The One and the Scapegoat: From Sinai to Stalin

Every war of absolutes begins with a god who cannot share the sky. The moment one revelation declared itself the only truth, the human mind was condemned to fight itself forever. From Sinai to Mecca, from Rome to Moscow, the story repeats: the One invents the Enemy, and history is written in blood to prove that the world can have only one truth, one ruler, one tribe, one book. That invention—the theological need for the scapegoat—is the most destructive technology the human species ever built. Without it, war would have remained an argument over land and power; with it, it became an argument over existence itself.

Christianity perfected this logic with the machinery of salvation and damnation. It inherited the Jewish exclusivity and universalized it. The pagan world was no longer merely different—it was evil. Missionaries marched where armies followed, and armies marched where missionaries had cleared the ground. The Cross and the Sword learned to travel together. Crusades became the divine export policy of Europe, justified as spiritual hygiene. To slaughter infidels was not a crime but a cure. The Inquisition institutionalized terror as theology. It was not enough to kill; one had to purify. When Galileo whispered that the Earth moves, he was not merely challenging astronomy—he was threatening the monopoly of truth itself.

Islam, born in the shadow of that same monotheistic DNA, turned unity into empire. “There is no God but God” became a political constitution. In Mecca’s deserts and later in Damascus, Baghdad, and Delhi, theology merged seamlessly with statecraft. The caliph ruled by revelation. Every non-believer was a category: dhimmi, tolerated but inferior; kafir, exterminable. The sword of faith cut continents in half, from Spain to Sindh. Its expansion, like its Christian cousin, was less about land than about legitimacy. To expand was to prove divine favor. To tolerate was to doubt the unity of God. Both empires—Cross and Crescent—lived in the mirror of each other, each defining its own purity by the other’s impurity. They could not coexist because they were twins.

When modernity finally dethroned God, it did not destroy monotheism—it nationalized it. The State inherited the halo. God was dead, but the need for the One survived. The result was secular monotheism: Communism and Nazism, the political religions of the twentieth century. They replaced the Church with the Party, the Scripture with the Manifesto, the Prophet with the Führer. Both promised redemption, both demanded faith, and both found their Satan. Hitler’s Germany worshiped Race; Stalin’s Russia worshiped History. Jews became the scapegoats of one, Trotskyists and kulaks of the other. Each purified its world by persecution, each murdered in the name of the One. The logic of revelation had simply changed its vocabulary.

Nazism was the most theological atheism ever invented. It claimed to be scientific yet spoke in the syntax of apocalypse. It baptized blood and nation as divine absolutes. Hitler replaced the Old Testament God with a racial deity—omnipresent, omnipotent, and infallible. The Holocaust was not only a genocide; it was a liturgy of purification. To annihilate the Jews was to annihilate the reminder of another revelation. The gas chamber was a cathedral without forgiveness. The sermon was simple: one race, one destiny, one truth. Every heretic was an infection to be burned out of history.

Communism, equally absolutist, traded race for class. Its moral physics were lifted straight from scripture: a fall (primitive accumulation), a prophet (Marx), a messiah (the proletariat), a promised land (the classless society), and a devil (the bourgeoisie). Its structure was religious even when its vocabulary was scientific. It needed betrayal to stay pure, confession to prove devotion, execution to renew faith. Stalin’s purges were not political errors; they were sacrificial rituals. Each show trial was an Inquisition in dialectical dress. Every heretic burned on behalf of the purity of the One—the Party that could not err, the Truth that could not contradict itself.

The difference between Sinai and the Gulag is not in their logic but in their metaphysics. One promised heaven later, the other promised it now. Both required obedience and an enemy. Both demanded unity and punished dissent. Both lived by the same grammar of faith: the idea that disagreement is evil and contradiction is corruption. When a civilization internalizes that grammar, it becomes addicted to purification. It can only survive by creating new sinners to destroy.

The mechanism is almost biological. Monotheism, sacred or secular, reproduces through conflict. It cannot tolerate calm; peace threatens its metabolism. Every system built on the One eventually fragments under its own contradictions, and to conceal that fracture, it projects blame outward. Heretics, apostates, foreigners, minorities—each becomes the scapegoat that restores imaginary unity. That is why these systems require enemies as oxygen. The “infidel” or “bourgeois” is not an accident; he is the structural necessity of the One. Without him, the believer or the comrade would have to face the unbearable fact of his own emptiness.

