Introduction

[H]uman beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. George Orwell in a review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Orwell, 2017 [1940]).

Apart from what the introductory quote from George Orwell on people’s will for struggle and self-sacrifice suggests, analyses often dilute an understanding of violence as an end in itself. Certainly, some consider violence as a foundational and enduring part of politics (e.g., Howard, 2001).Footnote 1 Other accounts, however, assume violence to be something exceptional (e.g., Collins, 2009), an atavism in decline due to human progress (Heath-Kelly, 2013, p. 1; see also Oona A. Hathaway and Shapiro, 2019; Pinker, 2011). Conceptual accounts of violence often treat it as a means, an instrument, rather than an end in itself. This is particularly obvious as faced with continuing violent atrocities, the public and academia alike lack an adequate vocabulary to grasp the character of modern violence and its prevailing features of sacrifice and victimhood. These features suggest that violence is more than just an instrument (Williams, 2015, p. xiii; see also Juergensmeyer, 1991).

I argue that conceptual accounts of violence, the physical destruction of bodies, can gain further insights through an engagement with the concepts of sacrifice and victim as provided by René Girard’s mimetic theory. To illustrate the value of these concepts, the article re-examines Timothy McVeigh’s justification for his 1993 Oklahoma City bombing. This look at the violence inflicted on the “home front” by “homegrown” terrorism like McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing is helpful to expand our understanding of political violence. McVeigh’s example illustrates that violence, rather than a mere instrument to achieve political ends, consists of a tripartite relationship between violence, victims, and sacrifice. This conceptualization of violence as a sacrificial act opens up hitherto neglected avenues of interpreting violence. Recent and current research illustrates this relationship. For example, by pointing out that the process of radicalization is similar in cases of terrorists and conventional soldiers (Haggerty & Bucerius, 2018), both of which groups are meant to purposely inflict violence. As I illustrate, McVeigh’s case is intriguing in this regard, as he was a soldier-turned-terrorist. Moreover, the relationship between violence, victim, and sacrifice illustrates the correlative threats and similarities of justifications for the violence of far-right terrorism and Islamist terrorism (e.g., Abbas, 2017; Ebner, 2018; Atran, 2017; Gill et al., 2019).

The article continues as follows. The first section illustrates that conceptualizing violence needs to take into account what violence immediately causes and produces, that is, sacrifices and victims. They make violence possible, ongoing, contagious, and productive. To illustrate this relationship, I adapt Girard’s concepts of victim and sacrifice. The article then illustrates the relevance of conceptualizing these terms with the example of McVeigh’s justification for innocent victims of his Oklahoma City bombing. This helps to better understand and discern other terrorist atrocities and points to further avenues for research. For example, McVeigh’s case suggests that the tripartite conceptualization of violence is not exclusively engrained in terrorist atrocities. Rather, it is potentially also engrained in the response to the infliction of violence of other actors by turning, for example, to torture.

Violence, Power, Politics, and Social Fragility

Seemingly peaceful social relationships are often more fragile than assumed (Mueller, 2004, p. 197). The most obvious example is the primary form of human political organization, the state that continuously built on as well as turned to violence (e.g., Tilly, 1985; Arnold, 2017; Scott, 1998). Furthermore, as the success of the “Islamic State” to control vast parts of Iraq and Syria illustrated, few extremely violent actors are often successful in achieving political ends (e.g., Atran, 2015). Where there are no clear boundaries between state and non-state actors and secular and religious motivations, theory often fails to adapt to the changing nature of violence that is justified in religious concepts and terms such as “sacrifice” (e.g., Asad, 2007; Dumouchel, 2015; Palaver, 2014; Kahn, 2008). Other than delving into the religious or secular motivations of violence (e.g., Cavanaugh, 2009), I argue that this failure of theory to adapt is because violence produces victims via sacrifice rather than that the act of violence draws and relies on simplified boundaries between the relation of perpetrator and victim. Violence, I take it, is essentially bodily injuring and thus not an instrument but a form of action (Ray, 2018, p. 2; see also Scarry, 1985). As such, the action is directly connected with its object, the victim.

