It should be noted that the possibility of such mob action is itself a symptom of a social situation where formal justice is weak or absent.

The invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland were land grabs, and hence motivated by a desire for resources, as was the attack on the USSR. And I’ll grant you that Hitler was planning the war in the east from the very beginning, and even that in his diseased mind, all opposition to German rule over all of eastern Europe had to be the work of “Jewish commisars”. But I think there was more pathological thinking than logical thinking in there; witness the elaborate attempts to construct a state cult of nationalism to replace Christianity, which was regarded as “tainted” because of its Judaic roots.

I’ll agree that Hitler and his vile followers scapegoated the Jews, blaming them for everything from the Treaty of Versailles to unemployment. But I don’t think that was an element of the planned resource war in the East so much as an indication of how virulently antisemitic not just Germany, but most of Europe was at the time.

Rene Girard argues that in times of scarce resources or a crisis of sometime, the population looks to find a suitable person to ‘blame’ it all on. The unsuspecting person/group is then expunged/killed or at least abused and in the process the remaining group is united in their hatred/abuse of them.

The thing is that everyone needs to be able to believe that this group could be responsible for the problem, but in reality they are innocent. In Uganda, homosexuals fit the bill because they are lambasted as being responsible for family breakdown, being against the church etc. That way everyone can believe that their suffering could be linked in some way.

Very scary but most of us exercise the same logic every day.

If Nigeria’s 500 dead are an indication of how things will be dealt with in times of scarce resources, i don’t think you are too far off the mark.

@Michael Liermann,
I think you may find that the Nazi genocide functioned along exactly the same lines as this author sets out: resources were scarce and there was a great deal of social strife in pre-WW2 Germany. This created a space for Hitler to single out one group of people and to direct hatred and blame onto this group of people. This is exactly what is taking place in Uganda – and what happened in South Africa with the xenophobic attacks.

The question which your question should arise, surely, is “Why does Ugandan homophobia get treated as a sign of impending genocide, while homophobia outside Africa is treated as a sign of political foolishness or sectarian bigotry?”