You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Before Hannah Arendt's phrase “the banality of evil” caught on, William Du Bois noted in 1903 that lynchings in the United States were perpetrated by “ordinary men.” And he wrote in 1926 that those “who destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake … [are] normal human beings … desperately afraid of something” (Patterson, 1998, p. 173; MacLean, 1994, p. xi). So it was across the world; the twentieth century's hallmark was killing. Besides two “world” wars, it was marked by the Holocaust and holocausts of Armenians, Kurds, and Africans, the rape of Nanking, the random incineration of women and children along with men at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “ethnic cleansing” in Yugoslavia, and probably the largest number of innocents killed in the political purifications of the Soviet Union and China. Behind many of the slaughters was fear.
My thesis is that fear and terror begat the inception of archaic religious fantasies, inducing ritual practices deeply invested with transference and projection, and that such dynamics continued into the twentieth century and underlay its prolific violence and scapegoating. Though Freud (1907, 1913, 1927, 1930) drew attention to the intense fear of catastrophe that underlay neurotic and religious ritual, this article draws on dynamics less related to sexuality. Ritual and violent sacrifice are psychological means of averting death. By sacrificing and scapegoating victims, the terror of chaos and death are eliminated, evil is displaced and cleansed from the community, order is restored, and the gods are mollified.
The most awesome of the twentieth century's slaughters-the