I am not preaching any form of religion, nor am I defending or blaming any. I do not make moral judgements; I do not say what is good and what is wrong.
"Christianity and Islam are pure evil!" – a statement I hear much too often. I do not have a problem being associated with Islam; I know what some of my Christian ancestors did in the past. My concern now is with the generalization process – something I will try to explaining next.
But first is first and – and examples are always welcomed, in my opinion.
„All Muslims should be killed!” „What? How can you say that? Even babies?”
I dare to ask, with all my innocence and overtaken by such a statement. „Yes, even babies. All Muslims. They have Islam in their genes”. Personally, I did not know till that time that one’s belief system is biologically determined, I would have said it to be a social and cultural construct. But what to say – we learn things new things every day! Then I said something to (hoping that it will) bring justice to Muslims – „but it’s not in their nature, it’s the course of history! (I was still fond of Spencer at that time). Christians did the same in the past!” (with a sense of self-guilt stuck somewhere over there, since I’m a direct descendant of my own (Christian) ancestors). „Yes! Christianity is evil as well!” Christians and Muslims are „blood sucking people!” I will not continue the examples - they are many, but will only become redundant. The essence to this would be „We hate You (pl.), because You are Evil!” But then again, these statements come from people who did not open a single page of theft Qur’an or the Bible, who think that Old Testament equals Christianity.
I dare to ask, with all my innocence and overtaken by such a statement. „Yes, even babies. All Muslims. They have Islam in their genes”. Personally, I did not know till that time that one’s belief system is biologically determined, I would have said it to be a social and cultural construct. But what to say – we learn things new things every day! Then I said something to (hoping that it will) bring justice to Muslims – „but it’s not in their nature, it’s the course of history! (I was still fond of Spencer at that time). Christians did the same in the past!” (with a sense of self-guilt stuck somewhere over there, since I’m a direct descendant of my own (Christian) ancestors). „Yes! Christianity is evil as well!” Christians and Muslims are „blood sucking people!” I will not continue the examples - they are many, but will only become redundant. The essence to this would be „We hate You (pl.), because You are Evil!” But then again, these statements come from people who did not open a single page of theft Qur’an or the Bible, who think that Old Testament equals Christianity.
We do not exist as isolated individuals. Our identity (or rather stated identities) is/are built through the socializing process. It’s a permanent shift between identities, depending on whom we interact with – our various identities coexist.
We build the Self (Ego) in relationship to (an external) Alter (Other) - our personal/collective identity through this process. I am Ego when there is an Alter to define me as Ego.
Based on this, hatred can only exist if it is directed at something or someone other than Ego or Ego’s group. The Other can be an individual, with a proper name and a proper face or can be a faceless aggregate. But, following Jung, the Other is our denied self – we hate in Alter everything we actually hate about Ego.
The term “paranoia” comes to our attention. Paranoia involves a mental, emotional and social mechanism by which a person or people claim righteousness and purity and attribute hostility and evil to their enemy (Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy). Impurity is that which falls between categories or is out of the normal order of things (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger) So what doesn’t fall into one’s category is considered to be impure – the first step towards paranoia. But paranoia has a more devious mechanism – it involves the metaphysic assumption of threat, eliminating in advance any evidence that might contradict its most basic assumptions about the nature of the enemy. It is represented by a number of basic sentences and assumptions that are beyond any doubt, a faulted form of knowledge that once generated will filter any future experiences and shape them in order to fit the basic axioms. Basically, no matter how much proof I’ll bring to you that I’m a peaceful person, you will still see me as intrinsically evil because of my religious affiliation. You won’t take my background into consideration, my present and past actions – none of this will serve you as proof – because your paranoia dictates you that eventually I will “suck someone’s blood” (this someone being a Hindu – sorry, a follower of Sanātana Dharma, most probably). You are the victims and We are your enemies.
Isaiah Berlin writes that few things have harmed more than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (tribes/states/nations/churches and so on) that they are in the sole possession of the truth (how to live, what to do and so on) – and those who are different from them are not merely mistake but wicked or mad and need restraining or suppressing. It is terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that one alone is right, with a magical eye which sees the Truth (thinking one’s truth to be the Truth).
Modernity brought upon a great shift in how we look at the world – hatred oriented towards a collective Other, and theoretically justified in the form of ideology; reaching new peaks. When the nation-building (and the empire-building) discourse was created, institutionalized hatred was introduced – and this time with a strength never seen before – because it had theories to be based upon – Marxism, communism, fascism, Nazism, Primitivism and so on. The hate speeches were legitimised by academic writings. Social Researchers, instead of having a discourse on power, generated a discourse of power. But the paradigm shifted once again in the 70s, when the Other gained a very important feature that made Other resemble Us – the Other became Human it its full rights.
The making of social differences if a human universal, but the categories which we use to divide the world are cultural constructs. There are emic and etic distinctions. And nothing is wrong with classifying, the problem is with the use of such classifications. The idea of race itself is a social myth, created by modernity to classify the newly discovered Others and to legitimate inequalities perpetrated against them. Science became a means to create a new hierarchy of humans and not-fully (or not-yet humans), with race being the core idea, and Aryan race being predominant. I won’t go into these debates, we all know our past. At one particular time, race stopped being an issue – something had to replace it – and a very friendly response came from a very friendly academician, named Samuel P. Huntington – religion and cultural identity (civilization).
