The Need for Scapegoats in All Forms of Oppressive Regimes

[Belacqua]

In oppressive regimes there is always this need to target some groups of people.

This is not only true in oppressive regimes, though. It's very common for certain groups to be demonized in order to increase solidarity among more mainstream people. Hegel called it "negative identity." You define who you are according to what you are not, whom you hate, whom you would like to see gone from the face of the earth.

Americans need Russians to give themselves a common group identity. For a long time it was the Soviet Union, then it was Muslims for a while, and now it's Russia again. The propaganda war is in full swing to make China a scapegoat, once we get tired of hating Putin and forget about Ukraine the way we forgot about Afghanistan.

On this forum there are a few people whose hatred of religion seems to be a central part of their personality. Some people get pleasure from hating. 

When I was in college I did study Orientalist painters like Eugene de la Croix for instance. Even in the beginning of the 20th century the Orient was seen by Europeans as this mystical realm that was visited by archeologists and treasure hunters [...]

Orientalism of the modern type got up and running in early 19th century France. It was largely started by Napoleon, who conquered Egypt and slaughtered the inhabitants of several towns there and in Syria in order to prove his skills as a general, and exploit resources for France. He took with him a large team of artists and archeologists who kept in-depth records of the culture as they killed and colonized its people. The set of prints they published on their return is a great masterpiece.

Both Delacroix and Ingres, who in other respects were opposites, got a lot of mileage out of exotic and erotic scenes of harems. Fantasies of available slave girls and freer, non-European morals were partly male fantasy but partly true. If you read Flaubert's journals from his trip through Egypt, for example, he seems to have spent more time in brothels than gazing at monuments. 

There continues to be a strong tradition of mature men, who wouldn't define themselves as "gay," having boy lovers. It was well known that the warlords in Afghanistan whom the US wanted to support frequently kept boys for such purposes.

Just as some people insist on defining Christianity by pointing to its very worst examples, modern Americans often think of Islam as only and always terrible. They can do this by remaining ignorant of large parts of its history. There have been Islamic societies in which liberal learning and lifestyles were encouraged. There is nothing intrinsic to Islam that makes it like the Taliban, just as Christianity can be far better than its modern American bad examples. But demonizing and scapegoating make it easier to fund the war machine.


Up through the time of the Beat Poets, Northern Africa and parts of the Middle East were destinations for sex and drug tourism, including by many gay writers and artists. This has reportedly ended as more strict Muslim regimes discourage such exploitation. But it's a typical way for colonial powers to use "exotic" countries: take from them what you want (sex, drugs, oil, etc.) while declaring that they are backwards and uncivilized compared to us.