Hate begets hate.
Violence begets violence.
Ignorance begets ignorance.
The greatest consequences happen with the smallest of circumstances.
This is more true than we realise.
Every beginning has an end. And, naturally so, it happens that every end has a beginning.
No conflict starts with outright war. No disruption begins with downright carnage. Bigotry is often the outcome of mild ethnic prejudices left to stew and boil. Apathy is a result of vast indifference left to rob empathy from a clouded mind, distorted of sense.
Masters of puppets 
Much in the same way genocides and mass atrocity crimes against humanity transpire; every instance where it’s a mankind vs. mankind, nation against nation scenario, more oft than not, begins with the sowing of poisoned seeds. For poisoned seeds do surely reap a poisoned harvest. But who stands to gain? Who stands to benefit, profit, and flourish from sowing discord and reaping mass conflict? Who among us basks in the shadows of a world spinning out of control? I did touch upon the key players and figureheads who are responsible for a lot of the issues rampant and evident in the world, in last week’s article.
Those sacrosanct entities and s**t-stirrers who create problems and then watch them exacerbate, and finally jump in as the saviours and problem solvers. We’ve always seen this on a global scale.
The sort of power plays where a nation with significant militarily, nuclear, and financial power requiring, say for example’s sake, a natural resource like oil and then facilitates arms to one country, ruffles feathers and rattles enough cages and sets them against a neighbouring country so that the almighty concocter may provide arms to the other side as well, and thereafter watch both nations ripping each other’s throats open while sweating in bullets and in a sauna of explosions. Meanwhile, certain chief intergovernmental organisations epitomising to preserve peace and security among international conflicting nations do nothing to interfere and remedy the dilemma. Not nothing per se. Let’s just leave it at not all or as much as they can or one may expect of them.
Therefore, with regards to who pushes the buttons and who the puppeteers are…
The guesswork is pretty easy. Standard procedure really. You have the apex predators of the food chain. The hierarchy of benefactors in ivory towers, the grand mages, and masterful ventriloquists who make societies dance on their strings.
The pipers of power who play their tune to satiate every whim, at every turn that makes nations sway to their cacophony.
Yet where can we trace those decaying bread crumbs to, if we follow them all the way to the beginning? Where is the starting point to each of the abovementioned dilemmas?
Where there’s an ill will there’s a weapon
Words.
It may very well all begin with words. The shaping of first impressions, a little systematic berating and underlying, a touch of ridicule, a spot of disregard that is like an untreated wound left to fester.
It’s the bait in order to draw the catch.
Words as we all know have the power to inspire, convince, coerce and heal, to encourage, liberate, satisfy, and build as easily as they can destroy. Words can be the anchor to our beliefs, the sails to our philosophies. Words can bring us bliss and joy as it can cause great insult, injury, and pain.
But of course we all know that words can tame a wild spirit or pacify a broken heart as well, no? Words can bridge the deepest chasms or touch parts of our soul, like nothing else can.
But words are also weaponised. Words can break down morale, and their lack of meaning and interpretation may lead to reopen old wounds or rip open ones anew. Words can topple governments, be used to bastardise the innocent, to polarise, disunite, and divide people, to torment a person’s troubled soul and be the root to reckless abandon, discontent, contempt, and disharmony.
Specifically, words used by the powerful to dehumanise others. Words and hateful speech laced in acerbic rhetoric to subjugate the weak and powerless. Words used to dehumanise minorities, penalise genders, the less fortunate, those not spoken for, the oppressed, the poor, the disenfranchised, disgruntled, derelict, and wayward communities who will never question, never fight back, never refuse to be swallowed whole by manipulative systems structured immaculately to monopolise, exploit, and subjugate others.
Step by step 
Hatred develops a step at a time. Hatred is a result of continuous insult, injury, harm, and violations by one group of people to another. It’s never an overnight thing. Isn’t racism much the same? Small slurs left unchecked. Seemingly harmless ethnic and racial barbs that somehow become part of the wider and larger narrative. Hatred is a result of envy, contempt, mistreatment all leading to resentment. And resentment can lead to more toxic feelings of ingrained prejudices which in turn grow cancerous given time.
Resolving individual resentment can happen with a degree of self-analysis, rumination, and forgiveness. But on a more communal convocational scale? How would decade-long grudges, prejudices, and apathy be ironed out and resolved? Especially when nations fight for land, and ethnic and religious beliefs, to gain resources for political or economic advantage…What then? When conflict has been paramount and incessant for so long that it’s embroiled in the DNA of generations like a hereditary disease.
