While we cannot know the content of their ideas, we do know that the minds of our ancestors must have operated according to the same principles as ours. After all, in anthropological terms, they are separated from us by only moments of time. Being of the same species, they share the same physiology and potential. No mutations or genetic changes could have possibly been established during such a minimal time frame. We differ from our late prehistoric ancestors only culturally, in the way that the Bedouins of North Africa differ from New Yorkers.
Early people clustered together for the group survival demanded by our biology. They operated under the same genetic systems governing the same biological imperatives that influence us today. We can safely assume that they protected the helpless child, shared the tasks of providing food, clothing, and shelter for the community essential to the social animal that we are. They established group identities, group beliefs, group totems, and religions. They defined an “us” and thus, by definition again, an “other.” The groups, however, were small and the enemy was at hand.
Early enemies resided on the other side of the hill or mountain range in areas staked out by each group as its preserve, if not yet its nation. What was preserved were matters of life and death—hunting areas or grazing grounds. When the enemy raided your territory, he took with him the stuff of your group survival and, in the process, killed your people and raped your women. It would not be long before the very existence of the other would be perceived as a threat to survival. We hated the person who threatened the life of our loved ones, who murdered our children. Since travel was limited—picture life on a small island—the enemy was the same enemy that persisted for generations, and a true obsession was inevitable.
The hatred felt then and the suffering it caused were the same as that which we feel today toward those who threaten us and those we love. But in one sense, hatred seems to have been more justifiable, more rational in the days of the tribal strife. In those smaller environments where food had to be gathered almost daily, life was lived in a tenuous present and a zero-sum game for survival existed. Their feast and our famine were intricately linked. The very existence of the neighboring tribe, not just their isolated actions of cruelty, was a threat to the lives of our children.
The conflicts between neighbors that exist today are almost invariably more symbol than substance. Nevertheless, territory, whether the vast territory of Kashmir or the small Shaba’a farm-lands area that define the border between Israel and Lebanon, is used as a focus of enmity. Territory is particularly pertinent in that it demonstrates how land may be used as a rationalization and validating reason for sustaining hatred.
Territory has enormous emotional leverage in the minds of most individuals. It is concrete, can be visualized, and perpetuates the idea of desecrated “homeland.” Territory gives tangible focus to grievances that are rooted in altogether different dynamics. It helps define the enemy.
The Irish Protestant and the Irish Catholic are separated, defined really, by their religion, but it is territory that they fight over. If one could solve the political status of Northern Ireland in a way that seems to provide respect for each party and pays tribute to the real or imagined grievances of the past, one suspects that the religious differences would prove to be readily accommodated. The land has become the metaphor for that emotional condition called “national pride.” If our country is strong, somehow we must be stronger than the evidence of our daily life suggests. To a creature that lives in the world of its own perception, the symbol transcends actuality in importance. Human beings respond to the metaphor, for good and bad.
Think of the national jubilation verging on hysteria that seems the inevitable response to a country’s winning the World Cup in soccer. Our team—composed of disadvantaged people like us—has vanquished, indeed humiliated, the mighty. Never mind that it is only a game, and the moment that it is over, we must resume our impoverished lives. On the field of games and through the imaginative power of group identification, we have triumphed. An economically struggling country goes wild over winning a soccer match, as though it were the discovery of vast reserves of oil, and in the process actually feels more joy and pride. The World Cup places them at the top of the heap, if only symbolically and if only for moments.
Everywhere in the modern world where traditional enmities exist—Ireland, the Middle East, Kashmir, the Sudan—there is a division into self and others that focuses on territory. And everywhere the territory will turn out to be a symbol.
The Burundi-Rwanda wars are particularly devastating examples of long-term battles over largely symbolic territory. The massacres between Hutu and Tutsi occurred time and again over decades, resulting in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. It is hard to identify a starting point for the conflict. The intermingling of these people extends back at least a half century, but beyond that little can be verified.61 Popular knowledge has it that Tutsi cattle herders migrated south from their homes in Ethiopia into the Great Lakes area then occupied by the Hutus. This migration set the stage for a primary claim to the area by the Hutus, reminiscent of some of the rhetoric in the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, as to who “got there first.” Current scholarship indicates that there is no proof that the Hutus’ claim is true. Revisionist histories exist on both sides, yet what is clear is that a conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi has existed over hundreds of years—preceding colonization, although undoubtedly exacerbated by it. The conditions of the recurring massacres and the rationalizations for them would change with each episode of destruction. But a traditional rivalry over land existed and serves as a classic example of tribalism at its worst.
With the Hutu-Tutsi conflicts, the occupations of common grounds and the slaughter increased and the pace of enslavement of the enemy accelerated with each shift of the power struggle. The withdrawal of the Belgians in 1959 saw constant battles to fill the power vacuum, resulting in the splitting of the area into two states. In this case the split into two separate and arbitrary countries in Africa was no more effective in ameliorating hostilities than the opposite was in Europe—the joining of separate Balkan states into the arbitrary single country of Yugoslavia. Neither political maneuver seemed to help dispel traditional and established enmities. Eventually the same conflicts would emerge in both Rwanda and Burundi as had existed in the conjoint state. Only the identity of the victims and victimizers changed, depending on the shifts of power. The battleground was the same.
