Hatred Doesn’t Pay

Much has already been written about the reasons why individuals become radicalized to the point of violence and suicide terrorist attacks. There are no simple, clear-cut explanations, but among the motives one often finds the terrorists’ belief that a suicide attack on people of other faiths and views, and on random passers-by, will earn them a reward in the afterlife. Many terrorists believe that their explosive belt will blow them all the way to the gates of the Islamist paradise, where seventy-seven virgins will reassemble them and service their jihadist pride for all eternity.

It is much the same with the followers of the politics of fear and hatred. They believe that the fight against the nation’s enemies—from migrants and refugees, via faggots, to people from the former Yugoslav republics, degenerate artists, NGOs, liberal democrats of all stripes, emancipated women, Muslims, Soros and other Jews, all the way to multi-culti activists and random passers-by—will, after the final victory, bring a morally unpolluted and ideologically monolithic prosperity in which the Slovenian nation will blissfully bloom like a water lily on Lake Balaton. Virgins play no role in this sub-Alpine idyll. Women exist only as breeding support for patriotic machismo.

Both, of course, are badly mistaken, but since one should not equate and generalize sweepingly in such sensitive matters, it must be acknowledged that there are also important differences between them. The first difference is that Islamist fanatics expect to be rewarded for their earthly crimes and atrocities only in the afterlife. The vanguard of the culture war, by contrast, believe that an ethnically and ideologically pure paradise is possible within a few days or weeks. On Earth, not just in heaven. A second important difference is linked to the first. Islamist fanatics have fewer empirical proofs at their disposal that could help them understand that they are shooting in the dark. Complaints from self-detonated yet ultimately unsatisfied terrorists are relatively rare. Just as it is hard to prove the existence of heavenly virgins generous to jihadists, it is hard to prove the opposite. In the end, you either believe it or you don’t.

It is different with the legionnaires of the Kulturkampf. They have a whole range of instructive historical examples at their disposal that can vividly illustrate, even to the slower learners, where politics based on vampirized nationalism, the cult of personality, exclusion, closure, fear and hatred ultimately leads. Every time in history, these stories have ended tragically, and not only for those who were hated but, without exception, in the end also for those who did the hating. Let me be specific. Four million Germans died in uniform in the Second World War. But it was not only soldiers who died. In July 1945, damaged sewers and contaminated water caused a dysentery epidemic in Berlin that killed two-thirds of all newborn babies. Seventy-five percent of residential buildings were destroyed or uninhabitable. More than fifty thousand abandoned or lost children and orphans wandered the streets. In the first days of May, Russian soldiers raped almost a hundred thousand women in Berlin alone. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, more than twenty million people in Germany were homeless. There was a shortage not only of homes but also of food. In June 1945, in the American occupation zone, the daily ration for an adult did not reach nine hundred calories, too little for normal survival. Into all this misery poured millions of ethnic Germans expelled from the eastern parts of the ultimately not-so-eternal Third Reich. This was surely not the fate the Germans expected when, in the 1930s, they raised their right arms enthusiastically and en masse.

Post-war German suffering is described by the late British historian Tony Judt in his book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Deprivation, hunger and death, of course, did not afflict only Germany and the Germans; the war left even worse consequences elsewhere in Europe, especially in its eastern part. What is worth reflecting on in this story today is the fact that the Germans themselves ultimately paid a very high price for the sins of leaders they had, until recently, ardently and blindly supported. The hatred, inhumanity and crimes committed in their name by the German state came back to the German people like a boomerang, cruelly and without mercy. Only the solidarity and help of their former enemies gave them back human dignity and the chance of a better future.

Those who find the comparison with Nazism historically too remote can think about what Slobodan Milošević and his Greater Serbian politics brought the Serbs. From surfing the waves of the “yogurt revolution” adrenaline to today’s marking time in a traumatized country that an entire generation of young people has left. They know that there is neither bread, nor future, nor freedom in nativism, nationalism and hatred. It is human nature that we find it hard to learn from other people’s mistakes. Some of you probably believe you will succeed because you know how to hate better, more cleverly and more effectively than many before you. Believe me, the moment will come when you will regret it. Perhaps not for the people you are deliberately causing hardship and injustice, but in the end you will surely regret and lament your own fate. Hatred is like an explosive belt. Once it is detonated, we all inevitably end up as victims, you included. On Earth already, and perhaps in heaven too.