Abstract
In developing a methodology for modelling panic-driven scapegoating as a persistent historical phenomenon (i.e. by demonstrating historical patterning of moral panics), we are aided greatly at the outset by two central canons in the western literary tradition—The Crucible, by US playwright Arthur Miller (1953), and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), by English novelist George Orwell. As central canons of Western literature, The Crucible and Nineteen Eighty-Four are both remarkable in that, in one form or another, they treat the tendency of scapegoating never to prosper, helping as a commentary on two different historical parallels to establish the pattern and construct the theoretical scapegoating model.
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Notes
- 1.
Miller, Arthur, The Crucible: Revised Edition, London: Penguin, 1996; Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Penguin, 2004.
- 2.
Miller, The Crucible, ibid.
- 3.
See Case Study II for a more detailed discussion.
- 4.
Griffith, Robert, The Politics of Fear: Joseph McCarthy and the Senate, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987; Feldman, Jay, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America, Pantheon, 2011.
- 5.
See Case Study II for a more detailed discussion.
- 6.
A small fraction of the available literature appears in examples such as Howe, Irving, ed., 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, New York: Harper Row, 1983; Goodman, David, ‘Countdown to 1984: Big Brother May Be Right on Schedule,’ The Futurist 12, no. 6, 1978: 345–355; Tyner, James A., ‘Self and Space, Resistance and Discipline: A Foucauldian Reading of George Orwell’s 1984,’ Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 1, 2004: 129–149; Yeo, Michael, ‘Propaganda and Surveillance in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Two Sides of the Same Coin,’ Global Media Journal 3, no. 2, 2010: 49; Herman, Edward S., Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, Including the Doublespeak Dictionary, Black Rose Books Ltd., 1992; Kerr, Douglas, ‘Orwell’s BBC Broadcasts: Colonial Discourse and the Rhetoric of Propaganda,’ Textual Practice 16, no. 3 (2002): 473–490; Bennett, John, ‘Orwell’s 1984: Was Orwell Right?’ Journal of Historical Review 6, no. 1 (1986): 9–15; Plank, Robert, George Orwell’s Guide Through Hell: A Psychological Study of 1984, Vol. 41, Wildside Press LLC, 1994, etc.
- 7.
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, op. cit., CITE.
- 8.
Mencken, H. L., Notes on Democracy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, 22.
- 9.
Guilday, Peter, ‘The Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (1622–1922),’ The Catholic Historical Review 6, no. 4 (1921): 478–494; Mattelart, Armand, The Invention of Communication, University of Minnesota, 1996: 179–180; Koestler, Arthur, The Sleepwalkers, London: Hutchinson, 2017, Penguin.
- 10.
Prendergast, Maria Teresa, and Thomas A. Prendergas, ‘The Invention of Propaganda: A Critical Commentary on and Translation of Inscrutabili Divinae Providentiae Arcano,’ in Auerbach, Jonathan, and Russ Castronovo, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, Oxford University Press, 2014, 2.
- 11.
Simon, Bart, ‘The Return of Panopticism: Supervision, Subjection and the New Surveillance,’ Surveillance & Society 3, no. 1, 2002.
- 12.
Matthew 7:1-3, Luke 6:37.
- 13.
Lynette Finch, Dark Angel: Propaganda in Modern Warfare, Beaconsfield, VIC, 2006.
- 14.
Finch, Dark Angel, ibid.
- 15.
Bernays, Edward L., Propaganda, Ig Publishing, 1928; Bernays, Edward L., ‘Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and the How,’ American Journal of Sociology 1928: 958–971.
- 16.
Carey, Alex, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995, 37.
- 17.
Carey, ibid.
- 18.
Carey, ibid., 18–21.
- 19.
Hartmann, Thom, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, Rodale: New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2002.
- 20.
Chomsky, Noam, ‘The Corporate Takeover of US Democracy,’ Chomsky.info, 24 January 2010, via https://chomsky.info/20100124; Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Empire, Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000.
- 21.
Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, ibid., 37.
- 22.
Pilkington, Ed, ‘Manning Conviction under Espionage Act Worries Civil Liberties Campaigners,’ The Guardian, 1 August 2013, via https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/bradley-manning-espionage-act-civil-liberties.
- 23.
Wilson, Jean Moorcroft, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches: A Biography (1918–1967), London: Routledge, 2003.
- 24.
‘I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.’
- 25.
Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, op. cit.
- 26.
Gilbert, Gustave Mark, Nuremberg Diary, Da Capo Press, 1995; Knightley, Phillip, ‘The Role of the Media in Justifying and Promoting War,’ in Fox, Jo, and David Welch, eds., Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age: Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012, 378.
- 27.
It bears dwelling on the conditions under which these comments were made, neither giving Göering room to manoeuvre nor boding well for his longevity. If Göering did not made a direct mea culpa, the abovementioned comments might be considered the next best thing—even more so if saying so gave him an opportunity to take down his enemies with him. Being close to death, he had plenty of motivation to make his last public statements truthful ones. Mosley, Leonard. The Reich Marshal: A Biography of Hermann Goering, Doubleday Books, 1974.