In what follows, I illustrate this relationship with the help of Girard’s mimetic theory (for an overview, see Palaver, 2013b). His conceptual framework facilitates understanding via an interpretative approach to political and social reality. In this sense, the conceptual framework is not necessarily causal. Conceptualizations do not, up front, distinguish between normative arguments and analytical conceptualizations but rather have a broader ideal-type thrust. A concept is “a means toward the formation of hypotheses” and “represents a deliberate, constructive interpretation of reality” (Drysdale, 1996, p. 80).Footnote 2

Girard’s theory already proved to be useful for studies attempting to understand the logic of terrorism, violence, sacrifice, and politics and conflict more generally (e.g., Juergensmeyer, 2008, 2020; Abbink, 2020; B. Evans, 2021; Troy, 2021). In Girard’s theory, imitation is central to the human condition because it points out that imitation of desires generates resentment and conflict (Girard, 1983).Footnote 3 The Greek word mimesis points to the connection between desire and imitation. However, it is not the desire for a definite or original object. The imitation of desire means following the desire of others (Girard, 2008 (2000), pp. 59–60) rather than copying others. What is desired is constructed socially. How the desire is constructed occurs in a “triangular desire” (Girard, 1996), consisting of the Self, the Other (mediator), and the object that is desired by the subject. This is “because the person knows, imagines, or suspects that the model or mediator desires it as well. Therefore, the goods or objects people desire, and their ideas about what to desire, are based on the ideas and desires they learn from others” (Thomas, 2005, p. 124). The persecution of a victim, a scapegoat, solves mimetic rivalry. Sacrificial rituals thus became a common form to canalize violence.Footnote 4 The scapegoat, a replacement, is a sacrificial substitution to protect society from its inherent destructive tendencies due to mimetic rivalry (Girard, 1988; see also Palaver, 2013a). The scapegoat mechanism, a form of mediation, serves as a means to channel and contain violence. Mimetic theory’s “causal story,” then, “begins with reciprocal imitation, not from an impulse to harm.” The details of its “sequence” are as follows: imitation, small state conflict, contagion, large scale conflict, sacrifice, and resolution (Farneti, 2015, p. 6). Moral codes and modern law transformed and camouflaged the archaic scapegoat mechanism.

Today, law “represents the rejection of a premodern worldview in which human sacrifice was a conceivable means of social and political integration” (Bourg, 2010, p. 139). Scholars of political theory have been aware of Girard’s insights, for example, by pointing out that the character of modern conflict originates in a societal notion of violence being a means and an end itself. The Girardian perspective points out that law is a distinct feature of the principle of politics and cannot escape the archaic character of violence (Kensey, 2014). What the law does is tame and regulate violence born out of mimetic rivalry. “Unable to exorcize violence within themselves, humans have chosen to sanctify it” (Gray, 2016, p. 81; see also Benjamin, 1996; Cover & Minow, 2001). Modern transformations of the scapegoat mechanism illustrate why Girard’s framework, originally focusing on sacrifice as a social and public ritual, can still be applied to notions of sacrifice that seem alien to any public meaning system.

Political theory elaborates on the necessity to separate political power from violence, arguing that violence and politics are distinct principles (e.g., Frazer & Hutchings, 2011). For example, Hannah Arendt’s (1970, p. 46) characterization of violence as essentially instrumental remains a prevailing feature of conceptions of political violence (see also Bufacchi, 2005). Violence, in this view, is in “need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything.” Violence and political power are thus opposites; “where one rules absolutely, the other is absent” (Arendt, 1970, pp. 51; 56).Footnote 5 Violence, however, has always made its way into the political sphere. It has been the demystifying and de-politicizing assumptions that led to a genuinely procedural view of politics putting aside this relation (e.g., Mouffe, 2005a, 2005b).Footnote 6

