Massive Mumblings from Malaysia

Hate

I’ve never encountered a Holocaust denier. But I realized last week that there’s something worse than that: a Holocaust…supporter.

My good, dear, close Malay friend A. shocked me when he said he thought what Hitler did (specifically, the killing of 6 million Jews) was good. I didn’t know how to respond, where to begin. The very possibility that someone could believe such things was outside my realm of conceptualization. And then, that someone I liked, had spent time with, had fun with, could think it...

I tried to make parallels, asking him if he thought it was right for white Americans to have black slaves, to lynch blacks, just because they thought they weren’t as good, as human, because their skin was black. Is it good if Americans think all Muslims are terrorists and try to kill them, bomb their countries? Perhaps a better comparison would have been if I had brought it closer to home and asked if it would be ‘good’ for Malays to kill all the Chinese (who, like Jews, tend to work in the business/economic sector) or vise versa.

The fact is, it’s because Hitler’s victims were Jewish and A. is Muslim that he can say it was ‘good.’ A.’s never met a Jew before. And his understanding of the End of the World is that the Muslims and Jews will fight (so I guess that means killing them before that is advantageous?) in an all-out war.

He’d seen Life is Beautiful, but wasn’t sure if he’d seen Schindler’s List. But, “those are just movies.”

Several days later, I saw my Omani friend. He got his B.A. in South Carolina and his father works for the U.N. Surely, he wouldn’t have the same opinion?

But, oh yes, he does. His English is better, but I didn’t hear anything at all convincing in what he said. Like A., he suggested it was deserved because of what’s happening in Palestine now. The Holocaust pre-dates the current transgressions of the Israel government, army, and settlers. If you think it’s unacceptable that innocent Palestinian women and children are killed by the Israelis, doesn’t the same logic carry through to the conclusion that the Holocaust (killing innocents just because they happened to be born Jewish) is also wrong? Where’s the consistency in logic?

Fortunately, when I asked my Tanzanian friend Farida, she disagreed with the others that such a thing could be considered ‘good,’ though I’d say she is the most religiously conservative.

[an aside: she consulted a Malay sheikh she usually agrees with and respects, who said that non-Muslims are not allowed into a mosque. That I cannot believe! See September archive for more discussion on this.]

I asked A. what he would think if I told him my Canadian friend he met last week were Jewish (she isn’t). He didn’t think she’d deserve to die, but that “Hilter must have had a good reason” for hating the Jews.

Do people who hate have good reason? In some cases, yes. According to this FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin about hate crimes:

“Hate, a complex subject, divides into two general categories: rational and irrational. Unjust acts inspire rational hate. Hatred of a person based on race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or national origin constitutes irrational hate.

The ultimate goal of haters is to destroy the object of their hate. Mastery over life and death imbues the hater with godlike power and omnipotence, which, in turn, facilitate further acts of violence.”

I recently saw American History X. I thought about the KKK, neo-Nazis, Matthew Shepard. A.’s question about the basis of Hitler’s hate compelled me to read part of Mein Kampf, but also made me want to understand more about the psychology of hate.

Robert Sternberg, Yale professor of psychology, has a book coming out next month addressing this very topic: The Psychology of Hate.

Sternberg is already quite well-known for his triangular theory of love. In his own words (and from his website):

“I have proposed a triangular theory of love, according to which love has three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Different combinations of these three components yield different kinds of love. For example, intimacy and passion together produce romantic love, intimacy and commitment together produce companionate love, passion and commitment together produce fatuous love, and so forth. All three components together produce consummate love.

I have also proposed a theory of love as a story, which specifies how people come to form the different love triangles. According to this theory, from early in life, people are exposed to various love stories, and as a function of this exposure and their personalities, they create a hierarchy of preferred stories. Examples of such stories are the business story (love is
like a business, with two business partners contributing to the business venture), the collector story (no one person can fulfill all one's love needs, so one needs to collect people who in combination, hopefully, will serve to fulfill those needs), the fairy-tale story (love is a story about a prince and a princess), and the war story (love is war). There are roughly two dozen stories in the theory at present.”

His hate theory mirrors the triangular and story aspects of his love theory.

The three sides of the triangle (passion, negation of intimacy, and commitment to hate) can be combined in many ways that then produce different kinds of hate. Hate can be hot, cool, cold, seething, simmering, boiling, or burning. An article from the Yale Alumni Magazine explores the theory:

“Commitment alone is "Cold Hate." For this, Sternberg cites the hatred people feel when they've been conditioned into prejudice, as the youth of Germany were after Hitler's rise. Many had never met a Jew, but thanks to comic books crafted to portray Jews as wicked, they harbored a cold, cognitive hatred. Sternberg notes that, post-9/11, some Americans feel cold hate for Muslims -- not an emotion so much as an entrenched intellectual devaluation…

Then there's complete hate, the hate of all hates -- "Burning Hate," made of rage, disgust, and commitment together… Burning hate is "the need for annihilation," Sternberg writes. It's "the hate you feel when 'it's us or them.'" It is the hate Hutu leaders felt for Tutsis, the hate some Americans feel for terrorists, the hate terrorists feel for Americans. This hate fills the news. This hate destroys nations...

Think of someone you dislike, and the story of what he did to you leaps to your mind. In the second part of his duplex theory, Sternberg proposes that we cannot hate without a tale to tell…Humans hate in narrative.

Whether international or interpersonal, hate stories are generally built on two fundamental flaws. The first is a confusion of aggressor and victim. The Nazis who packed women and children into train cars like cattle believed these same Jews were out to exterminate them. Othello, even as he kills Desdemona, feels she has wronged him. "Stories of hate tend to have two fairly stable roles," Sternberg writes: "perpetrator (who is to be hated) and victim (who is to be the hater).... People who do evil things tend to see themselves as the victims of those they persecute."…The second flaw is that the hate stories are factually wrong.”

Sternberg suggests that wisdom is the antidote to hate and has even created a curriculum for developing wisdom-related thinking at the middle school level.

Hate crime and groups

Law enforcement agencies reported 8,759 bias-motivated criminal offenses in the US in 1996. The FBI reported a seventeen-fold increase in anti-Muslim crimes nationwide during 2001, largely due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

There were 751 hate groups in the U.S. last year, according to Hatewatch, which also keeps a weekly list of hate crimes around the country and a map of hate groups. South Dakota and Vermont are the only states with no known hate groups.

Iowa has 6: The KKK, National Socialist Movement (neo-Nazi, Cedar Falls), Aryan Nations (neo-Nazi, Mason City), Nation of Islam (black separatist, Waterloo), the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (other, Ames), and Sigrdrifa (other, Olds).

I wanted to know what was in operating in Iowa, so searched for the Euro-American Unity and Rights Organization. David Duke. White Supremacy. From the homepage, a sidebar that read “Why do Children Hate? Teaching Tolerance: A Teachers Guide to understanding and correcting racial hatred in the classroom” caught my attention. “Violent behavior has increased as multi-culturalism and diversity programs have forced races together.” Wow. And hate crime laws “only end free speech. Freedom of criticism and expression are stifled.” The list of local EURO offices doesn’t include any in Iowa though, so hopefully Hatewatch is wrong…

Sigrdrifa doesn’t seem as overtly hateful on a quick perusal of their website: "Our mission is to provide educational materials to the global community, focusing on the cultural identity of contemporary and ancient European heritage." I’m sure that if I were to have joined the E-zine or Bulletin Board, I might have gotten some of that. But I didn’t want my email associated with a possible hate group, so will just have to believe Hatewatch on this one.