WEEKLY TRANSMISSION N°09 SCAPEGOATS:
THURSDAY 02 MARCH 2017
THINGS HIDDEN SINCE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD
Crowd at Omaha, Nebraska, detail of n° 1
contents: The Théo Affair, France, February 2017 Weekly Cartoon by Théophile : Lynchage The Burning of William Brown, Omaha, Nebraska, 1919 Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (René Girard) Publishing images can result in a heavy fine or even imprisonment in France The victimization process as the origin of cultural forms (René Girard) The Scapegoat Supreme by Raphaël WWW.PLANTUREUX.FR
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Theo in Hospital
The ThĂŠo Affair is a court case concerning the arrest and alleged accidental rape probably caused by the insertion of a telescopic stick, of a 22-year man, Theo, on February 2 2017, at Aulnay sous Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis), France. At the hearing for the policeman indicted for rape, the police stated that they only hit Theo's legs and they have no idea how Theo L. was injured. Several demonstrations of support for "Theo" have taken place since February 8 in all France. The emotional reaction among French youth surprises the political elite and the whole society.
The e-bulletin presents articles as well as selections of books, albums, photographs and documents as they have been handed down to the actual owners by their creators and by amateurs from past generations. The physical descriptions, attributions, origins, and printing dates of the books and photographs have been carefully ascertained by collations and through close analysis of comparable works. When items are for sale, the prices are in Euros, and Paypal is accepted.
N°09-2017: THINGS HIDDEN Previous related transmissions can be found at www.plantureux.fr
Weekly Cartoon: Lynchage by ThĂŠophile Boucher Galliano
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PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICE. The Burning of William Brown, Omaha, Nebraska, 28 September 1919. Later silver print, 203x254 mm, captions and agency stamps verso: “Culver Pictures”, “Negroes”, “Sy Seidman Collection, Black Americans”. Bruce and Dee Lundberg collection. About one hundred years ago, the brutal lynching of Willy Brown took place in in Omaha, Nebraska, the then central home of meatpacking plants. With dramatically increasing population in the beginning of 20th century, there was major civil unrest in Omaha, resulting from competition and fierce labor struggles.
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Racial Tensions in Omaha - A Horrible Lynching The Omaha race riot occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, September 28–29, 1919, resulting in the brutal lynching of Will Brown, a black worker; the death of two white men; the attempted hanging of Mayor Edward Parsons Smith; and a public rampage by thousands of whites who set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse in downtown Omaha. It followed more than 20 race riots that occurred in major industrial cities of the US during the Red Summer of 1919. Those riots resulted from a variety of postwar social tensions related to the demobilization of 350.000 black veterans of World War I, and many white, and competition for jobs and housing among ethnic white people and black people. In addition, it was a time of labor unrest in which some industrialists used black people as strikebreakers, increasing resentment. The riots were extensively documented in the press, which along with the federal government feared Socialist and communist influence on the black civil rights movement following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. They also feared foreign anarchists... In Omaha, sensationalized local media reports of the alleged rape of 19-year-old Agnes Loebeck on September 25, 1919 triggered the violence associated with Will Brown's lynching. The following day, police arrested 41-year-old Will Brown as a suspect. Loebeck identified Brown as her rapist, however during questioning Brown stated that Loebeck did not make positive identification which Loebeck later refuted. After the confrontation outside the Loebeck home, rumors began to fly that a mob would try to seize Brown. After an hour’s confrontation, police reinforcements arrived and Brown was transferred to the Douglas County Courthouse. On Sunday, September 28, a group of youths gathered in south Omaha and began a march to the Douglas County courthouse. By evening, the Omaha police and city officials inside the courthouse were virtual prisoners. The size of the crowd was estimated as between 5,000 and 15,000 people. Whatever the true story, the mob lost interest in city officials and concentrated on getting Brown out of the courthouse. Brown ended up in the hands of the crazed mob. He was beaten into unconsciousness. His clothes were torn off by the time he reached the building’s doors. Then he was dragged to a nearby lamp pole on the south side of the courthouse at 18th and Harney around 11:00 pm. The mob roared when they saw Brown, and a rope was placed around his neck. Brown was hoisted in the air, his body spinning. He was riddled with bullets. His body was then brought down, tied behind a car, and towed to the intersection of 17th and Dodge. There the body was burned with fuel taken from nearby red danger lamps and fire truck lanterns. Later, pieces of the rope used to lynch Brown were sold for 10 cents each. Finally, Brown’s charred body was dragged through the city’s downtown streets.