The Ideological Enemy
Since hatred is inevitably a displacement, the hater generally needs a known population on which to displace his or her resentment. The Hutus needed proximity to create an enemy population. They were not likely to select as an enemy the Inuits of the Arctic Circle, of whose presence they were not even aware. They also needed a history of grievances. Territorial conflicts are a substantial ingredient in sustaining old enmities. The presence of the enemy, his physical approximation—the “vision” of him, as Hume would have it—plays a central role in hatred, as it does in pity and compassion.
Enemies are generally drawn from the neighborhood and ordinarily derived from a long tradition of contact and conflict. In most of the sustaining enmities, although proximity was a necessary condition for locating an enemy, one still needed some identifying differences—some potential threat. National differences will do. But short of some history of atrocities between the two populations, national differences create identities too weak to sustain hatred over time.
Think of the peculiar modern history between two other groups of people, the Americans and the Vietnamese. The corrosive hatred between the Americans and the Viet Cong during the war was staggering. To the North Vietnamese, the American intruders were heirs to the French occupiers, yet another wave of colonizing Caucasians intruding on their space and destroying their population in the process. To the Americans the North Vietnamese were a Communist menace, the first of the dominoes, and another “yellow peril” for a society still struggling with vestigial rac
ism. Some three million Vietnamese died in that war. And it permanently altered the relationship of millions of Americans to their government.
The peace agreement between the Americans and the Vietnamese was signed on January 27, 1973. Now, thirty years later, what can we make of the relationship that exists between these two enemies so recently engaged in deadly struggle? Vietnamese now join the other immigrants from Asia to the United States, greeted with the same ambiguity, but no more hostility, than the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese that preceded them. Americans, bored with the more familiar cuisines of China, Japan, and Thailand, are now making Vietnamese cooking the latest rage. For the most part, Americans do not think of the Vietnamese. And in Vietnam? Well, if we are to believe David Lamb—a former war correspondent living in peacetime Hanoi—they positively love Americans:When Fidel Castro visited Hanoi . . . officials had to bus kids in from the countryside and give them Cuban flags to make a crowd. Russian President Vladimir Putin attracted nothing more than yawns and a score or so of curious onlookers outside his hotel. . . . But for Clinton, the Vietnamese went nuts! . . . Vietnamese by the tens of thousands stood six-deep along the airport road. . . . Another huge crowd gathered outside the Daewoo Hotel to cheer his arrival. . . . Everywhere Clinton went for three days there were multitudes of cheering young people.62
There is, in other words, no residual hatred and no sign of an attachment in enmity. Quite the contrary, today Vietnam looks to America as a model of a successful economy to which it aspires. And Americans, in typical fashion, have pretty much dismissed Vietnam from their minds. Vietnam now takes its position among the vast hordes of countries whose existence has no current significance for the people of the United States. It is relegated to the area of apathy and indifference that one reserves for those who have no role to play in our emotional life.
There was never a territorial relationship between Vietnam and the United States. And the ideological relationship that was falsely presumed to be present died with the end of the Cold War. The Vietnamese, having won the war, emerged with their pride enhanced. They were not the humiliated party. There is no sense of national despair. Instead, the rage of the past is obscured by a continuing struggle to rebuild and enhance the economy. Vietnam has essentially abandoned the Communist model. Having been proved a failure in every country that had the misfortune to adopt it, communism exists in modern Vietnam only in the remnants of political nomenclature. Capitalism is the new standard and the exemplar is that of the United States. There are, therefore, none of the traditional grounds for hatred remaining.
To sustain hatred, one cannot simply view the enemy as another set of people. The enemy must be evil and a menace to our well-being. Some means must be established to justify violation of normal codes of behavior when dealing with the enemy. To this purpose, the enemy will be demonized, made into an agent of evil, or, worse, dehumanized so that the rules that apply to conduct among people can be suspended.
Wartime requires a rapid demonizing of the enemy in order to justify the kind of injury that one must inflict on enemy populations, inevitably including the innocent among them. But as seen in the relationship between the Americans and Vietnamese, the bonds of hatred can melt quickly with a very short thaw. Similarly the hated Boche of World War I seemed to disappear with the romanticizing of Germany and German culture in the 1920s and early 1930s. Berlin would become a Bohemian capital for English and American writers.
Sustained hatreds are created when “ideological” differences, specifically religious ones, remain festering, long after political settlements are agreed upon. The dissolution of Yugoslavia into multiple groups of hatred is a prime example. The Serbs attribute their hatred of the Muslims to a humiliation dating back to the invasion of Kosovo Polje in 1389. Their hatred for the Croats antedated even this by centuries.
