HOW EVIL WORKS: THE MYSTERIOUS POWER OF HATE
By David Kupelian

WorldNetDaily
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March 1 2010

David Kupelian explains how innocent children become murderers
and rapists

Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from WND Managing Editor
David Kupelian’s latest book, "HOW EVIL WORKS: Understanding and
Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America."

Growing up in a family of genocide survivors as I did, I got to hear
stories – lots of stories – about just how depraved human beings
can get.

Although my father and grandmother passed down these often-vivid
recollections to us in the comfort of a warm suburban family room,
worlds apart from the nightmares of their youth, their painful
psychological scars remained ever fresh. And to a young boy like me,
those stories – of cruel soldiers and bandits hell-bent on mayhem,
as well as their intended victims’ resourcefulness and sometimes even
heroism – provided a glimpse into a scary, alien dimension of evil.

But rather than tell any more family stories here – and most Armenian
families have them, just as Jewish Holocaust survivors and their kin
have their stories – I’ll quote the U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the
time, Henry Morgenthau, whose published memoirs exposed the horrors
he witnessed firsthand during the 20th century’s first genocide.

Incredibly, he described how Turkish officials bragged to him about
their nightly meetings where they would enthusiastically share the
latest torture techniques to use on the Armenians:

Each new method of inflicting pain was hailed as a splendid discovery,
and the regular attendants were constantly ransacking their brains
in the effort to devise some new torment. He told me that they even
delved into the records of the Spanish Inquisition and other historic
institutions of torture and adopted all the suggestions found there …

I’ll spare you the details, except to say that Morgenthau, father of
FDR’s treasury secretary of the same name, summed up the "sadistic
orgies" of the Armenian genocide by declaring: "Whatever crimes the
most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever
refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination
can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I
am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no
such horrible episode as this."

Unfortunately, more such "horrible episodes" followed apace throughout
the 20th century. In the 1930s, Stalin ordered his military to
confiscate all of Ukraine’s food and then sealed her borders to prevent
any outside sustenance from getting in, thereby intentionally starving
7 million men, women and children to death. This was followed soon by
Japan’s demonic "rape of Nanking," during which 300,000 Chinese were
butchered in their nation’s capital, including up to 80,000 women and
little girls gang-raped by Japanese soldiers and then stabbed to death
with bayonets. The Nazi Holocaust in the ’30s and ’40s, of course,
tops most people’s list of genocidal horrors, with its death-camp
crematoria, extermination of 6 million Jews and unspeakable "medical
experiments." For sheer numbers of dead – tens of millions during the
’60s and ’70s – China’s Mao Ze-Dong has been called history’s worst
mass murderer. Pol Pot’s maniacal communist purge of Cambodia in the
late 1970s led to the deaths of 2 million of his own people, while
Rwanda’s tribal genocide in the 1990s resulted in the club-and-machete
massacring of 800,000. Today’s ongoing Sudanese genocide, backed by the
Islamist government in Khartoum, has resulted in at least 400,000 dead.

We frequently ask ourselves how human beings can sink to this level
of cruelty. There’s no precedent for it among even the most fearsome
predators in the animal kingdom. What, then, makes us capable of such
extreme evil?

Genocidal madness can’t be blamed on a particular philosophy or
religion. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were atheistic communists. Imperial
Japan and Nazi Germany were in the grip of quasi-religious personality
cults that deified their leaders. And today’s genocide in Sudan, like
the Turkish military which tortured Armenians for sport a century
earlier, is heavily motivated by Islamic jihadist fervor.

So what turns people into monsters? Since they obviously didn’t
start out that way, let’s rewind back to the beginning of the story
and see what causes an innocent child to morph into an instrument of
great evil.

Children’s songs that celebrate murder

There’s nothing more beautiful than a young child. Nothing. The
brightness of spirit, the spontaneity, the natural intelligence – which
Einstein called "the holy curiosity of inquiry" – are breathtaking.

What, then, possesses a smart, handsome young 5- or 6-year-old boy to
go on Palestinian television and sing, "When I wander into Jerusalem,
I will become a suicide bomber"? Or a group of children, both boys
and girls, to sing together, "How pleasant is the smell of martyrs,
how pleasant the smell of land, the land enriched by the blood,
the blood pouring out of a fresh body."

