"The cultures that were still autonomous cultivated all sorts of solidarity - familial, tribal, and national - but they did not recognize the victim as such, the anonymous and unknown victim, in the sense in which we say 'the unknown soldier.' Prior to this discovery there was no humanity in the full sense except within a fixed territory. Today all these local, regional, and national identities are disappearing: 'Ecco homo.' The essential thing in what goes now as human rights is an indirect acknowledgment of the fact that every individual or every group can become the 'scapegoat' of their own community. Placing emphasis on human rights amounts to a formerly unthinkable effort to control uncontrollable processes of mimetic snowballing."
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 167-168.
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