The problem is that these deeper conflicts have much deeper origins that have now turned malignant. There is too much at stake as well as a cost too hefty to bear to end conflicts through negotiations, treaties, and amnesties.
Dehumanisation
Perhaps it’s a foregone conclusion trying to salvage spilled milk. Once a people are dehumanised and victimised to a point of being treated as something less than human, exploited for it, tortured, and made to suffer for it, forgiveness and amnesty become mere notions of grandeur. A people who have suffered genocide cannot be expected to forgive and forget their instigators and violators without seeking justice, if not some retribution. If no one will be accountable for vile acts of criminal atrocities and furthermore if no one shines a spotlight and calls them out, then it will only lead to one party feeling isolated and disregarded, made to feel insignificant, stained, and soiled, their very essence of humanity defiled and raped, and so no solutions will ever be found.
It takes two hands to clap, but a few careless words to stir unrest.
Yet why should people of specific ethic, racial, national, and religious groups who have been deliberately and systematically destroyed simply let it slide and be dust in the wind, when the wind itself carries the ashes and cries of their unmourned dead?
The war to end all wars
The genocides and mass atrocities throughout our known histories are immense, even if we take the last centuries or so. The scale of mass murders, politicide, crimes against humanity, classicide, and war crimes are prevalent globally. It just happens to be that some are more publicised than others. The Crusades and the Sack of Constantinople, the Asian Holocaust, the Red Terror, the Great Purge, atrocities in the Congo Free State, the Armenian genocide, the Shoah of World War II, the ethnic conflict of Sri Lanka…these have all affected billions of people. International and civil wars have debilitated and destroyed communities and families, disrupting and distorting the social and economic fabric of nations. The effects of long-term psychological, emotional, and physical harm, the damage to resources and capital, the impact to livelihoods and industries, is unfathomable.
Let us not forget the consequences and negative repercussions of crimes and atrocities against humanity; sexual violence, death, injury, malnutrition, disability, psychological paralysis.
But these all start with one group – their agendas and reasons be damned, be it political, religious, economic, social, or otherwise – making another group be seen as less human, with lesser value and purpose.
Maybe the world truly lacks any cognitive structures, adequate high-impact strategies, and holistic psycho-social initiatives implemented to deal with prejudices, conflict, and war. Which is a hoot really, right? For all our advancement and progress, are you telling me that we can’t reform our own education systems to empower future generations with the knowledge to empathise, and be more attuned to the suffering of others, to not repeat the damning disasters of the past? To ascertain that communities are endowed with the means and mechanisms to not just be more cognisant and conscious of their words and deeds, but aware of personal responsibilities and their wider sense of accountability, their duty towards each other?
How will we ever stand up for truth over untruth, reason over blind irrationality, empathy over prejudice, morality over hidden agendas, justice over injustice; if we cannot first be willing to pen a new narrative, while not glamourising, sensationalising, and twisting the narratives of the past? In order to prevent repeating our past mistakes, we need to raise awareness of the terrible and terrifying acts humanity is responsible for. There is no cure for hatred, apathy, bigotry, and atrocious sentiments once the contagion has been unleashed so a portion of the world may exploit and aggrandise themselves from the many conflicts worldwide. Instead, we should not let injuries and insults occur in the first place.
Maybe, just maybe, we need to turn our attention towards pouring our resources, efforts, and collective knowledge towards the covetous and avaricious from further gaining and exploiting others so they could build and expand empires out of blood and bones.
Remember in The Matrix when Neo asked the Oracle what The Merovingian wants, and she replies:
“What do all men with power want? More power.”
Remember a poisoned tree may bear poisoned fruit. Why then keep picking up and cleaning up after the fruits fall and rot? Why keep pruning the branches? Uproot the tree. Cut the roots off.
No poisoned tree. No poisoned fruit.
Which is what we need to do to fight dehumanisation, demoralisation, apathy, criminal atrocities, bigotry, mass murders, needless violence, and hatred.
Cut it at the roots.
Terminate the bloody virus before it spreads and can corrupt and destroy the data and the entire system from within.
Suresh de Silva is the frontman and lyricist of Stigmata, a creative consultant and brand strategist by profession, a self-published author and poet, thespian, animal rescuer, podcaster, and fitness enthusiast.
The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.