The origin of this idea comes from Georges Bataille the Post Marxist who wrote The Accursed Share. The argument is one of equivalence between civilizations: the fat of the civilization... the elite of culture must be victimized for the civilazation to function. This is also echoed in Freud who talked about a martyred father figure being essential as well, however Bataille expands the idea to Jews in the Holocaust as being paralleled in Aztec Virgin Volcano Sacrifice. Bataille is concerned about why a Marxist revolution or class based movements are inherently violent. The National Socialists and the Bolsheviks certainly were. His point is that the blood letting is essential to a cultures survival. In other words you have to be martyred if you are moral and you should be thankful for this opportunity. This is the heart of the argument coming from what we call the Left and is in conflict with the idea of the "Good" and "True" usually taking benefit with unknown reasons for the exceptions. Here is the excerpt
from a U.K. Guardian article by Prof. Richard V. Biddable, newly appointed
Chomsky Fellow in Cultural Relativity at All Balls College, Oxford:
To ask the question ‘Is it a forgery?’ is to misunderstand the forces that shape culture and the perception of truth itself. Since there is no such thing as objective truth, only truth created by culture, and since the cultural perception that ‘The Protocols’ is a true statement of Jewish objectives and aims in world history is so widespread, almost universal throughout the Arab and Islamic cultural sphere, but elsewhere too, then ‘The Protocols’ has a cultural veracity that makes it an expression of truth, in the same way that a myth may express the inner genius of its civilization.
After all, in Incan civilization it would have been culturally reprehensible to suggest that there was something unreasonable about the sacrifice of tens of thousands of prisoners, who had their hearts torn from their bodies in order to appease the Gods, or that it was actually pointless, because there were no Gods to appease. It would certainly have been extremely impolite. The Gods existed culturally. Therefore they were real. And people had a right, in their own terms a ‘human right’, if you like, to witness that appeasement and draw comfort and satisfaction from it; to deny that right would have been an act of cultural imperialism.
Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. via Georges Bataille - The Accursed Share - mitpress.mit.edu and image from Evidence that Incas Fattened up their Children Before Sacrificing Them
