Hate

Summary

Hate preachers are not only rife among religious fundamentalists. They are also found in the extremes at both ends of the political spectrum. In social media, waves of outrage and hate speech targeting politicians and journalists are the order of the day. Women are most severely affected. Friedrich Ebert, the first Social Democratic President of the Weimar Republic, was already receiving hate mail in the 1920s. The author Bertolt Brecht once wrote that hate distorted a person’s features. He was referring to hate towards the National Socialists, who forced him and many others to emigrate. In Brecht’s view, this hate was understandable, but it made its victims resemble their hate-filled persecutors all too closely. This chapter shows that hatred as a political instrument has always reared its ugly head when people make radical distinctions between friend and foe and attempt to destroy their enemies by force. Democratic societies, in contrast, have made hatred a punishable offence. After 1945, the lesson has finally been learnt, with exceptions: in democracies, people argue, persistently and vehemently, polemically and pointedly. But they do not hate.