The Psychology of the Scapegoat: Jews and Kurds
Part Three
Language that Hides the Hand
The present age organizes feeling with remarkable efficiency. Mood becomes message in the time it takes to touch a screen. Within that economy of speed the figure of the scapegoat is not an intrusion from antique ritual but a compatible feature of the system. The pattern is legible in the way stories are framed and circulated, in the preference for emblems over causes, and in the readiness with which status is made to carry the burden of judgement. The cases of the Jews and the Kurds show how a symbol can be made to perform the labour of explanation, and how the stage on which it performs is maintained by habits of language, memory and institutional convenience.
A first feature is compression. Complex chains of action are reduced to an image that promises comprehension at a glance. For Jews the image often arrives attached to the land of Israel, as if the entanglements of the region could be encapsulated in a single moral verdict whose force requires no context. For Kurds the image is cartographic, a word on a map that can be pointed to, denied or redrawn with the tidy authority of a planner’s pen. The attraction lies in the neatness. The compressed sign gives relief from the strain of proportion. Where there might have been several causes ranked in order, there appears one emblem of fault. The emblem is serviceable because it travels well. It can be summoned whenever a new mishap seeks an older reassurance.
A second feature is the choreography of language. Violence that meets Jews in the street or in the sanctuary is reported in a register that leans towards meteorology. An event happens. A clash occurs. The grammar is cooling. The actors withdraw from the sentence. In the next column the moral burden hardens in the opposite direction. Allegations against Jews as a collectivity present themselves as declarative truths, already weighted with certainty. The asymmetry settles into routine and becomes unremarkable through repetition. In Kurdish affairs the choreography is administrative. A ban appears as standardization. A closure takes the name of security. A vanished toponym is explained as rationalization for easier travel. The terminology lulls the ear. The moral content is replaced by the tone of a manual. The cumulative effect is to make erasure look like maintenance.
A third feature is importation. Conflicts that belong to one theatre are recast for use in another, not as scholarship but as equipment for local drama. Jews become proxies for distant antagonists, which allows participants to speak with the timbre of grand struggle while dealing in neighborhood resentments. Kurds become proxies for regional contests in which ordinary civic demands are promptly rewritten as extensions of a chessboard that lies elsewhere. The convenience is obvious. Imported meaning enlarges a parochial quarrel and rescues it from the embarrassment of detail. It also fixes the scapegoat in place, since the symbol can always be refreshed with new scenes from the larger play.
The fourth feature is the politics of status. Legitimacy in the Israeli theatre remains on probation, a condition that can be extended indefinitely without explanation because it is driven less by law than by sentiment. Recognition in the Kurdish theatre remains suspended at the gate, neither granted nor decisively denied, which allows every subsequent petition to be treated as an error of category. Both moves are economical. They shift argument from the level of decisions to the level of existence, where the terms are broader, the language grander, and the evidentiary burden more easily blurred. A dispute about a particular policy becomes a judgement about being present at all. The upgrade supplies drama and removes the tiresome business of specifics.
The archive holds smaller pieces that confirm the shape of the larger. Municipal minutes from earlier centuries show how a decision with grave consequences could be framed in phrases of extraordinary calm. The calm is not an alibi; it is a method. Likewise, contemporary communiqués avoid the heat of polemic and lean on the idiom of procedure. The style assures the audience that the action has the texture of normality. In both cases the rhetoric performs an anaesthetic function, drawing a veil over the particular lives that will absorb the cost.
These mechanisms do not require a controlling cabal. They grow from the soil of fragmentation, where institutions that ought to absorb shocks pass those shocks outward, and where publics that deserve proportion receive theatre. The theatre is not a conspiracy against truth so much as a convenience in its absence. It arrives in moments of pressure and stays because it serves too many purposes to be surrendered quickly. The experience of the Jews and of the Kurds shows how a symbol, once promoted to a tool of order, can be kept close at hand even when it plainly fails to illuminate.
The habit also feeds on a selective use of memory. Memorial culture, generous in intention, often prefers the grammar of completion. A crime is named; a vow is made; the ritual proceeds with decorum. The form is consoling. It suggests that evil belongs to a concluded chapter. When hostility reappears in less theatrical clothing, the apparatus for recognition hesitates. The result is a split vision. The past is narrated with admirable clarity, while the present returns to the softer diction that makes agency retreat. The same society that can recite an old wrong in the active voice can speak of a current attack in the voice of weather and fate. The division does not arise from malice alone. It grows out of a wish to keep the sanctuary of remembrance uncorrupted by the noise of present quarrels. Yet it leaves the mechanism of scapegoating intact, and sometimes greases its cogs.