As the history of Yugoslavia demonstrates, in many cases the confluence between territory and ideology makes any exact differentiation arbitrary. Often, an ideological difference will simply serve to fulfill material desires. One would have to be a sophisticated theologian to detect any life-threatening or otherwise profound differences between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox theologies. History had imposed a different identity on these ethnically similar Slavs. Religious identity, not ethnicity, sustained the Slavs’ sense of enmity over the centuries. Religious differences became fused with differing political ideologies in the Balkans. The recent Serbian slaughter of the Bosnian Muslims was entirely territorial. The ideologies helped to demonize the Muslims and justify the genocidal slaughter that followed. The ideologies masked a pure grab for territory.
Ideological enemies can best be examined when no territory or national interest is present to obfuscate the issues—when the politics are removed and the passion is focused. In this case it is easier to turn to such groups as the antiabortion fanatics, the radical animal rights activists, and the extreme environmental-protection movements, groups that bomb and kill in the service of some ideological principle that transcends all others. They have subordinated all other moral commitments to their one moral crusade.
In my research for this book, I visited many of the websites of radical reformist groups in an attempt to understand the motivation and means for forming ideological communities. I started with simple causes, usually single-issue groups. Specifically, I wanted to understand how groups that had been formed ostensibly out of compassion, to protect the helpless and abused—animals, children, nature—were so readily converted to a community of haters. How love of the victim became subordinate to hatred of those who do not share one’s belief.
Most right-to-lifers, animal rights people, environmental protection groups, while passionately devoted to their causes, would not commit acts of violence or condone such actions by others. Still, in their “righteous” indignation against the opponents, they set a climate of hatred and create a defined and legitimate community in which the paranoid can enlist. These groups offer the individual hater an outlet for his groundless hatred, a self-justifying rationalization for his frustration, and a group identity that generally eludes the isolated and mistrusting paranoid.
The websites are, I suspect, the domain of the fringe elements of movements, representing a radical minority. It is their personal agendas that preempt the true goals of their cause. In addition, these sites provide justification for the even sicker segment of their constituency—those who are actually prepared to do violence. These people, who are at the periphery of the movement, are not primarily motivated by the specific cause—say, their anxiety for despoilation of the earth—but rather by their need to find relief from perceived persecutions and humiliations. The rhetoric supplied them by the leadership has both a religious fervor and the absolute certitude of revealed truth. This messianic leadership supplies those struggling with personal demons a rational and noble reason to destroy innocent life, at the same time, relieving their internal conflicts.
These websites have become a nucleus for the formation of a community of haters. They are a haven for such paranoid psychotics as Theodore Kaczynski. The movement supplies a rationalizing factor that supports the psychotic’s delusional thinking. The rage he feels and the destruction he exercises are now justified as being in the service of some common good. What he is doing may seem evil but is actually “noble” and “proper,” “a service to morality.” This justification is confirmed by his allegiances.
Ted Kaczynski stated in court that he used information from the “Litha 1993” Earth First Journal to kill Thomas Mosser by sending a bomb to his home. His conviction that he was saving the entire world was sufficient justification for him to say in a letter to the New York Times, dated June 24, 1995, “We have no regret about the fact that our bomb blew up the wrong man, Gilbert Murray, instead of William Dennison, to whom it was addressed.”
Radical single-issue groups offer justification for personal paranoia by the extreme rhetoric of their publications. But a mass culture of hatred cannot possibly be co
mposed entirely, or preponderantly, of madmen and psychopaths. These websites are capable of attracting and mobilizing hatred, but they are likely to draw into their webs only people previously disposed to hatred.
The antiabortion activists see abortion as infanticide. In their battle to save the innocent, the taking of a few less-innocent lives—doctors and nurses and parents ready to “kill” their own babies—seems to them a reasonable moral trade-off. In their perverse utilitarian thinking, they will have saved more lives than they have taken. Their current campaigns on the web employ the term “the abortion holocaust,” by which they choose to see direct equivalence between abortion and the Holocaust. They argue that while the Holocaust killed 6,000,000 Jews, since Roe v. Wade (1973), “28,000,000 unborn babies have been put to death by abortion in this country.”63 They believe they are fighting the just war, and under that aegis, the use of an atomic weapon to further their cause may be justified. They are free to kill the few to save the many. Incidentally, the Catholic church and the fundamentalist Protestant churches, whose philosophies underlie the right-to-life action groups, were not nearly so outspoken during the Holocaust. The passivity of Christian communities in the face of the Holocaust slaughter continues to be exposed in current studies and stands in sharp contrast to the passion with which they currently defend against abortion and even birth control.
Many animal rights activists perceive helpless animals as akin to innocent babies. Thus the life of a laboratory mouse is fungible with the life of a laboratory technician. To prevent torture to the helpless, the activists are willing to bomb the facilities of the torturers—the research laboratories of major hospitals—and in the process risk the loss of some of the “torturers” or their “enablers.” Equating human life with animal life, even if a ratio of value is applied, opens the door to the kind of utilitarian arguments that justify murder in the defense of animals.
Hatred Page 17
