Deadly spiral of human hatred
The tragedy of Lebanon's civil war lays bare how dehumanization and fear can turn human beings into monsters.
October 13, 1990, marked the official end of the Lebanese Civil War. But our subject today is neither politics nor war. The story that follows is simply an illustration of how easily a person consumed by hatred can become a devil.
We will trace the very mechanism of that transformation, step by step.
The prosperous Switzerland of the Middle East
Lebanon in the late 1960s. The country was still known as the "Switzerland of the Middle East" for its economic prosperity. A wealthy nation, happy people: everyone worked, lived in peace, made plans for the future. Children laughed, adults ran their businesses. Life was good.
At the heart of Lebanon stood a strong Maronite Christian community. Its members had lived there for centuries. Lebanon had become their only refuge in a Middle East long dominated by the Muslim world. The 1943 constitutional arrangement safeguarded Christian rights, reserving key government positions exclusively for them.
But things eventually began to change. The Palestine Liberation Organization arrived in Lebanon after being expelled from Jordan in 1970. Christians were terrified of their country becoming Islamized, of losing their homeland, of being demographically overwhelmed. They saw the Palestinians as a threat to their lives and security.
Lebanon also had its own longstanding Muslim population. Naturally, Lebanese Muslims felt somewhat aggrieved because they lacked the right to participate fully in governing the country. But the situation was not yet critical. Christians and Muslims lived together in peace and harmony, and that was what mattered most.
Yet the Palestinian refugees who had arrived in Lebanon felt equally insecure. They feared that the Lebanese army and Christian militias – of which there were several – would try to drive them out of the country. In reality, there was no reason for such fears. Nevertheless, that was how they perceived the situation.
Perhaps this was precisely the moment when the two camps should have sat down together, talked through their fears, eased tensions, found ways to guarantee everyone's safety, and reassured one another.
But events took a very different turn.
The first sparks of the coming bloodbath
- Step One. On April 3, 1975, an assassination attempt was made on the leader of a Christian party against the leader of a Christian political party. Christian militia forces then opened fire on a bus carrying Palestinians. Let us state the confessions plainly from the outset: Christians shot up a bus full of Muslims. Twenty-seven people died. Who was behind the assassination attempt, and why? No one knew. Did the Muslims who died have anything to do with it? No one knew that either. But what happened had happened.
- Step Two. A few months later, the bodies of four murdered Christians were found in one of the city's districts. They were young men. And as ill luck would have it, among them was the son of one of the chief commanders of the Christian militia. Once again, suspicion fell on Muslims.
- Step Three. Overwhelmed by grief, the commander orders key intersections in Beirut blocked off. At the time, Lebanese identity cards were required to state their holders' religious affiliation. At the checkpoints, anyone whose ID listed "Muslim" under religion was dragged from their vehicle and shot at point-blank range. Within a matter of hours, more than 200 people were dead.
The relentless machinery of bloody vengeance
- Step Four. Things only got worse. The militia surrounded the poorest district of Beirut, where Muslim refugees lived, and began a "cleansing" operation. Women and children were herded into buildings, which were then set on fire. The wounded were finished off in the streets. The district was razed to the ground with heavy machinery and burned. The victims of the massacre numbered as many as 1,500. Photographs of Christian militiamen celebrating their victory and playing musical instruments against a backdrop of smoking ruins and corpses went around the world.
- Step Five. Two days later, on January 20, 1976, Muslims began an assault on one of the Christian towns in the suburbs of Beirut. Men were lined up against the walls of their own homes and shot before the eyes of their families. Women were subjected to gang rape and torture. Children were killed with shots to the back of the head. Historical chronicles have recorded acts of inhuman cruelty; thousands of people perished.
- Step Six. In retaliation, the Christians surrounded a large city with a Muslim population. Inside the city, besides the militants, were thousands of civilians: the elderly, women, and children. Over the weeks of the siege, the city ran out of water, food, and medicine. People drank water from radiators and sewage ditches, and died of exhaustion and constant artillery shelling. Surgeons in makeshift underground hospitals amputated limbs without anesthesia. After the siege, the Christians broke into the city, unleashing a horrific massacre. Men were lined up in rows along the walls and shot with machine guns. Women and the elderly were burned alive in basement shelters. The camp buildings, together with the wounded Muslims inside them, were crushed by heavy bulldozers.
And so the next moves follow, back and forth, like pieces on a chessboard. We will not recount them all. The pattern is already painfully clear.
How the enemy is stripped of their humanity
How did it all end?
The war in Lebanon lasted 15 years, from 1975 to 1990, and neither side emerged victorious. It ended in exhaustion, poverty, economic devastation, the deaths of tens of thousands of people, and a compromise forced upon all sides. A country that had once been the financial center of the region lay in ruins, its economy destroyed. There were no trials for the war criminals.
And yet they could have lived together in peace.
Instead, every new turn in the spiral of hatred and mutual slaughter only deepened the fury.
Christians rejoiced at the deaths of Muslims. Muslims, in turn, rejoiced at the deaths of Christians. Everyone wanted revenge.
Every fresh killing fueled the hatred still further. Innocent people died on both sides – children, the elderly, people who had done nothing wrong. But the machinery of vengeance had become unstoppable.
Why could neither side bring itself to stop? Why did every new act of violence lead to even greater cruelty?
The answer lies in the way the media on both sides cultivated an image of the enemy as absolute evil.
The enemy was dehumanized. There were no human beings on the other side. Only vicious, savage beasts wearing human faces. They were evil incarnate, and they had to be exterminated without the slightest mercy.
Once an enemy has been stripped of every human quality, disabling the safeguards of conscience becomes frighteningly easy.
The principle of collective guilt was relentlessly preached. Whenever one of "us" was killed, "all of them" were to blame.
The murder of an innocent Muslim at the port became an "appropriate" response to the murder of Christians on the road. The killing of Muslim children in one town became "justified" revenge for the killing of Christian children in another. "This is for our children!"
Children are sacred, after all. And surely, to avenge their deaths, it is perfectly acceptable to kill other children. Isn't that right?
And finally, every attempt to seek compromise or enter negotiations was crushed. Reasonable politicians became hostages to radicals. Any attempt at reconciliation was branded a betrayal of the dead.
To make peace would mean admitting that those who had died had died in vain.
The blood already spilled demanded still more blood, as though each new sacrifice could somehow justify the last.
The tragic lessons of blind hatred
This is what happens whenever a society allows fear and dehumanization to triumph over reason and compassion.
People begin to turn into beasts.
And unless that descent into savagery is stopped, neither side will ultimately gain anything.
Everyone will lose.
All that will remain are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of graves – graves of people who could have lived.
These are the lessons history offers us.
But as the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once observed, "The only lesson we can learn from history is that people learn nothing from history."
And sadly, the history unfolding before our eyes today leaves little doubt that he was right.