Existing research looks at the outcomes of the modern transformations of the scapegoat mechanism and the societal containment of violence (e.g., via law, moral frameworks, or advocacy activities) (e.g., Oona Anne Hathaway & Shapiro, 2017; M. Barnett & Finnemore, 2004; M. N. Barnett, 2013). However, what the literature lacks is to look at specific instances where violence actually and unveiled still occurs as part of politics. This is not the least because few studies consider violence an ontological feature of politics. Studies that attempt to understand the logic of terrorist violence conclude that, “positing a rational and causal ‘means-end’ calculation may not be a sufficient explanation for all terrorist acts themselves. An understanding of how terrorists think on a subjective and culturally determined level is also required.” In other words, violence must also be understood in symbolic terms of the “act itself, rather than just the deliberate selection of symbolic targets … And one of the most important symbolic acts in many societies is the sacrificial act of violence” (Dingley & Kirk-Smith, 2002, pp. 103, 104).

Increasing resentment and rivalry on a global scale (e.g., Brighi, 2016; Laurent & Paquet, 1991; Mishra, 2018) also highlight the importance of the concepts of victim and sacrifice. Both concepts suggest looking at instances where and how they materialize—in actual acts of violence. Yet there remains a conceptual gap. Despite existing accounts of the act of violence, research usually treats the categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” as “prior or external to analysis” (Jacoby, 2015, p. 512). Certainly, conceptualizations of victimhood rhetoric mark various attempts to comprehend violence. The notion of victimhood “can have a cohesive function in a community” (Wydra, 2013, p. 178), and metaphysical underpinnings are a necessary language for referring to the evil that causes victims (Casebeer, 2004, p. 442; see also Münkler & Fischer, 2000).

However, those attempts, first, show little interest in the actual victims. Second, they argue that, as in the case of terrorism, it is not useful to focus on the victims of terrorism.Footnote 7 However, representations of victimhood “have become a non-negative, unconscious force of globalization” (Wydra, 2013, p. 178). Take, for example, terrorism that originates in subjective perceptions of victimhood, injustice, and feelings of resentment, giving rise to violence. Terrorist activists are often “people who feel oppressed more by socio-economic and cultural changes, rather than any empirically-defined act of oppression” (Dingley & Kirk-Smith, 2002, p. 113; see also Richardson, 2007). The trigger for “terrorist violence,” thus, lies “in resentment against weakness or losing in political rivalries albeit often in a context of growing equality and the elimination of structural differences” (Morrow, 2017, p. 495). This is why the “emergence of global terrorism” is “evidence of the spread of internal mediation and mimetic escalation (Morrow, 2017, p. 494; see also Brighi, 2015).

In fact, rivalries over victimhood and its hierarchy, based on feelings of oppression by socio-economic and cultural changes, frequently mark conflicts (Jacoby, 2015, p. 529; see also Ferguson et al., 2010; Lynch & Joyce, 2018), making it necessary to conceptualize how victims and victimhood come into being in the first place. The lack of a comprehensive engagement with the concepts of victim and sacrifice reveals the modern myth of the autonomous subject, unconscious of social complexities (e.g., Chandler, 2014; Farneti, 2013), questioned by mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism. “Contrary to the ‘romantic’ lie of individual autonomy, Girard asserts the novelistic or ‘romanesque’ truth or relatedness. Human desires are not original but interrelated and mediated by a model from which we learn what to desire. Human beings are ‘mimetic’” (Morrow, 2017, p. 493). The dominant assumption of the autonomous subject is, for example, obvious in the individualization of accountability, largely ignoring societal factors contributing to violence (e.g., Ainley, 2011). What is more, this assumption is ignorant of social and political dynamics following forced violent political intervention, ignoring that violence causes victims based on the demands for sacrifice.

In the relationship between act, actor, and audience, symbolic acts of violence seek to imply “a sympathetic relationship between act, actor and audience; that the audience knows what the symbol means and how they should respond” (Dingley & Kirk-Smith, 2002, p. 123). As indicated above, studies in conflict and political theory tend to assume violence to be an instrument within a conflict to pursue an end (e.g., Rapoport, 1989). My argument posits that violence is an essential part of the relationship between the act of sacrifice and the victim. This relation makes it possible to frame violence as a form of purification (of victims and victimhood) and as a socially constitutive act. Including the concepts of victim, sacrifice, and their relationship introduces an additional layer to other conceptualizations of violence by pointing out how violence is “productive” (Heath-Kelly, 2013, p. 2; Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004, p. 1).

