Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [83]
Not surprisingly, scapegoating often involves the kind of Freudian projection that we have repeatedly discussed, where people project their own hateful feelings onto the scapegoats. For instance, medieval anti-Semites projected their murderous impulses onto the Jews whom they accused of poisoning wells and subsequently murdered. Thus, the well-poisoning theory was perfectly designed to lodge itself in the brainstem of the German peasantry: it exploited their instinctual suspicions of insular and exotic Jewish communities, it explained the devastating epidemic that was ravaging the land, and it rationalized their violent urges.
Dawn of the Supervillain
According to historian Norman Cohn, such ancient superstitions led directly to the “the modern myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy.”4 What began as localized rumors about poisoned wells and sacrifices of Christian babies eventually evolved into beliefs in a global plot by wealthy Jewish powerbrokers to destroy Christianity. The conspiracism satisfied the same basic urges as the scapegoating—converting suspicion of strangers into explanations of misfortunes. How do you account for World War I, a senseless, catastrophic war that killed tens of millions? You blame the international Rothschilds who are not part of any nation but exist somehow above and outside European society, just as the European peasantry once blamed local Jews—isolated in their traditions and their ghettos—for the Black Death.
And if you’re a Bill O’Reilly fan, how do you explain the secularization of Christmas or the liberal media that challenges your ideas? You blame the international George Soros—a “lone wolf,” a “state-less statesman,” a rich Old World Jew with a Hungarian accent. One need not hate Jews to scapegoat George Soros, but Soros’s marginal status as an American is part of what makes him an appealing target. There have been other less exotic scapegoats in the history of American political paranoia, including the Rockefellers, the Illuminati, the communists, and the Jesuits, but they have all in some way been represented as anti-Christian (or at least anti-Protestant) and un-American. They are radicals, globalists, profiteers, or elites. They answer to Stalin, the pope, or the Devil. They are not from what Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have called “the real America.”
These global supervillains, the modern version of the Salem witches and the well-poisoning Jews, had been largely absent from mainstream American politics for decades. Even in the heydays of the Secular Humanist and the Gay Agenda, the conspiratorial bad guys seldom had names and addresses. They were amorphous atheists and homosexuals, perhaps with a Welfare Queen thrown into the mix. When a real villain was wanted, Americans looked outside the nation’s borders to Leonid Brezhnev, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden. The United States had not seen genuine domestic supervillains since communist spies like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were prosecuted during the Red Scare.
That all changed with George Soros and the war on Christmas. After Saddam Hussein was executed and the Bush administration seemed to give up on capturing the elusive bin Laden, Fox News and the Republican Party turned the spotlight on Soros and his gang of paid assassins. But Soros was only the first and most prominent in a new line of domestic supervillains. Like baseball pitching machines, today’s right-wing media outlets regularly serve up fresh bogeymen to conservative commentators and politicians who joyfully slug at them with all their might. Most of these bogeymen differ from most of the people who watch Fox News. They might be Jewish like George Soros. They might be black like Van Jones, a former White House environmental advisor whom Beck has suspected of plotting a communist revolution.5