Consultant and political analyst, Mathieu Slama works for several media, notably Le Figaro and Le Huffington Post. He has published
The War of the Worlds, Reflections on Putin's Crusade Against the West
, (ed. De Fallois, 2016).
Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg announced, Sunday, November 14, the entry into force as of Monday of a confinement for people who have not been vaccinated or who have not recovered from Covid-19. Austria becomes the first country in the world to implement such a measure, which is therefore installed at the very heart of democratic and liberal Europe. With this discriminatory confinement, we are taking an additional step in the authoritarian policy put in place to fight against the Covid, since it is now a question of going to the end of the logic of the health pass, that is to say excluding definitely the unvaccinated people of all social life.
The figure of the unvaccinated has become over the months, as vaccine policy has become more and more authoritarian, a kind of separate citizen, reduced to his serological status and permanently demonized by a power that has made him the scapegoat for the crisis.
Mathieu slama
If there is one lesson we can learn from this pandemic, it is that it acts like a giant laboratory where the most liberticidal measures are tested, approved and then generalized. Containment, curfews, outdoor masks, sanitary passes: all these senseless measures that violate the rule of law have gradually become normalized as they lasted over time and spread geographically. Containment began in China, then contaminated Italy and France; the health pass was first put in place in Israel before contaminating the whole of Europe.
Why would it be any different with this discriminatory confinement put in place by Austria?
Several right-wing presidential candidates were heard last night indicating that they were not against the idea of confining the unvaccinated only.
Professor Gilles Pialoux said this morning that the containment of the unvaccinated "made
sense from a medical point of view
".
All the taboos are broken one by one, and it is only a matter of time before this one is broken.
Read also "What errors of reasoning allowed the acceptance of the health pass?"
It is needless to say that such a world which locks up citizens depending on whether they are vaccinated or not is an unacceptable world and contrary to our entire democratic heritage.
The issue we would like to raise here is elsewhere.
France did not wait for Austria to lead a guilty and discriminatory policy vis-à-vis the unvaccinated.
The figure of the unvaccinated has become over the months, as vaccine policy has become more and more authoritarian, a kind of separate citizen, reduced to his serological status and permanently demonized by a power that has made him the scapegoat for the crisis.
This owes nothing to chance, and is part of a methodically thought out and implemented strategy.
The philosopher René Girard elaborates, in his famous work
La Violence et le sacré
, the idea according to which societies are, from the beginning, troubled by an evil, mimetic desire, source of rivalries and conflicts, and that they have solved this evil by designating a sacrificial victim, the scapegoat.
"
The agitation and fear which preceded the choice of the scapegoat, then the violence exercised against him, succeeds, after his death, a new climate of harmony and peace,
" writes Girard.
Persecutors always end up convincing themselves that a small number of individuals, or even a single one, can make themselves extremely harmful to the whole society, despite its relative weakness.
René Girard
The scapegoat is both the one who concentrates all the responsibility for the crisis and the one who guarantees, through his sacrifice, the maintenance of social order. For Girard, "
whether physical or psychological, the violence inflicted on the victim seems to us to be justified by the responsibility of the scapegoat in the occurrence of an evil for which it is appropriate to take revenge, of an evil or harmful element for which it is necessary. must resist or that it is important to eliminate
”. Each crisis therefore has its designated culprit. "
The persecutors
, writes Girard,
always end up convincing themselves that a small number of individuals, or even a single one, can make themselves extremely harmful to the whole of society, despite their relative weakness
."
Contexts change, but anthropological mechanisms persist.
The Covid-19 crisis is no exception.
Faced with an endless epidemic and a climate of fear cleverly maintained by governments to promote the acceptability of their freedom-killing measures, the unvaccinated have become the scapegoats for the health crisis, those through which the epidemic continues and "rebounds" »(According to the consecrated word).
Read also Law of health vigilance: "The government imposes, the Parliament executes"
Emmanuel Macron and his government have deliberately constructed this figure of a scapegoat, qualifying in turn the unvaccinated selfish, irresponsible, making them take responsibility for a possible re-containment, ostracizing them by means of the health pass. The speech is clear: if the epidemic starts again, it is the fault of the unvaccinated; if we have to re-limit or close businesses, it will be your fault. As for the pass, it acts as a sort of certificate of purity and virtue, separating the pure (vaccinated) from the impure (unvaccinated), the virtuous from the immoral, the responsible from the irresponsible. It materializes the strategy of the scapegoat by socially marginalizing, in a concrete way, those who are made responsible for the misfortune.
By showing the crowd a scapegoat, the government has acted cynically and irresponsibly, encouraging divisions, resentment and verbal violence.
By focusing the anger of the people on the unvaccinated, he exonerated himself of all responsibility for the management of the crisis, diverting the eyes of the people from his own shortcomings to the detriment of a part of the population.
Obsessed by the “irresponsibility” of the unvaccinated, we have ended up forgetting that in a crisis, the responsibility rests first with the rulers.
Yellow vests, anti-pass, unvaccinated, unemployed etc.
are no less citizens than the others.
But by dint of hearing the opposite from the mouths of our leaders, we ended up being convinced.
Mathieu slama
But such manipulation is only possible if there is already a company there ready to accept the appointment of a scapegoat. René Girard evokes the existence of a "persecuting unconscious" and recalls that the scapegoat strategy is only possible because there are attentive ears which listen to it and reproduce it: "
That such things can happen. to produce, especially in our time, it is possible, but they would not occur, even today, if the possible manipulators did not have, to organize their bad moves, an eminently manipulable mass, in other words of susceptible people. to allow oneself to be locked into the system of persecuting representation, of people capable of belief in the matter of the scapegoat
”.
If the people are overwhelmingly in favor of restrictive measures overwhelming the unvaccinated, it is because they need to hear this discourse and to direct their anger towards a sacrificial victim. The unvaccinated person is an essential figure in the crisis, because it responds to a need to point out a culprit. If the unvaccinated does not exist, then there is no longer a culprit. This demand is all the stronger among an elderly electorate, in favor of order, who strongly supports the restrictive measures taken by the government. There are also, in this whole story, electoral issues of which Emmanuel Macron is perfectly aware, who deliberately remobilizes his electorate in favor of his authoritarian and repressive policies.
Read alsoCovid-19: "I am very embarrassed that a vaccine booster is required as an obligation, both in form and in substance"
Emmanuel Macron is not his first attempt.
This same strategy was put in place against the yellow vests, excessively demonized by the government (and legitimizing a doctrine of maintaining order much stricter during demonstrations), or against the unemployed, accused to take advantage of the system and the “assistantship”.
The Macronian strategy is a strategy of division and hysterization which results, with each crisis, in the designation of a culprit and the establishment of a repressive policy against a part of the population.
The serious crisis of the rule of law that we are going through is also a crisis of citizenship, where citizenship is only fully granted on the condition of being a "responsible citizen", that is to say subject to the injunctions of power. But the yellow vests, anti-pass, unvaccinated, unemployed etc. are no less citizens than the others. But by dint of hearing the opposite from the mouths of our leaders, we ended up being convinced. The security and repressive society is a society of permanent search for the culprit. It is a fragmented, divided, unfair and unequal society. In a way, the health crisis has made visible what was until then less visible but just as significant.
Let us remember: one cannot make a lasting society in the permanent search for a culprit.
The scapegoat strategy is a short-term solution, but one which threatens our liberal and democratic society in its very foundations.
As René Girard reminds us,
“we will not fail to point out that a scapegoat, as powerfully rejected and then adulated as he is, cannot eliminate the plague
”.
