This morning I discovered that one of my more serious posts [1] had been posted on Thai visa as part of a serious discussion among the readers there about the scandal of elite Thai private school students celebrating Hitler and Nazi Germany, as well as the larger issues of Nazi iconography in Thailand as a whole. Having written this article more than a year ago, with no great fanfare, it was a bit of a surprise to see it attract such interest, but being the sort of person who does not greatly market my own works, sometimes it takes a while for those writings to reach an audience that finds them striking and noteworthy.

At this day and age, the horrors of Nazi Germany should not be a surprise to any well-educated person around the world. It should be noted that they ought not to be viewed in isolation, but as part of a larger view of the barbarization of mankind that has taken place on both the extreme right and the extreme left, as part of the larger genocides for political and ethnic reasons that have gripped the world in the 20th and 21st centuries, including the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the massacre of Bosniaks by Serbs (and Croats), the massacres of Tutsi and moderate Hutus in Rwanda, as well as the Communist-inspired leftwing genocides in the Ukraine, China, and Cambodia (to name but a few of the most prominent). To be ignorant of these matters as well as their larger significance as pointing to the cost that results from a decline in the Judeo-Christian ethic of mankind being created in the image and likeness of God in these days is an act of willful ignorance.

Such willful ignorance did not begin, though, with the elite Thai private school students whose fashion choices for graduation photos such abominably poor taste. Such ignorance began when the original problem of the Holocaust did. We must not assume, after all, that the hatred of the Jews, of their law, and of their nation, is limited to the Germans, to the Russians responsible for the pogroms of the 19th and 20th centuries, of the Muslims (and others) who to this day still believe the blood libels of the Protocols of Zion, nor must we assume that it is only the Jews who are subject to such hatred in this world. Rather, the evils of such hatred are something that can infect every heart. Some hearts will be more attuned to hatred based on personal wrongs and slights, others to ideological or religious differences, and still others to questions of ethnicity. Whatever hatred leads us to justify our hostile acts is an evil that must be rooted out unless we wish to be transformed by that hatred into the sort of monster that Hitler was.

Whatever leads us to neglect the image and likeness of God in someone else is an act of willful ignorance that will carry with it serious consequences for ourselves and others. I do not think that anyone is necessarily born to hate, but hatred does come to us far more easily than love, sometimes. As human beings we are all quick to make wide and general conclusions from our own limited and particular experiences, and the results of that lead us to hate far too easily. Every day I look at my friends and acquaintances and see the evidence of hatred on religious or political or ethnic grounds, to say nothing of personal grudges and vendettas. It is an easy matter for us to condemn those aspects of his hatred that are pointed at us, and a far more difficult matter to see ourselves as (potentially) part of the problem, given how quickly and readily we justify ourselves. Still, a bit more self-reflection would go a long way to reduce and ameliorate, if it cannot eliminate, the problems of hatred in our world, at least insofar as our own influence spreads.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/springtime-for-neo-nazis-in-thailand/