By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
At the heart of everything from the
debate over the Gaza War to DEI to toxic interpersonal relationships is a
disastrous loop known as the “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle.
The
self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle is a deceptively simple and
incredibly destructive paradigm for any kind of relationship, national,
communal or personal, in which one party constantly attacks the other
while claiming that it is the victim fighting against oppression.
The
paradigm is guided by the idea that there is a permanently fixed victim
and villain, that the victim is constantly suffering attacks from the
villain and that anything the victim does is justified because he or she
has no agency except to resist the assaults of the villain.
While
some Hamas supporters have lied or tried to cover up the atrocities of
Oct 7, Ghazi Hammad, a Hamas official, initially denied them, but then burst out with,
“the existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and
tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation.
Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On
October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is
justified.”
“We are the victims”, “nobody should blame us” and
“everything we do is justified” perfectly capture the cruel workings of
the cycle. So many westerners have sided with Hamas because they accept,
incorporate and make use of the same cycle in their own politics and
lives.
The very same arguments adapted from Marxism and therapy
culture play out routinely in “whiteness” and “colonialist” discourse in
America, Europe and other free world nations.
The
“self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle dispenses with arguments,
evidence or any reasoned assessments of rights. These may occasionally
be thrown in when convenient, but make no real difference because the
central premise of the cycle is the lack of any objective standard that
both sides have to meet. International law, racial tolerance, peace
treaties or negotiations are invoked in a purely one-sided fashion. It
is understood that the officially designated victim never has to abide
by international law, to stop hating or to sincerely agree to stop the
violence.
Any of the invoked appeals to any larger principle are
usually rigged in such a way as to render mutuality meaningless. For
example, racism has been redefined to mean racial hatred practiced by
those with power, making them the officially designated villains, while
racial hatred from victims has been designated “reverse racism”: a
justified response to the racism of the majority.
Once again, “we are the victims”, “nobody should blame us” and “everything we do is justified”.
Similarly,
international law is held to apply only to Israel as the “occupier”
while no one can expect anything of the Muslim terrorists who are
“occupied” and therefore have the right to “resist” by invading Israel
and burning Jewish families alive in their own homes.
The
perpetrators are omnipotent by virtue of being helpless, since they can
do nothing, they can do everything, as victims of oppression they have
no agency and also no restraint under any norms, either those of
decency, humanity, the laws of war or any concept of right and wrong.
They
cannot be asked not to rage, that’s “tone policing”, not to hate,
that’s “reverse racism” or even not to kill because that’s “dictating to
oppressed people the forms of their resistance”.
Whatever they do is not a reflection on their own morality, but on the oppression they suffer.
If
they hate, it’s because they have been hated and if they kill, it’s
because they have been killed. The worse the crimes they commit, the
more we are told that the horrors they perpetrate are a reflection of
the horrors they have suffered. When suicide bombers emerged on the
scene, we were told that they were a sign of how desperate the killers
must be after such suffering.
No crime, not even those committed on Oct 7, was allowed to be seen as a deliberate choice.
The
moral numbness of the self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle has long
haunted liberal minds. As Nazi Germany invaded Poland and began the
process that would lead to the mass murder of millions of Jews, the poet
W.H. Auden penned a hasty condemnation of Nazism, but threw in four
lines that became the best known from the poem. “I and the public
know/What all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in
return.”
Those same four lines appear in disguised or
undisguised form in every account of the Oct 7 attacks and in every
account of the violence committed by leftists and their allies.
How
often during the BLM riots were we treated to the MLK quote that, “a
riot is the voice of the unheard” which was never intended to be a blank
check for urban violence, but is used to shift the agency from the
young men beating an old man in the street to the body at their feet.
The
insistence that evil is a cycle not a choice, that the Nazis were
victims rather than perpetrators, that every terrorist and rioter in the
world could not do otherwise is an unlimited license for evil. And evil
is not a cycle: it is a choice that each and every one of us makes.
