By Peter Anhalt (Violence Prevention Network)
In our work with violent right-wing extremist offenders, we almost always encounter the phenomenon of hatred, because right-wing extremist violence is often linked to and driven by deep hatred.
We also work with people who have been convicted of hate crimes, where inner hatred is the driving force behind their actions rather than their extremist political views. To work with these people, we need to understand them and their hatred to a certain extent.
According to philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), “When I have understood something, I have adopted an interpretation.” This means that I have never understood the truth, only a part of it. It therefore makes sense to look at different interpretations and adopt them if appropriate.
This is fundamentally important in counselling. We humans are complex beings, and the more interpretations I know and the better I understand why people become and are the way they are, the more “counselling space” I have, and the greater the scope for change. This also applies to hatred in all its complex dynamics.
In the following, I would like to formulate some theses that have emerged from my work with these people and my reflections on it. They do not claim to be exhaustive but rather invite further reflection and discussion.
Thesis 1: Hate is a strong human emotion
What may seem trivial at first glance is worth taking a closer look at – hate as a strong human emotion.
It is certainly one of the strongest emotions. Hate is always strong, passionate and elemental; it is difficult to imagine a “mild” form of hate.
Hate is human, i.e. one could say that it is what makes us human, even if this is a very pessimistic view of humanity.
On the one hand, animals cannot hate, and on the other hand, being able to hate is not pathological, but a normal – human – emotion.
Hate is an emotion that, when emotions are categorised as positive or negative, as is usually the case, is considered negative, which also means that it is quickly dismissed as morally bad, but:
- Moral judgements are inappropriate when it comes to feelings. Hate is not morally reprehensible, but the actions that may result from it are – that is the difference.
- Behind every feeling there are valid desires and needs (feelings as the language of the soul) that are important to recognise and understand. With a feeling as strong as hatred, there must therefore be something at stake that is very important to the person concerned, without this being obvious to them.
- One might assume that hatred is classified as a negative emotion because people do not like to feel it, but not everyone who hates would agree that they consider it a bad or negative emotion – see thesis 5.
Thesis 2: Anger and hatred are different
Anger dissipates, hatred festers.
Anger wants to change; hatred wants to destroy.
Those who hate can no longer believe that anything can be changed.
Thesis 3: Hate turns – supposedly – towards others, but always returns to oneself
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”
(Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919)
The other person I hate is not interesting as who they are, because the hater does not see them, but rather their own inner image that they project onto them. Hatred ‘needs’ the other person, it needs an address to which it can be directed, because it does not want to look at itself.
And so, hatred demonises; one does not want to and cannot see the other as they are but instead creates an image of them. It is a loop: I create the address I need myself.
Hatred of others and self-hatred lie close together and are mutually dependent – it is hard to imagine that a person full of hatred is capable of self-love.
Thesis 4: Hatred is – very often – fuelled by biographical experiences
“If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke,
or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’
and acted as if we were non-existing things,
a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us,
from which the cruelest bodily torture would be a relief.”
(William James, 1842 – 1910, American philosopher and psychologist)
In our biographical work with our clients, we repeatedly encounter such experiences, some of them very early in life (selection):
- Violence experienced in the family and/or first-hand
- Alcohol and drug abuse in their immediate environment
- Neglect and antisocial behaviour
- Absent fathers
- Stays in clinics and homes
- Formative attributions in kindergarten or school
- Anti-democratic and extremist attitudes in the family environment
Important needs such as being seen, valued, loved, self-efficacy and many more are not met, or only to a very limited extent.
One solution – albeit a very destructive one – for dealing with these experiences is to develop intense anger, even hatred. This leads to the next thesis.
Thesis 5: Hate stabilizes
I remember a client in prison, in his early 20s, with whom I worked in one-on-one training sessions. At the beginning of each session, he had to shout out his hatred for all kinds of people and the world. I could hardly stop him.
Then I asked him once: What would you do if you didn’t have this hatred? His answer was as prompt as it was surprising: “Then I would break down.”
And little by little, we came to understand that hatred protected him – on the one hand from the grief over everything he had been denied as a child, but above all from the fear of having no plan whatsoever for what to do with his life. He had no education, still had several years to serve in prison, and had no one “outside” he could count on.
Hate and fear often go hand in hand. Hate is easier to bear than fear, which never goes away and continues to fester unconsciously. The greater the fear, the greater the hate must become, because if you allow yourself to feel fear (and grief), you have to fear that you won’t be able to bear it and will break down.
