“You
have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate
– the unloved and the unnatural.”
-Charlie Chaplin, The Great
Dictator
Is there anything unnatural about
hate? Is it in humankind’s nature to hate? We all hate something or someone. We
use the term hate in a variety of ways. You can hate sitting too long at a
traffic light. You can hate a type of food. You can hate an entire race or
nationality. You can hate yourself. Hate is anything stronger than dislike,
which itself is a more polite, less emotional hate. Hate though, is not the
absence of love. The absence of both love and hate is indifference, or apathy. Whether
you love or hate, it means you care deeply about something. They are mirror
images. Perhaps we use the word “hate” too freely.
I have struggled with hatred throughout my life. Especially in my teens. I hated school. I hated most of my
teachers. I hated the faculty. I hated homework. I hated the people who bullied
me. I hated the entire prisonlike atmosphere of school. This burning hatred
made me an angry and depressed person. It was making me sick.
Hatred has its place. I believe that
there are things that are okay to hate, and things that aren’t. “Hate the sin,
not the sinner” is a phrase that Christians tend to use, although they don’t
always follow their own advice. To an extent I can agree with the sentiment, even if I may sometimes disagree with what a Christian might consider sinful. It is better to hate behaviors than to hate people. It was a long path to get me to that point. Yet perhaps I’m not even
all the way there yet. I feel that once someone causes enough harm they are beyond forgiveness. And those are the people I hate. The people in positions of power, mainly, who engineer oppression and suffering behind the scenes. Then there are people who personally wronged me somehow. Again, it takes a lot to earn my hatred, more than it used to anyway. But I could name at least a couple people I hate for personal reasons.
When
I was in my teens and first learned about the history of the Armenian genocide,
how it was perpetrated by Turkey and denied to this day, its orchestrators
treated as heroes with streets named after them, Armenia’s historic lands
stolen, yes, I will say I hated the Turks. This was only reinforced by every
Turk I ever met online being just as hateful toward all Armenians. It wasn’t
hatred from a position of power, like white supremacy is for instance. It was
like a Jew hating Germans; that is, if Germany still denied the Holocaust and
had streets named after Hitler. But I did not yet have the means to think
rationally and critically. I was young. Then there’s the Azeris, of Azerbaijan.
Joseph Stalin (another man I hate) gave them control of Armenia’s Artsakh province during the Soviet Union. The province successfully broke away with the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and declared independence. The Azeris deeply
hate Armenians over this. They’re taught from preschool up to hate Armenians,
because they think Armenia “stole” their land. Sore losers. The government has
turned the Armenians into a boogeyman, in order to instill a national unity and
direct people’s ire toward a perceived enemy, rather than where their ire ought
to be directed, at their totalitarian government. One particular episode that
opened my eyes to just how much the citizens of Azerbaijan are taught to blindly hate all Armenians was the
treatment of Ramil Safarov, who murdered an Armenian, Gurgen Margaryan, in his sleep while they
were both at a military academy. He was imprisoned for a few years in Hungary
until Azerbaijan paid to have him transferred back home, where he did not live
out the rest of his prison sentence, no; he was awarded medals and treated like
a hero. For murdering someone in their sleep. Because he was an Armenian. I
hated the Azeris right back at one time.
As I got older, and perhaps wiser, I
learned to let go of this kind of hate. It was gradual, but I awakened to the
fact that nations and races are mere artificial social constructs. And I
awakened to the fact that you cannot defeat hate with hate. You defeat it with
logic, rationality, and yes, love. Or at least indifference. You don’t stoop to their level, you rise
above it. There are plenty of Turks and Azeris who have also reached this
point. You can’t paint them all with the same brush. I don’t hate anyone just
for their nationality or race. I hate Turkish and Azeri nationalism, and the
genocidal tendencies their ideologies lead to. I hate the leaders of their
countries who enforce this ideology. I can say that I hate Erdogan and Aliyev,
just as I hate Talaat Pasha and the rest of the orchestrators of the Armenian
genocide. I don’t feel bad saying that, because again, I feel that they are unforgivable at this point. I can hate people if they give me
enough of a reason. But, I don’t hate the common people. Not anymore. They can’t
help that their government brainwashed them their whole lives. Whatever racist
or hateful thing a Turk or Azeri says online, I no longer reflect that upon
their entire ethnic group. There are a few brave enough to speak out against
their governments and the historical revisionism that their governments try to
teach their citizens. Those who can transcend beyond blind nationalism. People like Taner Akcam and Umit Kurt, the latter of
which came to my university to give presentations many times while I was in Graduate
School, who have studied what happened and don’t deny it. They helped open my eyes, and gradually, I let go of most of my hate. I
became a better person for doing so.
Right now, as I write this Artsakh
and Armenia are under heavy bombardment by Azerbaijan, with an assist from
Turkey. It is war. People are dying on both sides. Their hatred for Armenia is
so vitriolic they wish to wipe it off the map and destroy its people and history.
Although I am on the other side of the planet, the bombardment impacts me too. I’ve
sunk into a deep depression. Yet I am helpless to do anything about it. I can
offer little more than “thoughts and prayers”. I have no power to stop it. To
my regret I’ve had to take a break from social media, because following the
news is just tormenting me. This is madness, madness driven by pride and above
all hatred. I don’t want to give into it. I don’t want to let it consume me.
But it fills me with such rage and sorrow. Although I want more than anything
for Armenia to emerge victorious, I don’t want to start cheering for the death
tolls of Azeri soldiers. They are the victims of government brainwashing. Mere
pawns. I have to work hard not to hate the people, just the ideology. The
ideology of nationalism that drives a man to kill another man who they haven’t
even met, based on lines on a map and what colored cloth they fly. It is a sick
ideology that turns people twisted and demented. Turns people into monsters,
who celebrate carnage and torture. You can still love your own country and
culture without it driving you to want to see other cultures and countries
destroyed. But all too often people can’t seem to do that. You know, there’s no good reason a piece of land has to belong exclusively to one ethnicity. Ethnicity itself is a made up concept. We should just be able to live together, without borders. Humanity would be better off without nation states. It’s all bullshit. People dying over idiotic made up concepts. It makes me sick of living on this planet. The Earth would be better off without humanity.
That sort of hatred has long
infected the United States as well. Racism and white supremacy. It is the same
thing anywhere you look in the world, and it is nothing new. Is hatred as “unnatural”
as Charlie Chaplin claimed? Or was he just naïve?
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