Scapegoat Research Paper

My logic is similar to Margret’s in a sense because scapegoating can be the effect of people being under stress or overwhelmed. For example in the selection Half- Hanged Mary, Mary is put to hang for being accused of witchcraft with no evidence to support except for the unfair evidence of her being an independent women. “I was hanged for living alone for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin, tattered skirts, few buttons, a weedy farm in my own name, and a surefire cure for warts” (Atwood 1). Mary ask the women that approach her for their assistance to help her get down from the tree but they are filled with fear and decide to leave her to hang. This begins to angers Mary to the point that she speaks to God as if she were challenging him that she no longer would believe in him any longer. Mary says “or like a dark angel insidious in his glossy feathers whispering to me to be easy on myself. To breathe out finally. Trust me, he says,caressing me. Why suffer?” (Atwood 2). At this point in the story Mary has been hanged for six hours, is hallucinating and is changing her thoughts on what she believes in with God telling her to give up. In Margaret Atwood’s interview with Bill Moyer she states, “When societies come under stress these things happen. People start looking around for somebody they can blame and they feel if they can demolish that person everything is going to be okay” (Atwood).

William Andrew Myers, in his essay “Ethical Aliens: The Challenge of Extreme Perpetrators to Humanism” originally published in Colette Balmain and Lois Drawmer’s volume edition of Something Wicked This Way Comes: Essays on Evil and Human Wickedness (2009), examines “extreme perpetrators” and our need to recognize the human in them. Myers supports his idea of “extreme perpetrators” by defining these people through a few expert opinions, categorizing the three central culprits (murderous dictators, serial killers, and ideological killers), and reasons why we distance ourselves from them but should take the time to understand their differences from humane people. The purpose of Myers’ essay is not necessarily to defend dangerous murders’ actions

While reading the crucible and analyzing other documents, Scapegoating became a relevant occurrence in communities. Societies will turn to scapegoating a group of people to place blame for a problem or event; there is evidence shown regarding scapegoating in “ The Crucible” / Salem witch trials, “The Holocaust”, and in politics. These three examples all relate to scapegoating because they all discriminate and place blame of something the community cannot control on a specific group of people.

Our common practice of thinking of others and ourselves as accountable is simply not justified!

An obsession exists in the world today based solely upon the use of scapegoats. According to the dictionary, a scapegoat consists of a person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place. Some of the most influential scapegoats consist of Jesus Christ taking suffering for the sins of civilization, the Jewish population being punished for the problems in Germany, and more recently the U.S. citizens who perished in 9/11 being punished for the sins of America. Scapegoats have come in many forms over time and have been very destructive. The usage of scapegoats in our society, such as in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, has proved to be damaging, and an end must be found in order to find peace.

The definition of blame, holding someone accountable for an action or result. In the story Romeo and Juliet, there is a lot of blame going around. The people or things deserving the most blame are the Capulet and Montague feud, Lady and Lord Capulet, and Romeo and Juliet. The feud caused the prince to issue a warning telling if the Capulets and Montagues were ever seen fighting again, death would occur. This in the end caused the death of Tybalt and Mercutio. They forced the second marriage to Paris upon Juliet, the first being to Romeo. Juliet went to Friar Laurence to seek a way out of it and got a potion. Romeo and Juliet, the two star-crossed lovers mentioned in the prologue who got married just hours after knowing each other. Romeo's impulsiveness

There are tragedies everywhere and everytime, with these tragedies you have to blame someone or something for it. In Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare they’d blame fate instead of themselves because they could have been responsible for the disaster they caused. Romeo was to blame for the misfortune in the city of verona. Romeo’s responsible for his hastiness, responsible for the deaths that happened in under 3 days and Convincing Friar Lawrence to get Romeo and Juliet.

“…a catch-all expression… it’s the idea that for every accident someone is at fault. For every injury, someone to blame. And, perhaps most damaging, for every accident, there is someone to pay” (Lord Falconer, 2005).

