Deconstructing hate

On Thursday, the Kigali Memorial Centre and mourning students were attacked. Police spokesman Marcel Higiro confirmed that armed men threw a grenade at the genocide museum, killing one policeman and injuring another. In a separate incident, a car was driven at speed through a commemoration procession, killing one person. As the majority of Rwandans commemorated the 1994 Genocide, others were embroiled in vicious acts of hate. Someone once said that hatred is a sentiment that leads to the extinction of values. How do individuals become bogged down in feelings so deep and negative that reality itself is distorted? Hatred is dislike and antipathy inflamed to a high degree and inspired by beliefs which stimulate a set of other emotions in the hater, chief among them fear, ignorance, jealousy, anger and disgust. What is interesting is that all these emotions, especially the first three, are about the hater; thus hating says more about haters than what they hate. Hatred is a crude emotion which turns fears and anxieties outward to fix them on something else. There are two fundamental truths about hate. Firstly, it is easier to hate a label, i.e. a group as opposed to an individual. It is almost impossible to hate an individually known human being. And secondly, it is easier to hate that group as a member of another, opposing group. Hatred is a natural emotion for the mass mind. How then to overcome it? “This act of terrorism was intended to frighten people away from coming to the Kigali Memorial Centre, but has had the opposite effect,” said James Smith, head of the Aegis Trust which runs the museum. More than 1,000 Genocide survivors visited the centre on Friday paying their respects. Hatred is a weakness that requires strength to overcome. Hate is a blanket impulse, a shapeless hysteria. To conquer it, people must think and act as individuals and view others as individuals – the very acts that foster love. Ends