Heute Abend bin ich in Volfs Exclusion & Embrace auf eine Stelle gestossen, die ich so aussagekräftig fand, dass ich sie hier nicht unzitiert (und -kommentiert) lassen wollte. Sie klingt wie folgt:
Consider an admittedly extreme example-the war in the former Yugoslavia. (…) “Eruption” seems the right word to describe it. I am referring less to the suddenness by which it broke out than to its insuppressible power. Nobody seemed in control. Granted, the big and strategic moves that started the war and kept it going were all carefully calculated and made in the centers of intellectual, political, and military power.
But apart from all this, there seemed to be an insatiable appetite for brutality among ordinary people. Once the war started and the right conditions were maintained, an uncontrollable chain reaction was under way.9 These were mostly decent people, as decent as most of us tend to be. Many did not, strictly speaking, choose to plunder and burn, rape and torture, or secretly enjoy these. A dormant beast in them was awakened from its uneasy slumber.
And not only in them. The motives of those who set to fight against the brutal aggressors were self-defense and justice. The beast in others, however, enraged the beast in them. The moral barriers holding it in check broke down and it went after revenge.
In resisting evil, they were trapped by evil. In “After the Catastrophe,” written right after World War Two, Carl Gustav Jung wrote, “It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts” (Jung 1964a, 198). Evil engenders evil, and like pyroclastic debris from the mouth of a volcano, it erupts out of aggressor and victim alike.
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Oder, um es mit Kübras Worten zu sagen, deren Blog ich den hiesigen Lesern übrigens sehr empfehlen möchte:
Hass schürt Hass schürt Hass schürt Hass.
Diese Spirale zu unterbrechen (und vor allem: wie das möglich ist), scheint mir eine wichtige Aufgabe des (meines) menschlichen Daseins zu sein. Ich bin gespannt, wie Volf hierzu noch Stellung nimmt und welche Lösungsmöglichkeiten er vorschlägt.
Ich werde in den nächsten Wochen vermehrt auch ausserhalb meiner Lektüre nach Möglichkeiten ausschau halten, mit der genannten Problematik gewinnbringend umzugehen.