Although fascism seems to be dead, it could have a second coming in different forms.1
Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future
Some of Sigmund Freud’s most interesting cases involved people who did bad or destructive things and then shifted the blame onto others. Such cases are now standard in psychological literature. Psychologists today are quite familiar with patients who display selfish or vicious behavior and then attribute those qualities to their psychologist. It is also quite common in the course of therapy for patients with a morbid hostility toward a parent or sibling to become morbidly hostile toward the therapist. Following a term coined by Freud, psychologists call this phenomenon “transference.”
Transference, in its wrongful assignment of blame and responsibility, is obviously a form of lying. A special case of transference involves “blaming the victim.” In the relevant psychological literature, the perpetrator of some terrible action blames it not on himself but, incredibly, on the victim of the offense. Serial killers who target prostitutes, for example, might come to believe that the prostitutes deserve to be raped and murdered. “That woman was a whore. She had it coming.” This enables the killer to consider himself a vengeful angel, an instrument of justice.
