Reflections as I read Girard:
- Adam and Eve - both damned us and made us. In Christianity, Adam is largely put down as culpable for our casting out of Heaven. But we have a love-hate relation to him (and Eve), because he is also responsible for what makes us human: the ability to tell good from evil. He is Promethean, who pulled fire from the gods, who took a uniquely divine ability and brought it to man. We pin on him the pain and suffering caused by this choice, but we also cannot escape that this choice is a founding moment of our very being. Indeed, we could not even judge Adam’s sin, if we had not the ability to judge at all.
- I believe that the driving force of the era of peace that proceeded World War Two, but not World War One, was the unambiguous labeling of the good guys and the bad guys (spoiler alert, the Nazis). I hold that the Americans did not actually know the extent of the Holocaust when they entered the war. There are multiple accounts of shock by US soldiers upon discovery of the concentration camps, which then disseminated throughout US newspapers. This does mean, however, that the Allies were perhaps not as virtuous when they were first fighting the war: they were merely another in a long line of groups of people fighting other groups of people over land. The discovery of the depth of the Holocaust, however, firmly established that the Allies were fighting ‘true evil,’ and thus supremely virtuous. This ascribed virtue is what propped up American dominance for the 80 years since. However, along this vein, the denial of American power must also require the denial of the Holocaust - something seen quite clearly among Arab populations, who ascribe no virtue whatsoever to America (a country that is instead obsessed with oil, the only explanation left for US involvement in the Middle East).
This maps loosely onto Girard’s scapegoating: the Jews, innocent, were held responsible by Hitler’s Germany for all of Germany’s problems (largely caused by WW1 defeat and a global economic crisis). Their murder brought about an overwhelming guilt, which completely silenced any future German uprising (in contrast to WW1, where the humiliation of defeat was the driver of the rise of the Third Reich).
A war might be won militarily (or economically). However, the forces that brought about the first war, will remain and eventually bring about a second, without some staying function. This is also why post-genocide Rwanda is one of the few cases of successful conflict resolution: both sides committed such terrible acts that the guilt was even across tribal lines, and the only way possible was a complete forgiveness (or, more accurately, a collective forgetting).
Along this thesis, there is no resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war unless Putin is scapegoated as an evil leader who, once dethroned, the Russian people could disavow. The one path to resolution in the Israel-Gaza war is gone given the refusal to acknowledge the innocence of the October 7 victims. Instead, Arab attacks against Israel will continue since there will never be a collective sense of guilt - unless an even greater act of terror were to occur. However, it is both terrible to imagine something worse than October 7 (perhaps a nuclear attack to a major city?), and still plausible that such an attack would still not create a sense of guilt amongst the Arab nations, given their response to October 7.