What? How does the horror and stench of death magically transform
into the "pleasant smell" of life and glory for these kids? What
happens to them in their earliest, most vulnerable years to induce
some to later strap on explosive belts and vaporize themselves while
murdering dozens of unsuspecting innocents?

Why, growing up in a "normal home" with a mom, dad, siblings, school
and friends, does a young man suddenly feel compelled to stab his
own sister to death – knifing her not just once or twice, but over
and over again in a murderous frenzy – just because somebody said
she was walking down the street with a male who wasn’t a relative?

Clearly, as these young people’s indoctrination progresses from
singing songs about atrocities to actually committing them, we’re
witnessing not only a toxic philosophy at work, but also the magic
ingredient that makes that philosophy come to life – namely, hatred.

Underneath all the smiles, underneath the "devout" faith, underneath
whatever persona is masking the overwhelming fear, confusion, and
jihadist programming that have been cultivated in them since birth,
lies the nuclear reactor core of their being – a smoldering fireball
of suppressed rage.

Intense hatred has a way of morphing inexorably into full-blown,
epic madness. Indeed, hate is like spiritual plutonium, possessing
bizarre, explosive and transformative qualities of which we are
largely unaware. It is the means by which evil itself blooms on this
earth, especially when rage is focused and magnified by a malignant
worldview. If you think this is overstated, just contemplate with me
the following news items:

Popular Middle East television programming for children that features
jihadist clones of Mickey Mouse, Sesame Street characters and other
kids’ favorites, in which the lovable, cuddly stars teach children
vicious lies and the virtues of mass murder.

Rape victims being flogged and imprisoned, as when a Saudi court in
early 2009 sentenced a 23-year-old female who had been gang-raped by
five men to 100 lashes and a year in jail. Her crime? Accepting a lift
from a man who drove her against her will to his house and took turns,
with four of his friends, raping her.

An epidemic of "honor killings" – at least 5,000 per year according
to the U.N., but many more that go unreported – in which fathers,
brothers or mothers brutally murder their own daughter/sister merely
for being seen in public with a male or similar "offense." For example,
two Jordanian brothers used axes to murder their two sisters, aged 20
and 27, after the older sister left home to marry a man without her
family’s permission and the younger one ran away to join her. After
someone tipped off the brothers as to their sisters’ whereabouts, the
men went into their home with axes and hacked them to death. "It was
a brutal scene," one government official told the Jordan Times. "One
victim’s head was nearly cut clean off."

Maniacal, zombie-like "religious police," such as those in Saudi
Arabia who on March 11, 2002, allowed 15 young girls to die horrible
deaths when a fire broke out in their school in Mecca. The religious
police, or Mutaween, literally blocked firefighters from saving the
girls because they weren’t dressed in the proper Islamic way for
girls and women to be seen outdoors. With helpless firemen watching,
the religious police literally beat the girls – those who were not
wearing their headscarves or abayas – back into the inferno.

What we’re looking at here is criminally insane behavior – no less
insane or criminal than that exhibited by severely deranged people
we routinely lock up in maximum-security psychiatric hospitals or
prisons in the United States.

Of course, by now we’ve all heard more than we care to know about
radical jihad culture, with its pathological blame of Jews for
everything, its condemnation of Western Civilization and its
"die-while-killing-infidels-and-Allah-wil l-give-you-virgins"
recruitment pitch. But distilling this "martyrdom" obsession down to
its essence, common sense tells us no one murders innocent people
or forces schoolgirls back into a burning building unless they’re
insanely angry. So, where exactly does this hate come from?

Let’s understand, even a violent philosophy like that of radical
Islam isn’t necessarily sufficient, by itself, to create a rage-fueled
jihadist. No, you become full of hate and driven to violate others only
when someone else first violates you – when a parent, older sibling,
teacher, cleric or other authority figure intimidates, frightens,
degrades, bullies, humiliates or perhaps sexually abuses you. And
such cruelty and degradation are, unfortunately, endemic in much
of the Islamic world. Its rigid, authoritarian religious system,
the near-slave status and abuse of women, the suffocating sexual
repression, the widespread incidence of what can only be called the
world’s most flagrant child abuse (where even toddlers are groomed for
future "martyrdom operations"), and the pervasive fear of flogging,
amputation or stoning if one runs afoul of the ultra-strict Sharia
legal code – all this creates an environment reeking of quiet terror.

No wonder its victims take to terrorism so readily.

