Victimage

It was a source of murmuring discontent to her, in the first years of an intelligent girlhood, to feel how entirely they (for it was always 'they' in her thought) had been shut out from the fairer social world, the victims of she scarcely knew what, but helpless in that victimage, and utterly weak to master circumstances.

Constant victimage to a feeble stomach while instrumenting Tannhäuser. (1845.)

Exploration of the victim's history can bring about the insight that the victimage is more than coincidence and that he has had a part in promoting it.

What is so terrible about victimage is that, invariably, one man's guilt, or a group's guilt, results in some other person's or persons' injury or death.

Both aesthetic and social logic motivate the victimages.

Victimage and populism work in conjunction.

In Girard's view, culture generally, and especially a military culture, involves the displacement of mimetic rivalry to a hierarchical pattern of dominance, and finally to a unanimous victimage (Girard 1987: 126, 128), a mechanism of transference that empowers political propaganda (Girard 1987: 140).

This book views the war on terrorism from Kenneth Burke's perspective— dramatism and the related concept of victimage ritual —and the problematic of ruling liberal societies.