Productive violence means that violence is “used to make and remake bodies in efforts to realize certain narratives and derealise others” (Heath-Kelly, 2013, p. 172). Consider, for example, terrorists who justify their violent acts based on resentment (e.g., Nesser, 2012; Simon, 2013). Applying the Girardian concepts, this is because globalization and equalization of culture generate rivalry, competition, and conflict, rather than mere ideology (Bourg, 2010, p. 137). “Globalisation,” then, “reveals the ultimate secret of political modernity: the fragmentation and increasing impotence of territorial sovereign states in both governing the political process and controlling violence … With the triumph of the principle of equality, enshrined in the liberal democratic ethos and central to the project of secular modernity, the idolatry of the tyrant as mediator is ‘replaced by hatred of a thousand rivals’ … in a move from external to internal mediation” (Brighi, 2015, p. 153).

Many terrorists are “deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers” (Žižek, 2015). The problem, then, is not difference, but sameness as Girard points out, and which has been echoed by Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984, p. 479) conceptualization of social identity which “lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represent the greatest threat.” As Slavoj Žižek (2015) puts it in a Girardian conceptualization, today’s violent fundamentalists and terrorists “are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them.” The other, the victim, thus becomes sacrificial in doing justice to experienced or assumed resentment, whatever the pretext might be.

What current perspectives on the use of violence miss is a relational perspective on the origins of their violent acts as well as the productive power of their acts with respect to the internal mediation of mimetic rivalry. To illustrate this relationship, the remainder of the article turns to the case of the “Oklahoma City Bomber” Timothy McVeigh, providing an example of how this mechanism of internal mediation potentially leads to radicalization because extreme resentment, internally mediated, still needs a victim to sacrifice.

Storm Troopers in the Gray Zone

In the late 1990s, three unique inmates briefly shared a row in the Colorado “Supermax” Federal Prison: The “Oklahoma City Bomber” Timothy McVeigh, the “UNA” Bomber Theodore Kaczynski, and the 1993 World Trade Center Bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. The histories of all three individuals epitomize some of the most pressing challenges posed by current political extremism and its terrorist outlets from the far right to Islamism. Resentment was the motivating force in all of their actions, either encouraged by big-government trimming individual freedom (McVeigh); the technologization and individualization of modern society (Kaczynski); or to avenge the sufferings of Muslims (Yousef) (Michel & Herbeck, 2001, pp. 359–365; see also Chase, 2003; Fleming, 2022; CNN, 2007). Furthermore, all three represent the dangers of “homegrown” terrorism by individuals with few and lose ties to other terrorists or networks.

Although all three would serve as cases to exemplify the conceptualization of violence, here I turn in more detail to McVeigh. This is for three main reasons. First, McVeigh epitomizes one of the prevailing motives for turning to acts of terrorism and the so-called lone-wolf terrorism: resentment. This is particularly obvious while illustrating in his acts the cycle of the relationship between sacrifice, violence, and victim. Second, because his case illustrates this conceptualization so well, it might also serve as a “lesson-learned,” illustrating that “lone wolfs” are not so lone after all (e.g., Schuurman et al., 2017; Hofmann, 2018), not least because internal mediation depends on outside contexts as well. Third, McVeigh’s case illustrates what scholarship on terrorism has only recently engaged: the correlation between threat and the path to radicalization between far-right terrorism and Islamist terrorism.

On April 19, 1995, a bomb planted in a rental truck, went off next to the “Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building” in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Shortly thereafter Army veteran Timothy McVeigh was arrested, eventually sentenced to death, and executed in 2001. Like right-wing militias (e.g., Stern, 1997; Barkun, 1996), “McVeigh, blamed the FBI and the ATF for the militia movement’s twin tragedies: the deaths of white supremacist Randy Weaver’s wife and son in a 1992 confrontation at Weaver’s home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians’ compound in Waco, Texas, that resulted in the deaths of 82 cult members, including their leader David Koresh” (DeSa & McCarthy, 2009, p. 46; see also Michel & Herbeck, 2001, p. 135; Serrano, 1998, p. 219; Wright, 2007, p. 5).