Oct
7 is far from the first time that “we are the victims”, “nobody should
blame us” and “everything we do is justified” licensed genocide. And it
will certainly not be the last.
Why did so many radicals jump into supporting Hamas after Oct 7 rather than disavow it?
The
atrocities did not alienate, they incited. The crimes offered the same
heady promise that the Left had since the French Revolution of
committing the worst possible crimes while being morally righteous
because each horror was a response to the horrors visited upon them.
When
there are no objective standards, all that remains are the propaganda
narratives that justify violence. The self-reinforcing victim/villain
cycle sheds standards. It asserts pain and suffering. It spends all of
its time demonizing those it wishes to kill. And then it kills them.
The
crybullies, the victims who kill, spend all of their time asserting
their trauma, they project hate as pain, murderousness as trauma and
assaults as resistance. Even as cities and countries burn, they always
talk about themselves while raging when anyone mentions the damage.
Attempting
to find common ground with them is futile. Proposals for reforms or
compromises are treated as admissions of guilt. Negotiations are blown
up because the professional victims don’t want a deal, they want to
continue the hate and violence, and they only use negotiations to assert
their endless suffering which can only be remedied with the destruction
of their targets.
Some attempt to meet them blow for blow, by
asserting their own victimhood, and yet this strategy is bound to fail
because the underlying premise of the self-reinforcing victim/villain
cycle is the “punching up” and “punching down” one of wokeness that only
some people’s pain and some people’s lives matter, that those who have
“power” are always perpetrators, and those who claim to be “powerless”
are always their victims no matter who is actually doing what.
No
matter how much those charged with having “power”,deny it, back away
from it, leave, turn over control, and cut deals, the underlying dynamic
can never be allowed to change anywhere.
Pro-Israel activists,
especially liberal ones, still don’t understand this dynamic and are
pained and shocked at how their former allies can justify mass murder
and rape at a music festival. But the answer is that it’s the same way
that supporters of BLM justified torching cities. The self-reinforcing
victim/villain cycle rejects any morality except assertions of
powerlessness.
Whoever has the most power is accused of setting
the cycle into motion and can never assert innocence again even as the
Nazis are goose stepping their way into Poland.
What is the answer to the self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle’s endless “you made me do it”?
Giving
up power isn’t the answer. Some adopt a Stockholm Syndrome strategy of
admitting guilt and promising to “do better”, they clamor to be “allies”
and loudly denounce their own people. But when the violence begins, the
Stockholmers don’t do any better than anyone else. Whether it’s the
Hamas attacks or BLM riots, the appeasers and the apologists were caught
up in them.
Some died.
An argument cannot be won by
arguing using the self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle’s rules. It is
important to think back to a time before the cultural poison reduced
every exchange to Marxist logic and social media narcissism when we
actually knew what right and wrong looked like.
And the only way to do that is by demolishing the cult of victimhood.
Right
and wrong are not determined by expressions of pain. While some people
may have more power than others, no one is truly powerless or lacks
agency. Whatever happens, everyone has a choice in how they respond to
it. That choice defines who they are for as long as they keep making it.
People are not the products of impersonal forces, but of those choices.
Anyone
can be a victim, but no one has to choose to continue being one unless
it’s a role they want to play. And anyone from narcissists to aspiring
tyrants finds that to be a useful role.
Most of those who assert
victimhood were never victims at all. The most malignant victimhood
behavior comes from the powerful and the privileged who use it to claim
moral immunity. Lenin came from a noble family and Castro was the son of
a plantation owner. Osama bin Laden came from a billionaire family.
Hamas had its origins in high officials who were displaced by the fall
of the Ottoman Empire and whose families have become millionaires
through terrorism.
Every evil movement, including the Nazis,
claimed to be the victims, but they’re only the victims of their own
thwarted ambitions. Today’s totalitarians who claim to be victims are
like them the victims of their futile dreams of conquest and of grinding
everyone else under their boots.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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