A different selection governs maps and names. The Jewish tie to the land of Israel is saturated with the long particulars of text, archaeology and practice, yet in certain rhetorics the tie is placed under a cloud as if continuity were a novelty. The skepticism carries the posture of sophistication. It treats attachment as an argument that must audition for entry into serious company. The Kurdish tie to Kurdistan, composed of weathered continuities of speech, custom and place, meets a parallel suspicion. The suspicion expresses itself in the ledger of substitutions, where one name politely takes the seat of another until the record looks smooth. The smoothness is not knowledge. It is the appearance of a world without disagreement.
The self-assurance of scapegoating lies in its capacity to move between scales without losing poise. A small incident becomes confirmation of a large story. A large story is made to condense into a single, repeating image. In the Jewish case the movement is often from the citizen to the emblem of power, an ascent that confers an abstract omnipresence on ordinary lives. In the Kurdish case the movement is often from the family to the emblem of disunion, a descent that recasts domestic habits as rehearsals for fracture. Neither transposition explains conduct. Both supply the intelligence of suspicion with the grammar it prefers.
Material conditions assist the passage. Economic tightness shortens tempers and narrows horizons. Political competition rewards the manufacture of clarity. Media markets discover that moral theatre is a reliable staple. The scapegoat, standing at the junction of these incentives, becomes hard to dislodge. The figure offers profit to publishers, energy to activists and respite to officials who might otherwise be called to account for routine failures. No single hand is required to sustain the setting. Many hands, each seeking advantage, keep the set upright.
A consequence follows for the study of causation. In an environment where the emblem precedes the enquiry, evidence reconfigures itself to fit the silhouette. Facts that do not serve the silhouette are relegated to the margins as footnotes to the obvious. Facts that do serve the silhouette are promoted to the front and repeated with the pace of a drum. The Jews and the Kurds enter this music as instruments that supply rhythm rather than as subjects whose histories complicate the score. The melody, once learned, is difficult to displace because it answers to a civic appetite for a tune that can be whistled while walking.
There are, nonetheless, interruptions. Archives preserve occasions when the emblem refused to behave. A crowd expected a parable and encountered a neighbor. An office that might have erased a name left it in place because the paperwork for deletion was more trouble than the continuation of ordinary life. These episodes look small beside the extravagance of catastrophe, yet they indicate that the mechanism requires more than resentment to operate at full power. It requires an alignment of incentives, a stage manager’s sense of occasion, and an audience in the right mood. Where any of these is absent, the scapegoat loses some of its stagecraft and the drama shrinks into grumbling.
The larger pattern admits of conclusions that belong to description rather than exhortation. Scapegoating is a technology for redistributing blame from systems to symbols. It proves most attractive when systems are opaque and symbols are ready to hand. It relies on psychological economies that make self-examination expensive and accusation cheap. It travels comfortably across languages because its components are modest: a compressed image; a softening of verbs where agency would embarrass; a hardening of nouns where certainty is desired; a preference for status judgements over policy disputes; and a procession of borrowed scenes that give local resentments the glamour of world affairs. Within that machinery the Jews and the Kurds occupy a recurring place. The former are invited into a continuous trial that treats legitimacy as a conditional privilege. The latter are kept at the threshold of recognition so that their claims can be treated as an administrative error. The settings differ. The underlying grammar holds.
To describe the grammar is not to erase the singularities. The land of Israel bears a history whose evidences are not scarce and whose meanings in the modern world cannot be settled by the cadence of a slogan. Kurdistan bears a continuity that has survived both overt assault and tidy euphemism. Each case carries the ballast of its own archive. The comparative vantage illuminates not by flattening difference but by showing how familiar psychological and linguistic devices travel across frontiers and adapt to new theaters without losing their character.
What remains is the texture of the present. Fragmentation has not invented scapegoating, but it has refined the conditions in which scapegoating thrives. The market for compressed explanations is buoyant. The rewards for declarative certainty outpace the rewards for proportion. Institutions that might insist on sequence and scale often find it easier to participate in the pageant, since participation yields applause while restraint yields suspicion. In that environment the figure of the scapegoat continues to serve as a reliable artefact, a tool that promises the restoration of order while delivering a narrative that spares the audience the hardship of ambiguity.
This is where the enquiry settles. The scapegoat in a fragmented age is not a superstition that lingers in corners of ignorance. It is a polished device operating in the open, supported by prose that has learned to feign neutrality and by memory that prefers closure to continuation. The emblem endures because it is useful. It gathers failures into a form that can be pointed at, shouted at, legislated against and celebrated for the decisiveness it seems to confer. The Jews, bound in argument to the land of Israel, and the Kurds, bound in continuity to Kurdistan, reveal how status itself can be conscripted into this work. Legitimacy can be kept waiting at the desk. Recognition can be invited to sit in the corridor. The theatre plays to a full house. The reviews praise its clarity. The city outside remains unsolved.
