René Girard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
There is a shadow on the good news. The same revelation that exposes the scapegoat mechanism also disables it. For millennia, societies contained their own violence by discharging it onto victims and calling the result sacred. Once the innocence of the victim is known, that discharge no longer works its old magic — the mechanism, dragged into the light, loses its power to bring the false peace.
This is liberation, but it is also exposure: we are left facing our own violence without the archaic machinery that used to absorb it. Modern history is the history of this predicament. Reading Clausewitz late in my life, I saw that war tends of itself toward extremes, toward the duel with no restraining measure, because mimetic rivalry between adversaries escalates by the same logic that once converged on a single victim — but now with nothing to converge upon and nothing to stop it.
We are not more violent than our ancestors. We are less protected. Two paths remain open: escalation to extremes, which the weapons of our age make final, or the conscious renunciation of rivalry — the positive imitation of a model whose desire acquires nothing and so provokes no rival. I do not predict which we will choose. I say the sacrificial exits are closing.12345
In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifi ces, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable Introduction to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.Battling to the End, pp. xiii–xiv
I will say more about this later. This insight regarding scapegoats and scapegoating is a real superiority of our society over all previous societies, but like all progress in knowledge it also offers occasions to make an evil worse. Let's say I denounce my neighbor's scapegoating with righteous self-satisfaction, but I continue to view my own scapegoats as objectively guilty.I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, pp. 156–157
However, in a world where the founding murder has disappeared, we have no choice but to imitate Christ, imitate him to the letter, do everything he says to do. The Passion reveals both mimetism and the only way to remedy it.Battling to the End, pp. 102–103
In order to escape crisis, they always had to turn their reciprocal violence into polarizing convergence of all against one. Every time, the outside point of view (which sees reciprocity) and the inside point of view (which wants to see only differences) had to coincide but remain separate. Then all would turn against a single individual.Battling to the End, p. 20
In the context, the leading power was the Roman Empire, which was essentially evil in the absolute but indispensable in the relative—and better than the total destruction about which the Christian revelation warns us. Once again, this does not mean that Christian revelation is bad. It is wholly good, but we are unable to come to terms with it. A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt.On War and Apocalypse, pp. 7–9
Girard's late apocalyptic turn is the most contested register of his work, read by admirers as a sober diagnosis and by critics as alarmism, determinism, or a lapse into prophecy. The direct empirical antagonist is the thesis (Steven Pinker most prominently) that violence has declined across modernity — where Girard sees the draining-away of sacrificial containment and a tendency to extremes, Pinker sees the pacifying work of commerce, the state, and Enlightenment reason. The theological objection that Girard ontologizes violence — makes it humanity's fate — he explicitly rejected, insisting the mechanism is a structure humans can see through and exit, so that the apocalypse is conditional, not decreed: escalation OR conversion. Whether Battling to the End is prophecy, pessimism, or clear sight remains disputed.