The Hell Report

It always starts the same. Someone steps on someoneʼs toes. Claims for territory or raw materials are
heating up human relationships. “For example, an acute shortage of arable land and fresh water seems
to have been a significant factor in several conflicts, including those in Chiapas, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe.
The
For example, an acute shortage ofsame conditions
arable land andappear to water
fresh be developing
seemsintoother
haveareas
beenof scarcity;” says professor
a significant factor inMichael T. Klare,
the author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. “It is all about the resources,” claim
several conflicts, including those
thein Chiapas,of Rwanda,
ideologists and Zimbabwe.
modern Russia. They say that The sameofconditions
protection appear
Russiaʼs natural to beis the most
resources
Humans are social animals. We love to get together and we like to associate with developing in other areas of scarcity.
important part of the “national revival strategy”.
the others. But sleeping lightly in our nature lies the ability to hate other men,
people who are “not from us”. This beast can be awakened by sequences of
banal and seemingly innocent situations which gradually de-humanize The Other. Jokes are innocent, right? But rising number of anecdotes about The Other often
History shows us that such spiral of hate can lead to atrocities beyond signals about tensions between nations, religions or classes. Funny strereotypes
imagination. And the worst news? It can happen anytime. This map shows how. lead softly towards the de-humanisation of groups of people. So, jokes can be the
first warning signal that something is wrong. Still, sometimes jokes may ease the
The 9 level structure of hell on the graph has been inspired by Danteʼs Divine confrontation and do not have to lead any further problems immediately. A typical
Comedy. one: “How do you get 100 jews into a car? Throw a quarter in it.”

It can be funny to read that “Hell is where the lovers are Swiss, the innkeepers are French, the cooks are
English, the mechanics are Italian, and policemen are German...” but ethinc or racial prejudice and
stereotypes can also take much serious form where The Other is seen as “lazy”, “dirty”, “unintelligent”
and so on. It is also common for a human to see the habits of communities of “the other” as weird and
clumsy, this can become an excuse for disrespect and conflicts.

Ideologies that claim your religion, nation or class to be better than the others, are dead
Conflicting interests. Claims for the same dangerous. Why? Because they give an excuse for not thinking with your own head and thus
resource - land, natural resources, property... make you blind. Such arrogant concepts can also produce inspiration for similar counter-
ideologies. For example, Nazism in Germany justified itselt as a counterforce against the
“Bolchevist-Jewish” plot to take over the world. It is also good to be skeptical of “new findings”
about the “great past” of a nation and stories behind any pompous monuments.
Making fun. Jokes and anecdotes about
The Other.
Insulting names are invented or old names get new bad meanings, such
Triggers Stereotyping. Prejudice against the other.
as “negro” for blacks or “žyd” for the Jew in Russia, “tibla” for a Russian
in Estonia etc. With this mechanism, people will be labeled and made
“less human”. Some violence may appear. One of the recent examples
Normally we stay on first three
Ideology. An ideology appears is the deportation of people with Georgian names from Russia in 2007.
levels. It is a bit like an entrance room. The historic extremes of the similar process could be seen in Nazi
It takes events to push us to lower hell. that claims some groups to be superior to others. Germany that required Jews to wear a yellow star and homosexuals a
Events that are highly symbolic. In worst cases pink triangle.
it means unjust death(s). Polarization. Groups will not talk normally
any more. The “other” will be labeled.
Now it is bad. Many have two options left: fight for humanity or flee. The Other is compared to
Some famous triggers in modern history: an animal, non-human, cockroach or a dog, sometimes by the media as was the case
The assassination of the Austrian crown prince Franz in Rwanda. This will mean that human laws do not apply to The Other. In US recently a milder,
Final dehumanization. The Other but similar dehumanization strategy was introduced by bureaucratic terms “enemy combatant”
Ferdinand in 1914 that ignited the World War I, shooting
will be described as non-human. and “terrorist”. Dehumanization strategy works the other way too - use of distinct labels, arm-
down the presidential plane in Rwanda in 1994, sparking bands, tattoos and uniforms will give people the machine-like feeling, so that they do not
the bloodbath of the century and 9/11 in USA. have to bother with personal responsibility any more when they clash with The Other.
Violence. Blood on the streets.
Sometimes a less deadly, but highly symbolic event can lead to Violence against The Other becomes natural for some people, because they no longer have
the descent to the next level as well, like the cartoon depicting moral problem to be agressive. Their neighbours remain indifferent, for the same reason. This
prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper in 2005. It created conside- can also be the point of no return, since once blood is shed, a viscious cycle of revenge starts
rable tensions between the Arabic and European value systems. Some- Deportation. The Others will be that is not stopped easily. It can be the bridge burning point for the violent as well, because
times a trigger can be socially engineered by politicians who see it as a deprived of rights and put away, from now on they can not easily admit that they have made any mistakes, it would destroy
vehicle for gathering easy votes. them morally.

It has even happened that people who have been deported have been told that it is “for their own protection!”
Normally it is possible to crawl back to the previous level of the hell, but “The final as was the case with a Lithuanian intellectual Balys Sruoga under the Nazi occupation. The main idea of this
there are certain points of almost no return. Coming back from there solution” stage is to put the victims “conveniently away”. The US government after the 9/11 terrorist attacks has
may be only possible in the course of many human generations. reportedly been using similar tactics within CIA “secret prisons”.

On the picture: Franz Ferdinand Millions have died. “...whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared
for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever
have been” (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil).
Distant Signals, 2008