The joke is really on those who follow blindly along, and whether they want to ever see it or not, they are collateral damage because they go about their lives living a false history with the scapegoated person, and usually this means they live with unnecessary negative feelings even if only harbored in the deep recesses of their memories.

And it's sad as hell! I'm sure in every family there have been good memories...but once that negative crap starts and goes unresolved, the good is put away in the confusion...a confusion created of lies to begin with.

Building armies is a subject all in itself, but in short I want to say that just because people flock together does not mean an army was amassed by any leader trying to start some crap against another. Sometimes people just agree based on their own social perceptions...no group was intentionally built. The scapegoater, however, deliberatly builds an army of morons she knows will believe her lies without checking anything out for truth. She knows she has these persons under her control before she even approaches them....and I tell ya this from experience too, she will get furious if she thinks she has a new moron and finds out they are not so gullible as she thought. If they won't join her army when she thinks they should, they are going to get the shit end of every stick with this evil person, and since most often this unwilling recruit knows the wrath of the vicious nature of the scapegoater they will sit in silence as they watch abuses go on. They don't want to become a target, you see?

Anyway, a story from my personal archives inspired this post....

My darling mother was such a pro at scapegoating she would actually TELL me she was going to do it if I didn't join her in scapegoating someone else...then she'd do it right in front of me as she called her moron of the day on the phone, faked an upset voice and made up horrid inventions of sheer bizarre fantasy about me. Then she'd hang up and laugh about how stupid the person was who was falling for her lies. She'd tell me there wasn't anything I could do about it because the person she was recruiting was a moron.
I'd say, they know I don't have a history of being the way you just said...they aren't going to fall for that crap.
But mom said, "I have planted the seed of doubt. Now all I have to do is water it daily."

Mom won! She grew her lie tree until the day she died. I conceed defeat, but I stand proud that I was only defeated because I refused to be her moron pawn.

Now if I sit silently and keep her little secret for her, then I would a martyr or a wimp. I don't want to be either of those so I don't think of myself that way...not even as I don't try to clear my name with mom's morons...for you see, it's not my name that has been trashed the most. It is her morons whom she thought the least of and who she was not lying about to get what she wanted. She only used them honestly for what they really were, morons like she said. And when I think about trying to resolve these fantasy conflicts mom created about me, I think in terms of how she used people I loved and I get sad about how little she thought of them.