We should probably at some point consider facing and questioning our widespread pop-cultural aesthetic feeling that finding and shooting a small number of powerful elite evildoers is a clean and side-effect-free solution to the problem of widespread social evil.
Preferably before it morphs completely from a pop-cultural aesthetic feeling into an actual political platform.
The idea that "politics is dirty but violence is clean, and eventually the dirt stacks up and you just gotta clean house" is surprisingly widespread on both the Left and Right, and has been since at least, oh, 1848 or so. It's not just a Fascist value, though they were perhaps the bluntest advocates for it.
It's not actually true. But so much of our meta-political cultural arguments still work on the assumption that it is, or ought to be, true.
@natecull the point Girard makes is that Christ's death made the scapegoating mechanism clear due to his innocence
and I meant that Caesar's assassination was a way for the society to overcome the tension and jealousy of his personality - clearly the following history shows it didn't work
Well, Caesar's assassination looks to me like just another very normal act in a long line of Roman inter-aristocratic power squabbles.
Dude lived by the sword and died by the sword. Wasn't a saint.
Though for some reason later non-Roman civilizations looked back at murder-happy Julius as creating all the Nice Things they wished they had again.
I suppose the Empire was a real mixed bag for the Mediterranean and Europe in terms of jackbooted oppressiveness versus economic growth.
But like, the whole subtext of that old "Caesar brought Rome prosperity and those damn dirty politicians murdered him!" really worries me.
It's that whole "violence is clean, politics is dirty" meme again.
Julius was a general, mass-murdering Rome's "enemies" -> that's all fine and dandy, super good, super moral
Julius crosses the Rubicon to give Rome a taste of his normal activity -> uh oh that's getting weird
Julius is murdered -> boo POLITICS
@skells
Christ was actually not an advocate of redemptive violence. The opposite, in fact.
Caesar, though, yes. That dude just loved crucifying people.