Retaliation for the debacles at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and in particular the fact that the federal government was not held responsible for the tragedies, became an essential motivation for McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing (DeSa & McCarthy, 2009, p. 47). The blueprint for the bombing itself and accompanying the way of radicalization of McVeigh was The Turner Diaries (Serrano, 1998, p. 28; 51; 219; Wright, 2007, p. 21; DeSa & McCarthy, 2009, p. 47), exposing him even more to anti-government views.Footnote 8 It is crucial to note that McVeigh was eventually mobilized to violence by specific violent acts, in particular the FBI raids (Berger, 2018, pp. 129–130). This justification supports the thesis that McVeigh’s act, as well, “implies a sympathetic relationship between act, actor and audience; that the audience knows what the symbol means and how they should respond” (Dingley & Kirk-Smith, 2002, p. 123). As illustrated above, the mediator of the relationship between the actor and the audience is sacrificial violence. This relationship turns violent acts into symbolic and productive ones.

Processes of “martialization” during his service in the United States Army and his tour during the Iraq War preceded McVeigh’s affection for violence. Considering martialization, “rather than radicalization therefore marks a distinct conceptual advancement, in that it helps to humanize all combatants, including terrorists.” Doing so allows us to acknowledge that individuals like soldiers and terrorists alike “might be drawn to a martial lifestyle through family support, the allure of highly gendered forms of adventure, a quest for personal meaning, a sense of vicarious injustice, and so on” (Dingley & Kirk-Smith, 2002, p. 123). Although McVeigh was an enthusiastic soldier, he was bothered to be involved in a war that posed no direct threat to the USA and forced him to kill innocents (Michel & Herbeck, 2001, p. 76; Serrano, 1998, p. 39). Eventually, he left the military frustrated because he felt “betrayed by a government that he desired to represent as a member of elite Special Forces” (Simi et al., 2013, p. 661) but which training he failed.

McVeigh’s temporary co-inmate, the “UNA bomber” Theodore Kaczynski, and psychological experts alike seem convinced that McVeigh’s involvement in the Gulf War had an “emotional aftershock” (Michel & Herbeck, 2001, p. 382). This is also indicated by a psychiatric review that described McVeigh’s act of bombing as a cold-blooded killing in which he found no pleasure. To illustrate this paradox even more, Kaczynski describes McVeigh as both right-wing (e.g., based on his pro-arms stand) and liberal (e.g., based on his sympathy for the Iraqis). This characterization hints at the problems of an all-too-easy distinction of motives based on distinctions between left and right, liberal and conservative. Kaczynski concludes that McVeigh is an adventurer for whom there is little room in the USA (Michel & Herbeck, 2001, p. 363)—or whose desires could not be mediated any longer.

In a letter to a newspaper in 1992, McVeigh wrote, “‘The American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week’s groceries’ ... ‘What is it going to take to open up the eyes of our elected officials? AMERICA IS IN SERIOUS DECLINE’” (Lepore, 2018, p. 702). It seems to be no coincidence that McVeigh invokes the American Dream, for the longest time something desired, imitated, and mediated by many. The American Dream has not least been legitimated and driven by American exceptionalism which itself “is legitimated through sacral and sacrificial forms, and its arbitrary nature is hidden behind paeans raised to the glory of its promise, and to all who bow to its power.” As with American exceptionalism, violence “becomes a sacrament by which one wins glory over oneself, one’s family, and the state” (Pahl & Wellmann, 2015, p. 85). Eventually, McVeigh made it his mission and duty to erupt the government while working for the greater good (Michel & Herbeck, 2001, pp. 288–289; 382). The “leaderless resistance” (Kaplan, 1997; see also Wilhelmsen, 2021, pp. 28–29) approach of radical-right wing groups in the USA came thus as a natural take on the way of life and eventual terrorist tactic for McVeigh. This is not least because “The far-right is utilising the popular history of America that is disseminated within mainstream society” (Vertigans, 2007, p. 655).