Group identities are created through a relationship between We and Them, most often in forms of binary ethnocentric oppositions (We Secular vs. Them. Religious; We civilized vs. Them primitive/savage; We Insiders vs. Them Outsiders; We Friends vs. Them Enemies and so on). This is created through the premises that there is an opposition between We and Them, that there is an Other and we distinguish ourselves from this Other. We cannot understand the Other – he is out of our social order, being portrayed as a chaotic and dangerous form of contamination (Mary Douglas). The group cohesion is ensured by eliminating these contaminations. We differentiate ourselves from the other and we stigmatize the other. Akbar Ahmen ( Ethnic Cleansing: A Metaphor for our Times?) suggested that late ethnic cleansing is intimately linked to late modernity – the weakening of the nation state, flows of people and customs from across the world, the world itself becoming a global village, hence the need to revive the „traditional”. Alexander Hinton (Genocide and Anthropology), states that genocidal regimes usually co-opt preexisting cultural knowledge, dressing it up in new ideological guises that maintain familiar and compelling resonances while legitimating new structures of domination and violence against victim groups. But one thing should be cleared out: ethnic identities are a historical construct – the modern categories change over time and are subject to manipulation; moreover, primordialist explanations often assume that ethnic groups are prone to violence – is that really so? How much does it take ethnonationalist leaders to prepare and promote fear, hatred and resentment of the ethnic Other? (John Bowen, The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict)
I have stated all the above to show my point that institutionalized (and directed) hate is a process, not a uniform phenomenon (Leo Kuper’s idea). I lack the space to expand here on this idea, but I think I have managed to prove my point of view.
The hostile imagination starts with the assumption (axiom) that the stranger (the Other, an outsider), poses a threat to Us and intends Us evil. I will now concentrate on the creation of the enemy. I have constantly underlined the differences between Ego and Other. How do we deal with pollution? We eliminate it. How many consider that their enemy is also Human? Annihilating our enemy starts with his dehumanization. First of all, he is an aggressor – we are not aggressors, we are only defending ourselves (both US and USSR were making the same claim during Cold War) – We are passive aggressive. So, first the Other is aggressive. But still – He is human – how can I kill my fellow human? Easy – transform Other into non-human – and I’m sure that you are familiar with the processes that help this transformation through propaganda. The Enemy, the Other, is a barbarian, a dehumanized monster who must be fought and exterminated, the worse and most polluted of the animal species – in the end he’s not even that anymore, but merely a number, a part of statistics.
Organized hatred itself is a process – first we create the enemy, then the combatant of the enemy – through propaganda that increases our sense of threat, justifying all violent actions.
UNESCO Chart states: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that we have to erect the ramparts of peace” – but then again, what is Peace? Most often we see it as the absence of war, violence of destructive conflict (GPI - Institute for Economics and Peace) or by freedom from disturbance. Sometimes elements like tranquillity, serenity and so on are added to the definition. One other thing – if war is seen as rational, peace is seen as emotional (iconography should provide one with the best evidence for that).
CONCLUSION:
The perceptions of the enemy most often tend to mirror each other – each side attributes the same characteristics to self and other (same virtues to self and same vices to other). Members of enemy groups see each other as beasts and sub-humans, reincarnation of evil, an agent of the dark forces, an It, an Abstraction one hand, and as diabolically clever on the other, also bringer of Death -> and what could be better, holier than destroying a beast or a devil? Or what could be wrong when killing an It? And even more, what could be wrong with deleting a number?
The process of hate-creation is so subtle that we cannot even sense it – at one time it is there – and we lack the much necessary introspection for discovering how it got there in the first place.
My personal note:
The example I started my presentation with is not unique and not even that special – actually, it’s more common than we would like to believe.
Really, do people actually believe that their hate speeches are so special? They have been there already – and taken to art even by some people far more capable of propaganda than you. Read some Cold War propaganda and it should be enough – maybe get inspired as well!
Answer me, if you can: If we didn’t have enemies whom would we blame for our problems? Define peace for me if you can. Can we love our country, our traditions and our values without falling into blind patriotism and ethnocentrism? Without making foreigners our enemies? What are the words you use to define those you fear and hate? If you claim that “God is on your side” and they claim that God is on their side, who’s right? You talk about what Others are doing to you – How about what you are doing to yourselves?
And a small piece of advice: ABC Political Science: The enemy of my enemy is my friend (said by Machiavelli some centuries ago) – you can’t even associate to fight the “Muslim evil” because you disagree if cows should be worshipped or not. You are so internally divided that you can’t even fight your common “enemies” together! And yet the only option (in the name of Peace, of course) is to kill and murder other human beings. Cause no matter how you are putting it, they are human beings. . It’s amazing the holiness of the cow, if it prevents you people from starting genocide!
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Akbar, Ahmen (1997) Ethnic Cleansing: A Metaphor for Our Time, in The Conceit of Innocence, edited by S.G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University Press, Texas, U.S.A.
Becker, Ernest (1975). Escape from Evil, The Free Press, NY
Bowen, John R. (1997), The Myth of Global Ethnic Conflict, Journal of Democracy, 7.4, pp. 3-14, available at: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bowen.htm
Hinton, Alexander Laban, (2002). Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.Berkeley: University of California Press.
Keen, Sam (1986). Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, Harper and Raw, San Francisco
Keen, Sam. The Mythology and Economy of War and Peace. Available at:http://samkeen.com/essays/the-mythology-and-economics-of-war-and-peace/