy.
From this survey, a set of conclusions suggests itself. Scapegoating does the work of politics without the labor of governing. It provides an explanation for failure that is emotionally legible and practically misdirected. It relies on psychological economies that minimize the need for self-revision. It is sustained by linguistic habits that soften acts and harden allegations. It is accelerated by technologies that convert a mood into a movement with striking speed. Its targets are chosen for symbolic utility rather than for evidence of responsibility. In the present climate, Jews and Kurds occupy that utility with unusual persistence. The one is made to sit an endless trial of legitimacy. The other is made to stand outside the court of recognition. Neither position arises by chance. Both answer to the needs of polities that seek unity on the cheap.
Finally, the comparative frame clarifies what is at stake. The Jews and the land of Israel, Kurds and Kurdistan, appear not merely as communities with histories but as instruments inside other people’s stories. To watch the instrument at work is to see how fragmentation invites shortcuts and how those shortcuts travel along the old grooves. The recurrence does not provide comfort. It does, however, provide understanding. It shows why the same emblem returns whenever institutions fail to absorb shock. It shows how legitimacy and recognition can be withheld in order to purchase a brief sensation of coherence. It shows, at a human scale, how the neighbor becomes the stage on which a society rehearses its anxieties.
None of this alters the particularities of each case. The land of Israel is not a metaphor for Europe’s unsettled history. Kurdistan is not a cipher for the cartographic confusions of the twentieth century. Each has its own archive of attachment, law, language and loss. The psychology described here travels between them because it is portable. The politics that makes use of that psychology travels because the conditions that invite it are common in an age where explanations are sought at speed and institutions collect more blame than confidence. The picture that emerges is not neat, but it is legible. In the half-light of fragmentation, the scapegoat stands where clarity should be. That is how the story continues.