- 28.
Cf. Norman Mailer: ‘Wars are a convenient way for the government to export a generation that is proving disruptive at home.’ Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, op. cit. The latter quote is generally updated into modern English as ‘if Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.’
- 29.
The Newburgh Sting, dirs. Heilbroner, David, and Kate Davis, Home Box Office, 2009. For more on entrapment see Aaronson, Trevor, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, Ig Publishing, 2014.
- 30.
Reich, Wilhelm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, London: Macmillan, 1970. For more on authoritarian psychology see Fromm, Erich, The Fear of Freedom, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1942; Adorno, T. W., E. Frenkel-Brunswik, and D. J. Levinson, The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Wiley, 1964; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973; Eco, Umberto, ‘Ur-Fascism,’ New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, via http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism, accessed 18 May 2017; Brinton, Maurice, ‘The Irrational in Politics,’ in Goodway, David, ed., For Workers Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton, Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004, 257–292.
- 31.
Mencken, Notes on Democracy, op. cit.; Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth, Mencken: The American Iconoclast, Oxford University Press, 2005; Reich, Wilhelm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, London: Macmillan, 1970; For ‘a complete chronicle of the Republic written in terms of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary, and without omitting a single important episode,’ see Davis, David Brion, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, Cornell University Press, 1971.
- 32.
Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Vintage, 2012, 3.
- 33.
Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, ibid.
- 34.
Hofstadter, ibid., 4. See also Cichocka, A., de Zavala, A. G., Marchlewska, M., & Olechowski, M., ‘Grandiose delusions: Collective narcissism, secure in-group identification, and belief in conspiracies,’ in Bilewicz, M., Cichocka, A. & Soral, V., ed., The Psychology of Conspiracy, London: Routledge, 2015, 60–79, and Golec de Zavala, A., & Lantos, D., ‘Collective narcissism and its social consequences: The Bad and the Ugly,’ Current Directions in Psychological Science 29, no. 3, 2020: 273–278. The Prejudice Lab at collectivenarcissism.com promotes further research into collective narcissism and conspiracy theories.
- 35.
Hofstadter, ibid., 7–9.
- 36.
Hofstadter, ibid., 29.
- 37.
Hofstadter, ibid., 33–34.
- 38.
Hofstadter, ibid., 34.
- 39.
Hofstadter, ibid., 6, 38.
- 40.
Schumpeter, Joseph A., Imperialism and Social Classes: Two Essays, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1955.
- 41.
Harris, Robert, ‘What a Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us: Pirates of the Mediterranean,’ The New York Times, 30 September 2006, via http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/opinion/30harris.html, accessed 22 April 2017.
- 42.
Harris, ‘Pirates of the Mediterranean,’ ibid.
- 43.
‘This moral colouring has inevitably affected the literary tradition for 67 BC, most notably in building up Roman paranoia about an organised pirate armada issuing forth from the rocky bays and ambuscades of the region known as Cilicia.’ Press, Daniel Patrick, Bellum Piraticum: Pompey, Piracy, and the Lex Gabinia of 67 BC, MPhil dissertation, The University of Queensland, 2012, via http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:281782, accessed 23 April 2017.
- 44.
Harris, ‘Pirates of the Mediterranean,’ op. cit.; Puchala, Donald J. ‘Of Pirates and Terrorists: What Experience and History Teach,’ Contemporary Security Policy 26, no. 1 (2005): 1–24.
- 45.
Policante, Amedeo, The Pirate Myth: Genealogies of an Imperial Concept, Routledge, 2015, ‘Ch. 7 Terrorists and Pirates: Global police and humanitas afflicta,’ 184–185.
- 46.
Hood, Christopher, The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-Preservation in Government, Princeton University Press, 2010.
- 47.
These comments come with the obvious caveat that The Bible was written by persons unknown hundreds of years after the events it describes had died, and that the King James Version was produced in the early seventeenth century, at the height of the European Witch Hunts, under the direction of the eponymous monarch, a notorious witch-hunter. If the KJV is a true reflection of Christianity, then let the comparison to the Paranoid Style stand. If the comparison is felt to be unjust, then let us acknowledge the KJV as the word of man, and an example of the Paranoid Style prevailing in the seventeenth century—or at least in part. Paranoid fears of the influence of Satan generally has a much older pedigree.
- 48.
Cai, Liang. Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire, SUNY Press, 2014, 143–151.
- 49.
Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Fairlawn, NJ; Essential Books, 1957, quoted in Hofstadter, ibid., 38.
- 50.
Cohn, Norman, Europe’s Inner Demons, London: Pimlico, 2005, ix.
- 51.
Hofstadter, op. cit., 39.
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Debney, B.M. (2020). Patterning Moral Panics. In: The Oldest Trick in the Book. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5569-5_2
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