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World-Herald, 1919
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Nebraska-born actor Henry Fonda (1905-1982) was 14 years old when the lynching happened. His father owned a printing plant across the street from the courthouse. He watched the riot from the second floor window of his father’s shop. "It was the most horrendous sight I’d ever seen ... We locked the plant, went downstairs, and drove home in silence. My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes. All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope." During Fonda’s long career, at least two of his best movies — Young Mister Lincoln (1939) and The Ox Bow Incident (1943) — featured lynchings as major plot points.
The Ox-Bow Incident, movie
(excerpts from Nebraskastudies.org)
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Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World A paroxysm of violence would tend to focus on an arbitrary victim and a unanimous antipathy would, mimetically, grow against him. The brutal elimination of the victim would reduce the appetite for violence that possessed everyone a moment before, and leaves the group suddenly appeased and calm. The victim lies before the group, appearing simultaneously as the origin of the crisis and as the one responsible for this miracle of renewed peace. He becomes sacred, that is to say the bearer of the prodigious power of defusing the crisis and bringing peace back. René Girard believes this to be the genesis of archaic religion, of ritual sacrifice as the repetition of the original event, of the taboos that forbid access to all the objects at the origin of the rivalries that degenerated into this absolutely traumatizing crisis. This religious elaboration takes place gradually over the course of the repetition of the mimetic crises whose resolution brings only a temporary peace. The elaboration of the rites and of the taboos constitutes a kind of empirical knowledge about violence. Although explorers and anthropologists have not been able to witness events similar to these, which go back to the earliest times, indirect evidence for them abounds, such as the universality of ritual sacrifice and the innumerable myths that have been collected from the most varied peoples. If René Girard's theory is true, then we will find in myths the culpability of the victim-god, depictions of the selection of the victim, and his power to beget the order that governs the group. René Girard found these elements in numerous myths, beginning with that of Oedipus, which he analyzed in this and later books. On this question he opposes Claude Lévi-Strauss. When the phrase "scapegoat mechanism" was not coined by René Girard himself (Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change, 1935), René Girard developed it much more extensively as an interpretation of human culture. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), René Girard develops the implications of this discovery. The victimary process is the missing link between the animal world and the human world, the principle that explains the humanization of primates. It allows us to understand the need for sacrificial victims, which in turn explains the hunt which is primitively ritual, and the domestication of animals as a fortuitous result of the acclimatization of a reserve of victims, or agriculture. It shows that at the beginning of all culture is archaic religion, which Durkheim had sensed. The elaboration of the rites and taboos by proto-human or human groups would take infinitely varied forms while obeying a rigorous practical sense that we can detect: the prevention of the return of the mimetic crisis. So we can find in archaic religion the origin of all political or cultural institutions.
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MILITARY PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICE. Dead Soldier, Six-Days War, SinaĂŻ, June 1967. Vintage silver press print, 152x228 mm, captions and agency stamps verso.
Photographs of the dead or injured arouse controversy because more often than not, the name of person depicted in the photograph is not given in the caption. Laws regarding photography can vary significantly from nation to nation. French recent laws virtually ban any war images or even representations of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ (Penal code 227-24 modified by Loi n°2007-297, 5 March 2007 - art. 35). Today was a vote in European Parliament about twitter diffusion of violent images.