Asked about the innocent people killed by the bombing, McVeigh compared them to the “Storm Troopers” in Star Wars. Individually, they might be innocent, but they are guilty because they are working for the Evil Empire. Killing them was thus a necessary act just like dropping the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima (Michel & Herbeck, 2001, p. 166). Like the “Death Star” in Star Wars, the federal building in Oklahoma City harbored innocent people who were serving and representing the Evil Empire (Michel & Herbeck, 2001, pp. 224–225). Rather than killing individual FBI agents (i.e., those responsible for the Waco siege), by bombing a federal building McVeigh was seeking to make the loudest possible statement.

McVeigh contemplated that history would see him as a “martyr, maybe a hero” (Michel & Herbeck, 2001, pp. 168; 166) for the sacrifice of the victims he made. Up until the execution of his death sentence, McVeigh was eager to deliver a spectacle to make people think about the government’s failures and to spark a revolution (Wright, 2007, pp. 17–18). During the trial, he wanted to speak to the jury, not to ask for forgiveness but to explain himself and talk about the Waco siege (Serrano, 1998, p. 307) where the FBI debacle became his justification for retaliation with the “Oklahoma City bombing” (Wright, 2007, pp. 17–18; 5).Footnote 9

The here outlined conceptualization of violence with the help of mimetic theory’s concepts illustrates why McVeigh placed such great emphasis on his role as one who violently sacrifices victims in the “gray zone.” These victims are a necessary component to justify the violent act. In the resentful circle of violence, victims became “acceptable targets” and, even more, “sacrificial victims” (Dumouchel, 2015, p. 90). In several ways, victims are powerless but highly significant to the sustainability of any form of violence (Heath-Kelly, 2013, p. 172). Victims thus need to be included in the concept of political violence. In addition, sacrifice is an overlooked link between violence and the consequential victim. As the case of torture illustrates, victims become “sacrificable,” yet the means to do so is violence. Ultimately, and as McVeigh’s example illustrates, “All political violence is an exercise in shifting the violence of some onto acceptable targets, sacrificial victims” (Dumouchel, 2015, p. 90). Certainly, McVeigh’s radicalization also depended on the external context of the militia movement of the time and The Turner Diaries as a focal point, as his desires reshaped around these contexts. McVeigh expressed these eventually in the awakening of the American public to its decline. That might sound instrumental yet this motivation was contingent on the need for sacrificial victims in the “gray zone.”

Sacrificial Victims Everywhere

The use of symbolic expressive violence to enact political superiority illustrates that violence is a productive act, whether, for example, in the context of Argentinian death flights or the more recent rendition programs (e.g., Austin, 2016; Verbitsky & Allen, 2005; Latour, 2002; Grey, 2006). The individualization of warfare and the rise of individual responsibility and accountability to tackle the mimetic crisis may build on recognition and the acknowledgment of equality in conflict and thus as some kind of a noble duel character (Kahn, 2008, p. 63). Yet, “the imaginative construction of meaning through sovereign violence has not” changed (Kahn, 2008, p. 69; see also Chamayou, 2012; Chamayou & Lloyd, 2015). The public atrocities conducted by the “Islamic State,” the justification of innocent victims because they are in the “gray zone” like McVeigh’s “Storm Troopers,” or the camouflaged and secretive acts of violence at black sites are thus neither new nor surprising.

