Hatred (22 page)

The history of civilization is a matter of a paltry few thousand years in the millions of years that our species, Homo sapiens, has existed. By definition, we have no records or proofs of the exact
nature of prehistoric life. We have some knowledge. We can roughly date the discovery of metals, tools, and agricultural techniques. We have cave drawings that date and define hunting procedures. What we do not have is any evidence, any record, of what the prehistoric people
thought
.

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.

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 racism. 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:

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.