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Publishing images can result in a heavy fine or even imprisonment in France “The European Parliament has lifted French far-right leader Marine Le Pen's immunity from prosecution after she tweeted three pictures of so-called Islamic State (IS) violence. Ms Le Pen is under investigation in France for posting three graphic images of IS killings in 2015, including the beheading of US journalist James Foley. Her position as an MEP has so far meant she could not be prosecuted. Ms Le Pen is currently running to be French president. The European Parliament vote — carried by a "big majority", according to acting parliament speaker Dimitrios Papadimoulis — confirmed a preliminary decision taken on Tuesday by the legal affairs committee of the European Union legislature. In theory such actions can result in a heavy fine or even imprisonment in France ...“ (Kevin Connolly, BBC News, Brussels)
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The victimization process as the origin of cultural forms According to René Girard, just as the theory of natural selection of species is the rational principle that explains the immense diversity of forms of life, the victimization process is the rational principle that explains the origin of the infinite diversity of cultural forms. According to René Girard, the origin of language is also related to scapegoating. After the first victim, after the murder of the first scapegoat, there were the first prohibitions and rituals, but these came into being before representation and language, hence before culture. And that means that "people" (perhaps not human beings) "will not start fighting again ». In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, René Girard discusses for the first time Christianity and the Bible. The Gospels ostensibly present themselves as a typical mythical account, with a victim-god lynched by a unanimous crowd, an event that is then commemorated by Christians through ritual sacrifice — a material re-presentation in this case — in the Eucharist. The parallel is perfect except for one detail: the truth of the innocence of the victim is proclaimed by the text and the writer. The mythical account is usually built on the lie of the guilt of the victim in as much as it is an account of the event seen from the viewpoint of the anonymous lynchers. This ignorance is indispensable to the efficacy of the sacrificial violence. The evangelical "good news" clearly affirms the innocence of the victim, thus becoming, by attacking ignorance, the germ of the destruction of the sacrificial order on which rests the equilibrium of societies. Already the Old Testament shows this turning inside-out of the mythic accounts with regard to the innocence of the victims (Abel, Joseph, Job…), and the Hebrews were conscious of the uniqueness of their religious tradition. With the Gospels, it is with full clarity that are unveiled these "things hidden since the foundation of the world" (Matthew 13:35), the foundation of social order on murder, described in all its repulsive ugliness in the account of the Passion.[citation needed] This revelation is even clearer because the text is a work on desire and violence, from the serpent setting alight the desire of Eve in paradise to the prodigious strength of the mimetism that brings about the denial of Peter during the Passion (Mark 14: 66–72; Luke 22:54–62). René Girard reinterprets certain biblical expressions in light of his theories; for instance, he sees "scandal" (skandalon, literally, a "snare", or an "impediment placed in the way and causing one to stumble or fall") as signifying mimetic rivalry, for example Peter's denial of Jesus. No one escapes responsibility, neither the envious nor the envied: "Woe to the man through whom scandal comes" (Matthew 18:7).
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Omaha, Nebraska, detail of n° 1
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Christian society The evangelical revelation contains the truth on the violence, available for two thousand years, René Girard tells us. Has it put an end to the sacrificial order based on violence in the society that has claimed the gospel text as its own religious text? No, he replies, since in order for a truth to have an impact it must find a receptive listener, and people do not change that quickly. The gospel text has instead acted as a ferment that brings about the decomposition of the sacrificial order. While medieval Europe showed the face of a sacrificial society that still knew very well how to despise and ignore its victims, nonetheless the efficacy of sacrificial violence has never stopped decreasing, in the measure that ignorance receded. Here René Girard sees the principle of the uniqueness and of the transformations of the Western society whose destiny today is one with that of human society as a whole. In our early 21st century, the traditionnal 20th century choice of poor scapegoats is more and more questioned by the young, more keen to prefer powerful volunteers. A Recent article was titled: “Donald Trump is the scapegoat supreme of our time” (David Gornoski )
The Scapegoat Supreme by Raphaël, 2017
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