More recently in Rwanda, the MDR Parmehutu were the revolutionary youth brigade of the far right political party. The Parmehutu were hoodlums picked up from the streets of Kigali and trained to commit violence and murder. Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, and the Parmehutu are only a few of the paramilitary groups that have achieved infamy for their violence and hatred. There are many others.
Once hatred is galvanized in paramilitary groups who have been trained to commit violence, killing is more than a random occurrence or the result of chaotic skirmishes at street protests or at rallies. The slaughter of innocent men, women and children—genocide—becomes a very real possibility.
When it comes to hatred, I ask myself: Why am I trying to understand the incomprehensible? I try to understand hatred because Donna Donato was right.
I do think too much. I often rely on other writers to teach me what I do not know or to unearth the truths that might be buried deep inside of me. I read “The Barefoot Woman and Cockroaches by French Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga. Ms. Mukasonga lost thirty-seven members of her immediate family to the genocide in 1994. Every passage is a powerful meditation to ponder and reflect, revealing the most raw of human connections. She describes the death of her youngest sister, Jeanne. Eight months pregnant, the Parmehutu sliced Jeanne open with a machete, tore out her baby and used the dead infant to club her head.
La Storia by famed Italian author Elsa Morante is the slow death of Ida Ramundo, a young woman of Rome, who is partly Jewish and struggling for her life in Mussolini’s Italy. Her father’s non-Jewish bloodline gives her the Italian ethnic cloak to hide from being herded from the Roman Ghetto into the Auschwitz train from the Tiburtina Station and into the throes of the death camp.
Morante knew that all political ideologies that incite hatred are ruses used by men who want power and will ruthlessly destroy anyone or anything that stands in their way of getting it. Whether it be fascism, communism, anarchism, or even in the 21st Century what we have come to know as trumpism, all of these ideologies are weaponized by corrupt men who are intent on taking control by subjugating the masses with the cruel opium of their messianic and evil notions about humanity. In the end, it is always men of power, greed and corruption who rise to the top on the backs of the working-class people who mistakenly thought they were being saved.
Every time I see Donna Donato’s posts on Facebook, my blood boils, but I don’t unfriend her. Seeing Donna from a distance in the rear view mirror makes me understand something about myself. It’s like seeing a car wreck on the Freeway and slowing down to see if anyone needs help. I am endlessly fascinated, and simultaneously repulsed by haters—people who hate entire categories of others for no other reason than their race, ethnicity, gender or creed, et al.
MEMES Posted by Donna Donato on FACEBOOK