The Discourse of Hatred

The pundits are certain that we have turned the page. Have we not relegated collective hatred to history books and referred individual malice to the good care of psychologists? No matter the countless problems that plague us today, modern euphoria wisely rushes ahead to contradict these contradictions. All can be explained, understood, excused. […]

Majority thesis of right-thinking people: hatred with a capital “h” does not exist. Those who direct our attention to it are evading the real problems. Those who profess to “have it” and claim responsibility for it are prisoners of a mirage. The hatred they experience and make a show of must be reduced to prior external causes: misfortune, poverty, frustrations, humiliations, and insults. Or so believe the amateur soul-doctors. Hatred is but the rotten fruit of a faulty upbringing. A proper upbringing is confident it can abolish that which does not exist. General acquittal, hugs and kisses all around.

Thesis defended here: hatred exists. We have all encountered it, at the microscopic level of individuals as well as at the heart of giant collectivities. The urge to attack and to destroy cannot be expunged by verbal magic.

Why Barbers?

“Tonight we will kill barbers and Jews.”
“Why barbers?”

Hatred advances with the implacable cool of a bulldozer, without worrying about the objections that, in its eyes, only reflect the hostility of those doing the objecting. Their resentful persecution confirms its reasons for shooting on sight anyone who tries to suppress it. […]

Hatred is confident that only a coarse lout, a nasty character, a traitor, an enemy of the people, a “pesky insect” (in the words of its friend Lenin), would try to block its way and sabotage its efforts. Whatever happens, hatred is always in the right, its very failures a comfort. It is not hatred that takes the wrong path. It is not hatred that overreaches; rather, it never goes far enough. […]

The strange capacity for individual manias and unrelated rages to unite around a central lynch-mob fury, thus creating a social bond par excellence, is illustrated, enigma of enigmas, by the hatred of the Jews. This destructive passion survives millennia, dresses in the style of the day, and is eternally reborn from the ashes of various fanaticisms that seem to motivate it. It appeared to be Christian, but when Europe became de-Christianized, it reached its acme. We thought it was extinct after Hitler, yet here it is becoming a worldwide phenomenon. We wish it were confined to some obscurantist or xenophobic excesses, but the daily headlines focused on Jerusalem and surrounding areas constrain each inhabitant on this planet to take a stand and choose sides.

The “Jewish question” is not just a pathological obsession of Muslim fundamentalists, who are only recycling the worn-out themes of religious, anti-West, statist antisemitisms peddled by the West itself in the past.

Let us be clear. My purpose here is not to attack anyone who criticizes this or that policy of Israel. […] To indicate one’s disagreement with a strategy momentarily dominating Israeli opinion does not in any way merit being called antisemitic, anti-Jewish, or Judeophobe. […]

Extremism, however, generally indicates that passion has overcome good sense. The accumulation of abuse is a sign that rational debate has given way to unspoken drives that cannot yet be acknowledged.

Increasingly, the news brings us worrying signs:

In a poll conducted for the European Commission (published with some delay, thus problems, November 3, 2003), Israel won the prize for top predator nation, named by 59 percent of respondents as the number one threat to world peace, ahead of Iran, North Korea, Iraq, and the United States (53%). Russia, a strong contender given some 300,000 Chechens killed, caused no more worry than communist China, and both were trailing the pack (22%).

Given the war cries exchanged over half a century between Pakistan and India, both of which have meanwhile become nuclear nations, and in the face of communist China’s repeated threats to “take back” Taiwan by force even if it means a confrontation with the U.S. Navy and Japan, one has to scratch one’s head: Israel, this handkerchief-sized country with its four or five million inhabitants, is the greatest danger for the twenty-first century! […]

Neither the current massacres in Darfur, white Muslims against black Muslims, nor the civil wars in Yemen or Algeria or Lebanon, nor the Iran–Iraq war, nor the Gulf War, nor the twenty thousand inhabitants of Hama assassinated by the Syrian army, nor the extermination of the Chechens, nor the conflict in Kashmir, and on and on—none of these is attributable to the Israeli splinter planted in the heart of an Arab world that one assumes, in spite of all, to be unified and harmonious. Nothing so far explains how the existence of the little state of Israel could interfere with the economic, cultural, and moral development of the collective Arab or Muslim societies. This disproportion between the supposed “cause” and the observed “effects” shows that the demonization of Israel precedes the analyses that claim to justify it after the fact.