During World War II, Hitler used his power to persuade the government to make him the chancellor, which gave him more control over Germany. This lets him manipulate the people so they would think that same way as he did. The people believed this because they did not understand what Hitler was going to do with the Jews, during this time they used the Jews as a scapegoat to blame for their problems. Many situations have a scapegoat that people need to blame to help them deal with their problems. In The Crucible written by Arthur Miller the town used witches as their scapegoat. In the New York Times article Extended Forecast: Bloodshed the people in Tanzania used witchcraft as their scapegoat. Finally in the Quartz Magazine article Fear of the Government Makes Americans More Likely to Reach for a Gun the government is creating scapegoats out of the certain people and events. Some people need to find a scapegoat to blame for example, in The Crucible, the New York Times article Extended Forecast: Bloodshed, and the Quartz Magazine article Fear of the Government makes Americans more likely to Reach for a Gun the people had to find a scapegoat for the problems that they faced.

When we are younger we used to get our brother or sister and pick on another sibling. When mom or dad comes to yell at the person who started it we tend to pin it on someone else or you are the person who gets left with all the punishment. At one point in our lives we were blamed for something we didn't do or we were the person that pushed it onto someone else. Arthur Miller expresses a lot of scapegoating or being the scapegoat in The Crucible.

Sometimes people get blamed for wrongdoings that they did not participate in. This was shown in Salem, Massachusetts, during the salem witch trials in the play The Crucible. The play was based in 1692, when a community of Puritans started accusing each other of of being witches and wizards. Innocent people that did not practice witchcraft were getting hanged and accused of being witches. Scapegoats have also been used in modern day with McCarthyism, which was a campaign against communist. Many people were blacklisted and lost their jobs even though many of these people did not belong to the communist party. This took place in 1950-1954 carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Using scapegoats blames innocent people for wrongdoings, and accuses people of wrong doings.

Scapegoats allow leaders to have something to blame when things may not go according to plan, to distract from something that the leader wants to do that may not be favorable to the people, and it’s also something that the community can use to bring them together, to fight for the same cause. In Animal Farm, we see the pigs using Snowball as a scapegoat for everything that went wrong in the farm. When the windmill is destroyed the first time, Napoleon announces: “Do you know the enemy who came in the night and overthrown our windmill"? "SNOWBALL” blaming Snowball for the destruction, when Napoleon really does not know who was responsible. Using high modality language such as enemy encourages the animals to really think of Snowball as an foe, rather than the friend he was. Additionally, he rhetorical question makes the answer of Snowball seem as though the answer should be obvious. This leads the animals to assume that Snowball is not who he really is due to all the things he did to the farm. The pigs continue to use Snowball as a scapegoat throughout the novel because of how it allows them to blame all of their mistakes on someone else, making them appear perfect to the other animals. It also unites them with a common enemy. The animals unite in the thought that Snowball is now ‘evil’, giving the pigs more power over the group

The archetype of a scapegoat is represented by Pearl Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In the novel, the townspeople view Pearl as a personification of Hester Prynne 's sin, and they do not treat her fairly because they only see her as the result of a horrible crime. And although Hester doesn’t see Pearl in this light for the most part, there is a time in which her view on her daughter changes. The village blames Pearl because they need to find someone to blame it on, which illustrates the role of a scapegoat in a novel. A scapegoat is an innocent character in which a problem is blamed on. In this case, the puritans put responsibility on Pearl because they can not blame Hester anymore. She is

Anyone with knowledge of current events must be aware of times when society has seized upon a scapegoat as means of resolution. Countless politicians, military leaders, corporate executives and school administrators frequently use this proven technique.  The people of the small village were very similar to the leaders of our society.  The village people

“Every group feels strong, once it has found a scapegoat” (Mignon McLaughlin, 1913). A scapegoat is someone who is blamed for all the faults and corruptions that others have committed. In history, there are lots of scapegoat examples, the most popular being; Jesus Christ and the Jews in the Second World War. In the short story “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson used persecution and tradition to demonstrate how scapegoating justified unfair killing. Both of these aspects relate to the World War that preceded only a couple years before the story was written. The persecution was blind and done once a year as a tradition that everyone expected to happen.