Polytheistic and plural civilizations understood this danger long before philosophy named it. The Greeks, the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese—all built worlds where many gods could argue without annihilating each other. Their metaphysics allowed disagreement as a form of order. Their divinities contradicted one another yet coexisted, creating a metaphysical democracy. A god could be defeated without being abolished, doubted without being damned. Truth was a landscape, not a throne. That is why these civilizations produced philosophies instead of inquisitions, epics instead of crusades, dialectics instead of dogmas.

And Europe once shared in that plural spirit. Before the desert gods crossed its frontiers, the continent was a forest of gods. The Teutons found divinity in thunder and oak, the Celts in rivers and mist, the Romans in hearth and law, the Slavs in the fertility of the soil, the Nordics in the icy sky and the courage of men who met death without priests. Their gods lived in trees, stones, springs, and mountains. Nature was not fallen—it was sacred. Their morality was not obedience to command but harmony with order. Freedom meant living in rhythm with the world, not submission to an invisible legislator. They built no cathedrals because the forest itself was their cathedral. When Christianity burned their groves, it was not just nature that died but Europe’s first democracy of the divine. Those ancient peoples did not need to vilify others to feel whole; they saw the divine reflected in every spark of existence. Their loss was humanity’s first ecological and metaphysical tragedy.

The monotheistic world called that tolerance “pagan confusion.” In reality, it was moral maturity. It recognized that the infinite can never fit inside one formula, one creed, or one party line. The gods of the Many mirrored the complexity of life itself—its plurality, ambiguity, and contradiction. Monotheism could not endure that mirror. It smashed it and replaced it with one reflection: the face of the jealous God, whether divine or ideological. The consequence was not moral clarity but moral catastrophe.

Modern geopolitics still operates under that monotheistic curse. The language has changed, the theology remains. Nations declare themselves “indispensable.” Empires call their wars “freedom operations.” Ideologies label dissent as disinformation. Every bloc demands loyalty to one vision of order. Even capitalism, in its imperial mood, behaves like a secular religion—promising salvation through markets, punishing unbelief through sanctions. The Cold War was a theological argument disguised as economics. The so-called “clash of civilizations” is merely the old quarrel of the One and the Many replayed with new logos.

The tragedy is that humanity has come to mistake unity for strength. We worship the monolith because we fear the mosaic. But the mosaic is what keeps civilizations alive. Plurality is not weakness; it is resilience. The One can build empires but cannot sustain them. Every empire that claimed absolute truth—Roman, Christian, Islamic, Soviet, Nazi—collapsed under its own gravity. The Many alone survive because they adapt, absorb, and evolve. Polytheism, in its metaphysical sense, is not about idols but about ideas: the right to question, to coexist, to doubt, to create.

To cure humanity of endless war, one must therefore perform a metaphysical surgery: amputate the doctrine of the One from both religion and politics. Not by persecution, but by illumination. The cure for absolutism is not another dogma but reason. The Enlightenment began that work but never finished it. Europe dethroned the Church but enthroned the State; it overthrew theology but retained its architecture. To complete that revolution, the human mind must dismantle the idea that truth requires exclusivity. Truth multiplies when shared; it dies when monopolized.

The future belongs to those who can think in the plural. To those who can see contradiction not as blasphemy but as dialogue. To those who understand that moral universality does not need metaphysical uniformity. A civilization that outgrows the need for the scapegoat will no longer require perpetual enemies to feel righteous. Peace will not come through prayer or party but through the recognition that the infinite wears many masks and speaks many tongues.

History has given us its final warning. Whenever the One claims the world, the world ends up in ruins. Sinai gave us commandments, Rome gave us crusades, Mecca gave us caliphates, Moscow gave us gulags, Berlin gave us ovens. Each promised purity and delivered ashes. The next salvation must be different. It must be rational, compassionate, and plural—a humanism free from revelation, a politics free from metaphysical monopoly.

Citations

1. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Ballantine, 2000).
2. Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Viking, 2004).
3. Tacitus, Germania, trans. H. Mattingly (Penguin Classics, 1970).
4. H.R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin, 1964).
5. Steven Katz (ed.), The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. I (Oxford University Press, 1994).
6. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Vintage, 1994).
7. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, 2017).
8. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Blackwell, 1983).
9. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Princeton University Press, 1990).
10. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015).