Scapegoating

History and effect of Scapegoating propaganda

A pattern theorized by Kenneth Burke and Rene Girard, and a defining feature of wartime and genocidal propaganda, including the RTLMC broadcasts studied ahead of the Rwandan genocide.

It relieves the in-group of complexity and agency by concentrating blame for a diffuse harm in a single bounded target.

Lineage: Burke; Girard; wartime out-group posters

How Scapegoating propaganda works

Scapegoating starts with a real harm that has many causes: a lost war, an epidemic, inflation, crime, an industrial failure, a wave of insecurity. The sender does not deny the harm. On the contrary, the harm is usually described vividly, because the audience's distress is the raw material. What the sender changes is the causal story. Instead of a tangle of policies, accidents, economic forces and decisions by many actors (including the audience's own leaders), the message offers one bounded group as the cause. The group is chosen because it is already visible and already somewhat distrusted: a minority, a foreign population, a class, a profession, a set of emigrants. Its boundaries are drawn so that every member shares the blame whether or not any member did anything.

Why Scapegoating propaganda works

The oldest psychological account is frustration-aggression theory. Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer and Sears (1939) argued that frustration produces an urge to aggress, and that when the true source cannot be attacked the aggression is displaced onto a safer target. Hovland and Sears (1940) reported that lynchings in the American South rose in years when cotton prices fell, which became a standard illustration. That finding has not held up well. Hepworth and West (1988) reanalysed the series with time-series methods and still found a modest relationship, but Green, Glaser and Rich (1998) argued that the correlation disappeared once longer-term trends were taken into account, and found no link between unemployment and monthly hate-crime counts in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. The displacement idea survives as one mechanism among several, not as a law.

Scapegoating propaganda examples across eras and sides

• Soviet Union, 1928 to the 1930s: "wreckers." In the Shakhty trial of 1928, mining engineers were charged with sabotaging coal production, and later show trials extended the charge of "wrecking" to other specialists. Industrial accidents, missed targets and shortages that had many causes, including the pace of the plans themselves, were attributed to hidden class enemies and foreign-linked saboteurs. (Sources: Kuromiya 1988; Fitzpatrick 1999)
• Germany, 1918 to 1945: from the stab-in-the-back legend to wartime antisemitic propaganda. After 1918, nationalist politicians and veterans' groups spread the claim that the army had been betrayed at home by socialists and Jews rather than defeated in the field. Under the Nazi government, the Propaganda Ministry and party press went further and presented "international Jewry" as the cause of the war itself, a claim that accompanied deportation and mass murder. (Sources: Evans 2003; Herf 2006)
• United States, 1942: collective suspicion of Japanese Americans. After Pearl Harbor, press reports and officials attributed a threat of sabotage and espionage to all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, and about 120,000 were removed from their homes and incarcerated in camps under an order issued by a Democratic administration. The federal commission that reviewed the policy found no documented acts of espionage or sabotage by Japanese Americans and attributed the policy to race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership. The archive's 'Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry' (exclusion order posted in San Francisco) shows the order itself, and This Is the Enemy shows the same government's poster habit of compressing an enemy into one figure. (Sources: Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians 1982)

Content note: Antisemitic boycott sign ('Kauft nicht bei Juden') posted by uniformed SA and SS men on a Jewish-owned shop window, 1933 This object is shown as it was published. Why

Content note: Poster attributing the 11 September 2001 attacks to 'Zionists', showing a hand with a Star of David cufflink pointing at the burning Twin Towers This object is shown as it was published. Why

Where it appears in this archive

The object tagged here ranges from wartime plant-security and anti-sabotage posters in the United States (This Is the Enemy, Wanted! For Murder — Her Careless Talk Costs Lives) to the German war-loan and 1919 anti-Spartacist posters (Das ist der Weg zum Frieden, die Feinde wollen es so! Darum zeichne Kriegsanleihe! (That Is the Way to Peace, the Enemies Want It So! Therefore Subscribe to the War Loan!), Spartakus bei der Arbeit (Spartacus at Work)), Soviet campaign posters, the Nazi press and boycott photographs, Cold War broadcast transcripts and a 2018 Iranian poster. Sub-cases are documented in the case studies Kangura, Radio Rwanda and RTLM: Hutu Power propaganda before and during the genocide against the Tutsi, 1990-1994, Anti-Rohingya propaganda in Myanmar, 2012-2018: the 'Bengali' label, the monks' sermons and the military's covert Facebook pages, Collectivisation, the 1932-33 famine and its denial: the kulak label, the silence and the foreign press and Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68). The sender and scale differ a great deal, from a private periodical to a state broadcaster during a genocide, but the structure the objects share is the same: one named group, many unrelated harms, and the audience's own side absent from the account.

How to spot Scapegoating propaganda

• Count the causes. If one group is blamed for several unrelated harms (crime, prices, disease, defeat), the explanation is doing emotional work rather than causal work.
• Check whether the blame attaches to named people and specific acts, or to everyone who shares an ethnicity, religion, nationality, class or political label.
• Look for the in-group's missing agency. Ask what decisions by the audience's own government, institutions or allies contributed to the harm, and whether the message mentions any of them.