Roger Cohen - An Affirming Flame: Meditations on Life and Politics

To underestimate hatred is easy. It was comforting to think that the twentieth century, with its estimated eighty-five million dead in two world wars, its killing fields, its Nazi Holocaust, its Soviet Gulag, its Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, its Hiroshima, its mass transfers of populations, its slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, its endless lessons in the inhumanity of tyrants, would be sufficient to deter or even eradicate an urge so destructive.

President Bill Clinton suggested in 1997 that great-power territorial politics were over. A new era had dawned, he said, in which enlightened self-interest, as well as shared values, will compel countries to define their greatness in more constructive ways.

It was not to be. In her poem Hatred, Wisawa Szymborska, the Nobel Prizewinning Polish poet, writes of How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles. / How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down. Hatred. / Its face twisted in a grimace / of erotic ecstasy. How listless, how wan, are other feelings!

Since when does brotherhood draw crowds? she writes. Has compassion ever finished first?

Hatred Lets face it: / it knows how to make beauty. / The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies. / Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns. People say hatred is blind. No, retorts Szymborska. It has a snipers keen sight / and gazes unflinchingly at the future / as only it can.

Clinton was far from alone in his Panglossian view. To think like this on the eve of the millennium was seductive, but it was to succumb to an illusion. The ghosts of repetition that haunt history do not go quietly. Hatred is an elixir, a potent political bomb, a seductive answer to the unbearable banality of life. It ushers the lone individual into a consoling tribe. It brings to tired faces a rictus of arousal at the sight of the savior. Szymborska was right: the Eros of hatred is potent. It replaces pointlessness with purpose. It is always available to the nationalist demagogue ready to identify scapegoats, promise vengeance, and whip a pliant or algorithmic populace into a baying frenzy. It propagates what the poet Paul Celan called the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.

A year before Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, Kurt Schumacher, a German Social Democrat, noted in a prescient speech to the Reichstag in Berlin that certain politicians make a continuous appeal to the inner swine by ceaselessly mobilizing human stupidity. That inner swine always lurks, smirking, confident of the ultimate depravity of human nature. For decades, Vladimir Putin has nursed a grievance at the breakup of the Soviet empire in 1991. It became devouring, a case of what Friedrich Nietzsche called the whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.

Nationalism is not fascism, but it is an essential component of it. Its perennial essence is a promise to change the present in the name of an illusory past in order to create a future vague in all respects except its glory. That is as true in the United States that elected Donald Trump president as it was in Belgrade when, in the last decade of the twentieth century, a surge of Serbian nationalist frenzy ripped Yugoslavia apart.

As I emerged from covering the Bosnian war in 1995my limbs intact, unlike those of several cherished colleaguesI never thought I might draw some parallel between my own country and the Balkan carnage. But that was in the time before Trump and the turning. That was before Trump brought a European idea pregnant with violencethe mystic pull of blood and soilinto the American political theater.

If I was alive, it was to say something. Otherwise, life was wasted breath. Something about crazed nationalism, how it giddies people with myth, how it affixes the devils horns to once-beloved neighbors, how it stirs the ghosts of blood feuds, how it frees the restive id to rampage, how it births loony ideas like turning Ukrainians into Russians or the East-West crossroads of Sarajevo into an ethnically pure Serbian preserve, how its end point may be a hundred thousand dead in the rubble and the ashes of Bosnia, or a post-apocalyptic scene in Bucha, Ukraine, with dozens of bodies in black plastic bags laid out beneath weeping birches laden with mistletoe. How nationalist fever quashes tolerance, destroys civilization, builds concentration camps, enables dictators, devours freedom, and erects walls to keep out an entire nation of rapists.