More broadly speaking, hatred protects you from taking a critical and clear look at yourself and from taking responsibility for yourself. Ultimately, you settle into it. You discover that hatred can also be pleasurable and that it is linked to the pleasure of violence. ‘Hate keeps me warm’ is a popular tattoo among violent right-wing extremist offenders. Inner hatred becomes dominant and “warming” in a destructive way.
The later you reach these people, the more difficult it becomes to reverse this process.
“He who fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster himself. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you also.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)
Thesis 6: Hate makes you stupid
This thesis follows from what has been said so far.
When I hate, I can only see small parts of myself, others and the world.
This means that the more I hate, the smaller my world becomes and the more stupid I become.
There are then no more distinctions – not in terms of myself, others or the world. Everything becomes smaller and more limited.
Thesis 7: Hate is political
“Most people live in the quicksand between success and redundancy. They struggle to remain useful, to become essential – not to fall into the late capitalist rubbish dumps from which there is no escape.”
(Ilja Trojanow, The Superfluous Human, 2013)
I remember a conversation I had during a telephone counselling session in the first half of the 1990s. A middle-aged, unemployed man called me; he was very upset and angry because he felt he had been treated very badly at the job centre. He kept mentioning that he had had a better life in the GDR but also mentioned that he had been imprisoned as a political prisoner. I paused and asked him how he could defend the GDR, to which he replied: “If I did something wrong there, I got a few punches in the face and knew where I stood. Today, no one cares who I am or what’s going on with me.”
There was a cynical saying in the GDR: “Everyone is good for something; they can always serve as a bad example.” The caller seemed to have been such a person. Someone who had been rejected but who – in a very destructive way – still felt seen. Now he no longer had that feeling; he was “just a number.”
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So, there is a feeling and an experience of being superfluous, or at least the fear of it – and that makes people furious. And if that is the case, the question arises: what does it do to us as a society when we have been debating for years about the “supposedly” superfluous people we want to get rid of? What fear lies behind this, perhaps of eventually becoming one of the superfluous?
Radicalisation “helps” against the feeling and/or experience of being superfluous: then I am a white German man with the task of keeping my own people pure, I play an important role, I have a task and a community – and a place and a reason for my hatred against all those who do not recognise my truth.
Thesis 8: Hate can be exploited and is contagious
Dresden, June 2018, at a Monday demonstration organised by the far-right political movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the west). On stage, Siegfried Däbritz, a founding member of Pegida, speaks disparagingly about the Dresden aid organisation Mission Lifeline. At that moment, their ship is in the Mediterranean with 234 refugees on board and is not allowed to enter any European port. The crowd chants: “Drown! Drown! Drown!” – ordinary people wishing death on others.
A week later, a television crew from the political magazine PANORAMA (NDR) returns and asks participants in the Pegida demonstration about the previous week. No one wants to admit to having shouted, everyone says it’s not right, everyone ends their statement with a “…but…”.
To the video (German): https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/panorama/archiv/2018/Absaufen-Zu-Besuch-bei-Pegida,wirschaffendas108.html
People have prejudices, aversions, resentments, which are stirred up – and then it all erupts, all barriers come down, you become part of a mob that wants to destroy others, a mob that hates.
That’s why the term “angry citizen” (German: “Wutbürger”) is too weak for a significant number of these so called “angry citizens”.
Thesis 9: Hate destroys people and societies
“Hate is an acid that corrodes the soul, regardless of whether you or the other fellow does the hating.”
(Erich Maria Remarque, 1898 – 1970)
Hatred begins with hate speech, which can also be destructive, and ends in violent hatred. Hatred eats away the soul of the person who hates, but it also consumes the victim and society.
A desolate childhood can be integrated – that is our task. Permanent injustice, on the other hand, much less, which means that averting hatred is always a task for the whole society.
Thesis 10: No justification for hatred can be used to excuse violent acts arising from this emotion
People are responsible for their thoughts and actions.
A central part of our work is to offer a space where clients can reflect on and understand their tendency towards hatred, take responsibility for it, and work with us to find ways to think and feel beyond hatred.
Peter Anhalt is a qualified theologian and supervisor (DGSv) and head of the Department of Right-wing Extremism at Violence Prevention Network.
INTERVENTIONEN 