The "hate" disease that afflicted everyone
People hold a banner reading "Love, Not Hate" during a multi-faith march to end hate (AFP)
"Teach us the deadly generalization and not to differentiate between the French and the French colonialism"
We have become individuals and groups affected by a pandemic of hatred that transcends continents, cultures, religions, languages, and different skin colors. The "pathology" of contemporary hatred is the most widespread disease in the world around us and in us, and the fire of blind declared and sleeping wars is optimally fueled by the various firewood of hatred, and all these wars in which we participate or The one we inherited from our parents and grandparents and still sleeps peacefully in the ashes, eyes wide open, ready to rise at any moment.
These holy or profane wars , modern or ancient, modern or classical, class or identity, wars of the sword or cybernetic, in the North or the South, are all prepared in a kitchen and on a quiet fire whose ideological embers are never extinguished, it is the kitchen of hatred.
In the history of man in North Africa and the Middle East, the only thing that hatred did not mix with was mother’s milk.
We drank the first old cup of hate in the school, and in its seats we tasted the taste of hatred for the first time, once as sterile as it was, and the new generations are still, generation after generation after us, sipping from the texts of the textbooks prescribed for us to hate in its poetic, religious, moral and linguistic forms, and so we were growing and growing in us and with us Hate, for almost a decade and a half, which is the age of school years, we used to bathe morning and evening in hate until it became as if it was from our genes from our blood.
Then, when we grew up a bit and the world around us expanded in terms of geography and consciousness, hatred also expanded and grew in us and with us to reach the other who is different from us and devour him. Each other in our imagination turned into a monster, a wolf, a snake, a murderer, a thug, a rapist and a criminal. Each other is a colonialism in the past or an expected colonization that must be resisted. He hated him and refused to live with him.
They taught us the deadly generalization, they taught us that there is no difference between the French and the French colonialism. They taught us that there is no difference between Jean-Paul Sartre and the butcher General Béjart.
They taught us that there is no difference between the baggage carriers supporting the Algerian liberation war and Maurice Babon's campaign against the penal revolutionaries who were thrown into the Seine River in Paris. They taught us that there is no difference between the presidential duo Bush father and son and novelist Henry Miller or Hemingway.
They taught us that there is no difference between the philosophers Maimonides and Spinoza and between General Sharon and the head of the extreme right-wing religious Zionist party Ibn Gvir.
This is how we drown in the quagmire of hatred through blind generalization. Ignorance of the other produces fear of him, and ignorance and fear produce hatred.
The different from us, that is, the other, scares us because we are weak from the inside, because our resistance is not the resistance of the productive historical, the resistance of the actor, the resistance of the intelligent, it is, in short, the resistance of the generalized "angry reaction" produced by the layers of the accumulated culture of hatred.
Gradually, the area of hatred expands and reaches the sacred religious space, so everyone sits listening behind the cleric who is supposed to be the voice of the soul and spirituality, love and synergy, so everyone hears in Friday sermons and holiday sermons and in daily lessons, lessons between afternoon and sunset prayers, and in supplication for the dead in On cemeteries and on pulpits, everyone constantly hears a prayer from the clergyman against Christians, against Jews, against secularists, against communists, and against atheists. These discourses perpetuate the culture of hatred, and hatred becomes daily "food", vulgar human "fodder", a very normal reaction.
To combat this religious hatred, we have to move from thinking about one religion to thinking about the many religions that live with us and around us, moving from studying religion in a religious way to studying comparative religions in a historical way.
Then, little by little, the homeland belongs to the party and enters the university, and they are two similar spaces or twins, so we start a new chapter in the series of hates, we learn that our language is the most beautiful of languages, it is the greatest of languages, it is the language of God and the language of heaven, it is the language that enriches us from other languages, and it is The language that will remain after all languages disappear with a curse from God, and such naive and dangerous nationalist, ideological or religious political discourses are what will perpetuate the sense of hatred of foreign languages and make us revolve around ourselves rejoicing in our empty self, so we deepen the sense of hatred for learning the language of the other who is part of us, this is the case He is the one who brought the teaching of foreign languages in all Arab universities to the nadir that we know, unfortunately.
It is beautiful and even necessary for every nation to work on developing its language, in order to fight stereotypes and expand the human imagination that resides in the memories of various languages, but it is not possible to benefit from this concern for this or that language unless we see it in the mirror of other languages. Languages are opposite and reflective mirrors.
The dangers of the culture of hatred expand within us when we ignite the “identities” wars around us, and each one takes out his “sword” of identity, to remain in wait for the identity of the other, aiming to assassinate it. Identity hate.
When I look closely at the composition of this world from North Africa and the Middle East, I feel that identity wars still exist, wars that only spread more hatred. Multiple identities, as well as multiple languages, are a great wealth in a democratic society, in a single country with a just pluralistic system, and when justice and freedom are achieved, identities of all kinds are realized as a great force in society.
Preserving an identity that is not based on the funeral of another identity, then little by little this happens in our strange society steeped in the flaws of hatred and reality in its claws. We learn another hatred which is sexual hatred, hatred of women, on the one hand they teach us mother's love, "heaven is under the feet of mothers" On the other hand, they teach us that women are the source of vice, lacking in religion and reason, and that their "plot is great", as if the mother is not a woman, and as if the other women, the neighbor, the sister, the aunt, the teacher and the doctor, are not mothers.
Hatred is a chronic time bomb that destroys the individual, the group, the country and cultures. It blinds one to error, one to self-criticism and revision.
In societies where the culture of hatred grows and is inherited from one generation to the next, the focus is on awakening the memory of wars and bloody conflicts, not as a lesson that must be avoided, but as a model of courage and chivalry that must be preserved. The wars of the past are summoned to hide the defeat of the present.
The societies that seek to get rid of the pandemic of symbolic or real wars are those that focus in their reading of their future on contemplating periods of peace, construction, and coexistence with the other. Societies, the more communication multiplied, and with it the triviality multiplied, and the positive symbols disintegrated.
Amin Al-Zawy is a writer and thinker
Source: websites