So, once these parents and other authorities, full of the madness
and confusion injected into them during their own youth, succeed in
passing it on to the next generation of youngsters by intimidating
and indoctrinating them, it’s child’s play to focus the newly created
jihadists’ zeal onto the appropriate "hate object" – Jews, Americans,
"infidels" and so on.

This dynamic is not unique to radical Islam. In fact, believe it or
not, it’s the hidden fabric of all too much of our own lives – albeit
usually in a far less extreme form. In a perverse mirror reflection
of the Golden Rule, we all tend compulsively to do unto others what
was done unto us. We effortlessly internalize the cruelty of others.

This is because, aside from the obvious effects being angry and upset
have on us – making us emotional, clouding our judgment and so on –
it also throws us into "program mode." That’s right: When we get upset
at the intimidating words or actions of other people, their cruelty
"infects" us in a very real way. So, for instance, if our parents
angrily yelled at us all the time when we were children, we would
tend to angrily yell at those smaller and weaker than us. A little
bit of the bully gets inside of us, and we then bully others, in one
form or another. We’ve all seen this, and we know that our prisons are
full of molesters and abusers who were molested and abused as children.

Thus, maniacal imams and jihadist teachers find it relatively easy
convert innocent children into suicide bombers. The first step is to
indoctrinate them from birth with a poisonous belief system demonizing
"infidels," a process explained by Israeli counter-terrorism expert
Itamar Marcus in "The Genocide Mechanism":

Common to the framing of all genocide is a very specific kind of
demonization. In Rwanda, the Hutus taught that the Tutsis were
cockroaches and snakes. Tutsi women were portrayed as cunning
seductresses who used beauty and sexual power to conquer the Hutus. …

Radio Rwanda repeatedly broadcast a warning that Hutus were about
to be attacked by Tutsis, to convince the Hutus that they needed to
attack first to protect themselves.

This demonization included two specific components. First, the victims
had to be perceived as a clear and present threat, so that the killers
were convinced they were acting in self-defense. Second, the victims
were dehumanized, so that the killers convinced themselves that they
were not destroying real human beings.

Teaching children virtually from birth that Jews are subhuman, evil
oppressors of Muslims – fiends who grind up Arab youngsters to use
as ingredients in their Passover matzoh – is epidemic in the Islamic
world. A typical example: The Saudi satellite television station
Iqraa broadcast an interview with a 3-year-old Egyptian girl named
Basmallah, who answered a question about Jews by declaring: "They
are apes and pigs."

But this little girl is not about to murder anyone. She’s just
repeating statements fed to her by adults for the sake of winning their
love and approval. Dehumanizing indoctrination isn’t quite enough
to launch a genocide. There must also be hate, and lots of it – not
merely to fuel the atrocity machine, but to allow the indoctrination
to fully take root.

In other words, whatever the toxic programming may be – Hutus
demonizing Tutsis as "cockroaches and snakes," Turks accusing
Armenians of being "enemy collaborators," Nazis likening Jews to
"vermin" – for such outrageous and counter-intuitive falsehoods to
be both believed and acted upon, those being indoctrinated must be
kept in a very emotional state.

Recall that Hitler always kept his audiences super-emotional; that’s
how he programmed them and guarded against their naturally coming
back to their senses. He was always stirring up their emotions,
and by so doing, his thoughts became their thoughts, his feelings
became their feelings. It’s brainwashing 101: Cause your intended
victims to become upset, angry, emotionally riled up, and you have
your hands on the control levers of their mind.

Children are so vulnerable, like spiritual sponges, that if they’re
treated with cruelty, if they’re degraded sexually, if they’re
constantly confused and intimidated – and at the same time are
indoctrinated with lies denying their neighbors’ humanity, and also
showered with promises of glory, reward and brotherhood for believing
and acting a certain way – well, it’s not long before you’ve got
yourself a newly minted jihadist, communist, or Nazi.

The preceding is the opening section of Chapter 9 ("The Mysterious
Power of Hate: How Innocent Children Become Murderers and Rapists")
from David Kupelian’s newest book, "HOW EVIL WORKS: Understanding
and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America."

David Kupelian is an award-winning journalist, managing editor of
WorldNetDaily.com, editor of Whistleblower magazine and author of the
best-selling book, "The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists,
and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom." His
newest book is "How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the
Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America."