Victim as Aggressor

It is interesting to me how prevalent the tendency is for people to try as hard as possible to portray themselves as victims of some other party, and then use that self-portrayal as grounds for aggressive behavior. Here are some examples:

---A group of kids at a school bus stop interpret a shy kid’s demeanor as meaning that he thinks he’s better than them, so they pick on him “in retaliation”.

---A released prisoner feels such a victim of the system from the eight years of his incarceration that he goes out and kills eight innocent people, one for each year spent behind bars.

---A car going down the road slowly in the left (fast) lane causes the car behind it to miss a light. At the next opportunity, the “victimized” driver pulls up alongside the slow car and shouts obscenities at its driver.

---Because the United States has troops stationed on Saudi Arabian soil, this “victimization” of Muslims, in the view of some, justified hijacking and flying jet planes into World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands.

---Because the U.S. was victimized by those terrorists, they are justified in going out and killing thousands more.

---Many people in Germany, after World War I, felt humiliated and victimized by the harsh conditions in the Treaty of Versailles. So, within a few years Adolf Hitler was promoted to power and began his nightmare rampage across Europe.

---The Soviet Union, at least in their propaganda, asserted that they occupied and controlled several East European countries under the Warsaw Pact because they had been so badly victimized by Germany and its allies during World War II, and that they would never let it happen again.

---The white supremacist organization Ku Klux Klan came into prominence in the South and later across the country because some people felt victimized by groups of other people that they perceived threatened them and their way of life.

---All of the conflicting sides in the Iraqi sectarian war see themselves as victims of the others who must be beaten down hard to prevent them from getting the upper hand.

---Countless assassinations have been committed by people who felt they had been victims, usually indirectly, supposedly betrayed by the ones they ended up killing (e.g. assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, John Lennon, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, James Garfield, and Abraham Lincoln, to mention a few).

---In Yugoslavia during the 1990’s, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all began to settle scores with each other from past conflicts as close as World War II and as distant as the Muslim Ottoman Empire’s invasion of this land in the fourteenth century. The Serbs, who considered themselves victims of both the Croats (seen by some of them as collaborators with the occupying Nazis in World War II) and the Muslims (for centuries, Serbs were subject to Ottoman rule, especially in Kosovo and Bosnia). And these historically victimized Serbs were the biggest aggressors in the conflict that broke out.

---In the mid-1990’s in Rwanda, the majority Hutus, feeling themselves to be an underclass to the traditionally more dominating but minority Tutsis, went on a genocidal rampage against them at the prompting of their Hutu leader.

---All blood feuds, be it the old Hatfields vs. the McCoys feud or the gangland feuds prevalent in organized crime, use victimization as the justification for further violence.

---The perpetrators of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing rationalized their atrocity by identifying with groups such as the western militias and sympathizing with David Koresh’s Waco cult, both supposedly persecuted and victimized by the Federal government.

The above examples vary in the degree of legitimacy of the aggressive actions taken as “reactions” to perceived victimization. Pure hate, I believe, is behind some of this, covered over with the pretense of following a principle. Another cause is the idea that what’s happened cannot be reversed, but by standing up to the perceived aggressor, it may be prevented from recurring in the future. And there is always the tit-for-tat rationale to explain some actions. Whatever the reasons, adding another link in the chain of aggression just makes it worse in the long run, regardless of whatever short-term benefits that may accrue. But what really gets my goat are the people that aren’t really victims of anything to speak of but go around acting as if they are anyway, apparently just to make others feel indebted to them somehow. But then again, there’s a little of that in most of us, isn’t there?