Like McVeigh’, the “Islamic State’s” surge of violence justified the victims of its terrorism. “Although it shifts the focus to its status as a victim, the major trend of ISIS’s public exploitation is to get rid of the ‘grayzone’” (Troy, 2020, p. 398). The “Islamic State’s” journal Dabiq, for example, approvingly quotes bin Laden: “The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,’ with the actual ‘terrorist’ being the Western Crusaders. Now, ‘the time had come for another event to… bring division to the world and destroy the Grayzone’” (Atran, 2015). The brutal violence that the “Islamic State” inflicts and broadcasts is not new. Rather, what is new is the public visibility of the violent spectacle on a global scale. The acts of violence function to mobilize the victim to enact the perpetrator’s political superiority (Friis, 2017, p. 8). Turning to such an approach, the “Islamic State” illustrates how violence creates and sustains political meaning by using symbolic expressive violence to enact political superiority.Footnote 10

The relationship between violence, sacrifice, and victimhood also offers new perspectives on the “war on terrorism.” The bewilderment about the ensuing torture programs, for example, largely rests on the assumption that “the taboo against torture has been a stable norm for a very long time” (Moyn, 2017, p. 117; see also Danner, 2009; Neu, 2017). Extremists turning to terrorism, as McVeigh did, understood the hubris of this assumption. What could have changed since McVeigh’s terrorist attack lies not in the motivation for terrorism, but in the responses to it. Today, a legal framework that focuses on individual responsibilities fortifies the infliction of violence, such as torture (e.g., Sanders, 2018). Eventually, the justifications of this legal framework might have the potential to entrench the “war on terrorism” as a “forever war,” relying ever more on forms of violence, however, subtitle and humane they might be (Moyn, 2021).

As in the case of torture, rather than “trying to escape violence, human beings more often become habituated to it” (Gray, 2016, p. 80). The assumed objective of torture is to protect us from others, “not as a violation of our own values or even as a threat, which could leave us all, as Americans, exposed to violence and violation or worse.” Justice, therefore, cannot only come through courts as instances of mediating mimetic rivalry but through politics, seeking not to destroy the “torturers but the idea of torture as necessary and vital” (Danner, 2016, p. 142). However, to do so, politics and political analysis must pay more attention to the relationship between violence, victims, and sacrifice.

Conclusion

What surprises us perhaps most about recurrent violent acts is that they confront us with what many seem to have forgotten. Violence remains a part of politics. It is not only the instrumental use of violence but also the symbolic productive thrust of violent acts because of their relationship with sacrifices and victims that are constitutive of political action. Such an understanding runs counter to understandings of politics that perceive violence as an atavism or, at best, as a sphere distinct from politics. Yet this incomprehension is logical as a liberal take on politics and violence thrives on the premises that it was seeking to ban, relying rather on external mediation and ignoring the thrust of internal mediation.

There are limits to mimetic theory’s potential to explain terrorism such as McVeigh’s acts. Yet as illustrated here, there is still little research on how sacrifice and victims provide meaning to those who commit violence (e.g., Della Porta & Haupt, 2012; Heath-Kelly & Fernández de Mosteyrín, 2021). With few exceptions, such as describing nationalistic endeavors, martyric death, or lone-wolf terrorism (e.g., Giglioli, 2017; Rusu, 2016; Brighi, 2015), the process illustrated here often seems to be treated as a relic of an ancient past (e.g., Enzensberger, 2002). However, the sweeping success of the “Islamic State,” terrorist acts committed by individuals such as McVeigh, and the frequency of mass and school shootings call for creative conceptualizations that allow us to understand and consequently counter the sacrificial aspect of violence. I illustrated one of these paths here as an example of how internal mediation of mimetic rivalry leads to self-radicalization.

Certainly, for those outside of the experience, these acts look like a sacrifice to the “wrong gods” (Kahn, 2008, p. 177). Yet the world today is in a state of constant competition due to mimetic rivalry on a global scale (Girard & Tincq, 2002). It seems that the partisans of the “holy war” on all sides of the political and religious spectrum are everywhere (Mishra, 2018, p. 280), identifying ever more sacrificable victims in the “gray zone.” Relentless comparison and frustration over their identity fuel their resentment but, more consequential, it fuels their internally mediated violent outlets. The argument presented here illustrates how crucial the relationship between violence, sacrifice, and victims is. Not least because it helps to understand why people turn to violence for some greater good once caught in the circle of sacrifice and victimhood, no matter if worshipping the “right” or “wrong” god and no matter how archaic their acts may look.