Laughing Ourselves To Death

There are some people who are simply invested in fomenting hatred against others. It is not hard to imagine they are anything but malevolently psychotic in temperament as evidenced by the ferocity of their vile imprecations against those whom they have identified as their hate objects.

Not surprisingly, given the history of Jews and their place in society from time immemorial, it is most often that group of people who have been singled out as different, invested with unspeakable traits that represent the target of racists.

It is more than likely that psychopaths who spend their lives destroying what others have built, who present as the very social dregs of abysmal human behaviour are simply fulfilling their purpose as human beings bereft from birth of normal human emotions leading to empathy and compassion for others.

Society is rife with sociopaths and psychopaths whose inability to construct emotional attachments to other people is legendary. These are people for whom normalcy in human relations is utterly foreign. Such individuals burn with an entirely different kind of passion than those whose genetic endowments have not short-changed them in the balance of emotions.

They are not merely people who have lost faith in humanity. These are people who do not recognize humanity as other than a great amorphous mass of people whose existence represents a nuisance to them personally. People readily disposed of should they become too great an impediment to whatever the desires of the psychopath happen to be.

From this psychically maladaptive cauldron of failed human beings come the haters, the cruel manipulators of humankind, the tyrants and the despots incapable of, and disinterested in caring about the well-being of others. From their distorted imaginations come visions of destruction on a mass scale.

These are the genocidal murderers of innocent populations, the volatile war-mongers who lay waste to civilization. When these individuals are identified for the monsters they are they have already committed their unspeakable crimes.

Some are called to the International Criminal Court to be judged on behalf of humanity, and they laugh derisively at the human construct that would hold them to account for their monstrous behaviours. Most of these monsters consider themselves impervious to human justice and indestructible in their power-hungry appetites.

Most, like Hitler, Stalin and Mao, will become admired footnotes in history that their would-be successors make every effort to emulate. Many, like Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Mussolini, Nicolae Ceausescu, Omar al-Bashir and Osama bin Laden, damage society and eventually justice is seen to be done.

Their legions of admirers enlist in their deadly destructive games in an effort of social upheaval to reflect their chaotic values. There is nothing that society at large is able to do to extirpate their influences, to attempt to halt their progress, to limit the damage they inflict on society.

Now that the technological advances of the 20th Century gave birth to those of the 21st Century and accelerating rapidly to bring us to hitherto-unimagined levels of instant global communication, the messages that they convey and the ill deeds they promulgate appear to proliferate at lightning speed.

Web sites that declare their intention to annihilate great swaths of populations, and teach recruits how they may join in the conflagration abound. Representing in a viral way the genie that leaped out of the bottle that confined it when humankind first learned the skills of manipulating and controlling fire.

The fire that civilization is now learning to live with is that of incendiary hatred for one another. The divisions that separate us through ideology, politics, culture, religion appear to become wider, the gulf more dire between human connection than ever before.

The more readily we are able to communicate, the more incessant and dire the message: to reject and to spurn and to deride and to foster hatreds that will not be remedied by the good will of the hapless majority in fear of the unexpected that has proven to descend with no warning to stir terror in our hearts.

Nasty little viperous charlatans whose inability to adjust to societal norms strut about on the Internet in emulation of al-Qaeda's vile messaging. And the al-Qaeda offshoots take inordinate pride in their growing ability to initiate further contacts, encouraging others to promote terror.

Still there is hope.

A website that claims "Our web site does not advocate terrorism or genocide against any people. All information on this site is for informational purposes only" - when the site itself is totally given over to the hopeful destruction of Jews and the State of Israel, extending those good wishes further to include Western democracies such as Australia, Europe and North America as tools of the Jews - demonstrates that even monsters may possess a droll sense of humour.

And isn't humour both a weapon and a potentially useful emotion to be leashed for agreeable compromise? We may yet end up laughing ourselves to death.