Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

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 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:

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