"WAR IS A DRUG" is the opening line of "Hurt Locker", the winner of best motion picture at the 2010 Academy Awards. These words are a quote from Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist of the New York Times. His article entitled "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" appeared in Amnesty International's NOW magazine in 2002.
Like war, hate is also a drug. It gives some lives meaning and purpose. It makes things simple; everything is black and white and nothing is ambiguous in between.
Hate comes from, or is closely associated with, anger; hate gives its bearer a high, and an interminable yearning for more. Hate feeds on itself; it grows on the hater and embraces and engulfs the person into total surrender, so that a person becomes one with it. Hate is like adrenaline: Once it starts flowing, it is hard to stop. It keeps the misanthropes going, and they do not want it to stop. Hate makes the hater feel invincible, vindicated, justified.
And hate begets hate. Hate hardly ceases to enlarge itself. Hate is contagious.
A culture of hate and the mentality of war seems to have been proliferating in Thai society in recent years. Once nebulous, it is now precise, foolhardy and ferocious.
It used to be a joke that if there were three Thais in a room, there will be three-way disagreement. But the joke was a good-natured and benign tease. It was meant to highlight our independent mindedness, just like the saying in the US, "I do not belong to any political party, I am a Democrat."
Now, hate is all around and is strengthening its grip on us. For whatever cause or reason from which it is derived, hate has found a larger and more comfortable place in our hearts.
Vile hate speeches that flood our airwaves and the Internet have been allowed to spread unabated. In the streets, at dinner tables, in living rooms, everywhere including monasteries and temples, hate rears its ugly head. It has become omnipresent. In such a social narrative, reason becomes a casualty.
Rationality and civilised common sense are valued less and less in our society nowadays; belief systems - even the shakiest ones - count more and more. Reason-based argument is ineffective against the belief systems that seem to be hard-wired into people's heads. And absence of reason is one form of hell. Or it will pave the way to hell.
We have all heard of the white supremacist hate group, the Ku Klux Klan, who burn and destroy, maim and kill innocent victims, purely on the basis of the colour of their skin. To them, blacks and other non-Caucasians have no place in the world, and they want to see that it becomes so. Their deeds represent hate in its raw and appalling face.
In a similar fashion, there is a group that calls itself the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black supremacist religion. The group's headquarters is said to be decorated with a mural depicting sword-bearing blacks standing over whites. The Black Hebrew Israelites believe that all white people are the devil and that when Jesus returns, they will rule over mankind alongside him.
In Ireland, for centuries, Irish brothers and sisters - the same race, the same people - tried to obliterate one another for one reason: They had different religious beliefs. Catholicism versus Protestantism. This civil war, in its longevity, was more brutal than the country's war of independence. Massacres and atrocities were carried out by both sides, sanctioned by their respective governments and state powers.
During the Cultural Revolution in China, the country's social and historic fabric was turned upside-down. Millions of lives were lost, precious heritage accumulated over centuries of civilisation was shattered overnight. All because of the brute selfishness of a handful of people in the seats of power, who would stop at nothing to preserve their own maximum political hand.
Atrocious acts of indiscriminate killing took place closer to home, to our immediate east. During the reign of terror brought about by the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979, Cambodians killed more than one million of their own people for no other reason than they might get in the way of the radical social engineering that the Khmer Rouge had in mind for the country. Cadres were indoctrinated. Nothing and no one was spared. Even the Preah Vihear temple - a beloved symbol of Khmer heritage and a source of national pride - was relentlessly attacked by Khmer Rouge cannon fire. The national museum was ransacked and left abandoned. Bats and rodents were the only inhabitants of the place for years. When the museum reopened with national treasures that the brave curator had managed to smuggle away from the brutal and destructive hand of the Khmer Rouge, visitors could still smell decay and death.
Hate turns haters blind, and it numbs the mind. As such, it can bring about total chaos and destruction that can never be justified. And hate is displayed proudly and openly in our society now.
It's time we started to think about how to stop hate from making more inroads into our national psyche. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, the American civil rights icon, contended rightfully that hate induced more hate, into a descending spiral, and the end result is destruction - for everybody. "Along the way of life, someone must have enough sense and morality to cut off the chain of hate."
Do we believe we can collectively cut off such a chain?
Not only that, we must believe, we must act on it. It should have been done many suns and many moons ago.
