ARTSPEAK: DEEP HATE

American author Peter Zeihan suggests in his book, The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World, that the world isn’t falling apart — it’s being pushed apart.
Many across the world are heroically trying to hold fast to the unifying power of humanity, but it seems a daunting task. Israel continues to follow its intent to empty Palestinian land of every Palestinian, regardless of the human cost. Britain is reeling with white rage.
In Europe, the thin veneer of accommodating a world of cultural, lingual, religious and racial diversity is splintering, releasing years of pent-up hate. South African-British economist Ian Goldin, in his book Divided Nations, suggests that the very success of globalisation is proving to be its downfall. Seeing it as loss of autonomy, he says, citizens become xenophobic, protectionist and nationalist.
Some suggest the new wave of Islamophobic rhetoric is a pushback to the softening attitudes to Islam in the wake of the Palestinian genocide. Germany is dismantling mosques with alleged links to Iran. Al Jazeera has traced the sources on X that spread misinformation that turned the Southport tragedy into unbridled violence against Muslims. The Hindutva ideology of India is rapidly replacing its secular identity.
Once released, hate is difficult to control. The French Revolution unleashed a ‘Reign of Terror’ with thousands of public beheadings, and cheering crowds walking with decapitated heads stuck on spears. Child soldiers in Rwanda were trained to kill a thousand in 20 minutes with machetes. The targeting of children by snipers and the indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps in Palestine can only be possible when motivated by a deep-seated hate.
Hate is cultivated by the systematic dehumanising of the perceived enemy. This is greatly assisted by derogatory slurs, portrayals in popular cinema and negative stereotyping. The media has greatly colluded in swaying public opinion, with sensational phrases that become catchphrases for the public. Edward Said suggested that, if knowledge is power, those who control the modern Western media are most powerful because they are able to determine what people like or dislike.
In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the state holds “Hate Week”, designed to express uncontrollable rage towards an enemy state, to redirect their dissatisfaction away from the ruling Party itself. People in a war-driven society are manipulated towards paranoia by cultivating fear that breeds hatred — the perfect emotion to effectively influence people.
Mike Lofgren, a congressional staffer in the US, wrote an essay called ‘Anatomy of the Deep State’ in 2011. By 2018, it had become a buzzword. The Deep State keeps people, whom they regard as incapable of understanding what they do, occupied with other matters. Its function is to make certain that policies remain the same, no matter how the government changes.
The three pillars of the Deep State
are the international banking hegemony, the intelligence community and the military-industrial complex. Henry Kissinger famously said, “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell speech, first used the term military-industrial complex as essential to the security of US interests. Arms sales are a large part of US exports, with the country contributing to 40 percent of the global arms trade. The US also houses four of the five largest private arms companies in the world, whose interest is promoting warfare globally. The Deep State can be said to rely on deep hate.
However, as people-to-people com­m­­­­uni­cation increases with social media, it bypasses the state-managed dissemination of information. Those calling for peace outnumber the hatemongers. The Gaza Global Day of Action held on January 13 this year saw hundreds of thousands in cities across the world raise their voices for peace.
Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist.
She may be reached at
[email protected]
Published in Dawn, EOS, August 18th, 2024