Cagot: a persecuted and despised minority found in the west of France
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
>The Cagots were not an ethnic group, nor a religious group. They spoke the same language as the people in an area and generally kept the same religion as well. Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families identified as Cagots. Few consistent reasons were given as to why they should be hated; accusations varied from Cagots being cretins, lepers, heretics, cannibals, to simply being intrinsically evil.
My take is that people generally enjoy having "punching bags". Based off this article and other instances of man's inhumanity to man, "punching bags" are people who are:
1) Outlets for existing grievances and resentments, a.k.a. scapegoats.
2) Powerless, weak, and unable to retaliate against abuse, a.k.a. victims.
3) Designed, in the minds of the abusers, for the purpose of being abused, a.k.a. inferior, subhuman etc.
Through this lens, the aforementioned "reasons" are rationalizations, a facade over our collective sadism. Sure, a single tragic event may start the cycles of violence, but the reactor that powers it over generations is our built-in desire to hurt "other" people, to take pleasure in "their" misery, and, most significantly, to pretend that "we" are doing so in the interests of morality, society, etc.
It feels good therefore, it must be good!
Such a twisted sentiment isn't always at the forefront of our minds, but given how often we as a species and as individuals have sought to make "punching bags" out of each other, I would say shared-sadism is more sublimated than staged.
I don't think this is true for a person, but is regularly encouraged at the group level and higher. Particularly if the group has developed a hierachy.
Nations states do this a lot. Religion does this a lot. Corporations do it a lot.
I don't believe it's a truism of humans, but a truism of authoritarians and those with power.
Fear of death is an individuals core motivator. Understanding ones environment, and safe ways to utilize what's available in it to prevent death. Authoritarians have manipulated the people around them to prevent their death. Authoritarians want to keep that power, so they peddle propaganda to their followers to give them a justification to support them, not $VILLAINS_OF_THE_WEEK.
Not that bigotry ever made sense, but "your very touch spoils the road upon which you walk... but by all means, cut up our meat for us" is a particularly weird one.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285450/The-untoucha...
Also, it's difficult to disentangle "extremely hesitant to speak" and "genuinely unaware/doesn't care": as far as I can tell, for most Japanese, the issue is an irrelevant historical relic. Living in Tokyo for years, the only reference I ever heard or saw a single piece of train station graffiti proclaiming that a certain train station was an etamura (derogatory term for buraku village). As noted, around Osaka it's a bigger thing, but the days of employers or prospective inlaws routinely engaging detective agencies to root out any trace of buraku origin seem to be long past. (Although doubtless you could still do this if you really wanted to.)
Finally, it's indeed a political issue, and often in unsavoury ways: the article you link to goes into some detail about how the Buraku Liberation League, which has... non-mainstream views on how many buraku there are and how badly they're persecuted, has Yakuza ties and earns considerable profits from government assistance projects.
https://www.amazon.com/Shibumi-Novel-Trevanian/dp/1400098033
Up there with Edna from the Incredibles.
Edit: I just remembered the Author's Note at the front of the book saying something like, "With the exception of <three people including Le Cagot>, none of the characters in this book are real -- though they may not know it." Unfortunately Google Books doesn't show that page.
Now go back 500-1000 years, where people didn't move around much (sometimes enforced by law) and most people only spoke their regional dialect. And if you were able to move town, the work you knew how to do was still the shit work for the lowest class - it's not like you could just pick up silversmithing on a lark, for example.
> They spoke the same language as the people in an area
> and generally kept the same religion as well. Their
> only distinguishing feature was their descent from
> families identified as Cagots.In addition moving to a new place was not trivial, you would have been questioned as to why did you move by the locals and you would have had no land to start with.
All of this changed only with the industrial revolution, when moving from your ancestral place became "normal".
And in my first paragraph, I gave you two clear examples of where someone can speak the same language and still have their origins be identifiable.
So a stranger turning up in a village would have been viewed with extreme suspicion.
Yet, now despite a history of abuse and segregation, descendants of the Cagots are now just seen as "privileged whites" who need to apologise for historical slights against ethnic groups their ancestors never met.