Just Peacemaking1: Challenging Hate Rhetoric in Latvia s Media

Just Peacemaking1: Challenging Hate Rhetoric in Latvia’s Media
By Peter Zvagulis

When I first attended Glen Stassen’s lecture at International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague in the autumn of 2005 and heard his three-fold interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount and how his triads are applied to real life situ­ations as steps of just peacemaking, I suddenly felt that I had just been given the key to what could become a Christian peacemaking initiative in Latvia. This new experience gave direction to my doctoral research with Glen, along with Parush Parushev, my supervisor and guide. This article examines some of the findings of the research and is written in memory and deep gratitude to my teacher and dear friend, Glen Stassen.

Latvia is a post-communist country, which has inherited ethnic tensions between the two main ethno-linguis-tic groups: Latvians and Russians from the former USSR. Over the last two decades Latvia’s media space has become increasingly divided along the ethno-linguistic lines, Latvian and Russian. Also unfriendly rhetoric from each targeting the other group has become a tacitly accepted part of media discourse. The media has amplified and increased the group prejudice on both sides. For many years, since Latvia regained its inde­pendence in 1991, it was the print media that played a role in the forma­tive texts of the two hostile ideologies. In the past few years, however, it is the electronic media, both the traditional radio and television, and internet-based news portals, that has taken the lead in provoking in Latvia’s society processes that René Girard calls ‘bad reciprocity.’¹

In my previous career, working as a journalist at Radio Free Europe, I had, with some limited success, experi­mented with reconciliation broadcasting to Latvia in both the Latvian and Russian languages. The difficulties with this secular peacemaking project ranged from a lack of common scale of moral reference to the vagueness of the claimed values and lack of teleological vision. Inspired by Glen Stassen’s understanding of just peace­making I decided to investigate if a Christian peacemaking community could potentially be better equipped for contributing to the reduction of perceptional violence in Latvia’s media.

About ten years ago, I surveyed representatives of the Latvian and Russian communities of Latvia, asking them if they had hate speech in their media. I received very similar answers: “No, we don’t have hate speech, but they do.” This perceptional phenom­enon is not unique to Latvia. As a journalist, I had observed this same attitude in many other cultural con­texts with ethnic tensions, like before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and before the ethnic wars in former Yugoslavia.

One problem with hate speech is that, while it is a reciprocal process, it is invisible to the offending side. The other problem, therefore, is that this perceptional blindness contributes to an increasingly intense (negative and collective) emotional reaction when the other party responds to the initial offense. This creates a vicious cycle of hostile emotional exchange between the members of the two groups. Such a development may be potentially destructive for the society as, according to Gordon Allport’s clas­sical interpretation of the dynamics of group prejudice, emotional attitude is at the core of human motivation for action.² In other words, the hateful rhetoric or hate speech, like the tip of an iceberg, is just the visible part

 of a larger and more complex para­digm that I call ‘perceptional violence’ and that involves discursive, socio-psychological, theological and ethical issues. Hate speech, however, is an important key element in this vicious cycle because it is the main vehicle of hostile group indoctrination. It creates a hostile collective attitude toward the out-group and works coercively on individuals of the in-group, forcing them to comply with the polarized collective vision.

Establishing the diagnostic method­ology for the paradigm of perception­al violence included aggregation of the relevant findings by a number of prominent authors across the fields of the humanities and the social sciences (René Girard, Gordon Allport, Roger Muchielli, Serge Chakotin, Samuel Huntington and others). The curative part of the methodology came from Glen Stassen’s work on just peacemak­ing. The diagnostic part of the meth­odology was tested by cross-cultural triangulation of well-documented case studies where hate rhetoric was an important contributing factor to political developments leading to mass violence. I found commonali­ties in the hate propaganda of Nazi Germany, pre-genocide Rwanda and the countries of former Yugoslavia before the notorious “ethnic cleans­ing” took place.

The works of Glen Stassen and James McClendon helped me to locate these findings in the sphere of Christian ethics and to spot a poten­tial way out of the vicious cycles of mutual recriminations and continuing negative emotional exchanges between the two conflicting groups. When I looked through the new diagnostic lens at the hate rhetoric in Latvia’s media, I came across an unpleasant surprise. The same triangulation paradigm characterized that rhetoric, only at a lower level of intensity. There were some political breaking factors that prevented the inter-ethnic ten­sion from further deterioration, name­ly the collective fear on both sides of potential military retaliation either from Russia or NATO. This displeas­ing discovery left me with a question: is there anything that Christians in Latvia can do to reduce, or perhaps end, this vicious cycle of reciprocal offences and deepening dislike? Long conversations with Glen helped to gradually shape the structure of a potential just peacemaking project suitable for the Latvian context.

When seen from the point of view of the above-mentioned methodology, hate speech is a part of the vicious cycle of perceptional violence. It is based on existing negative stereotypes and a prejudiced attitude toward the out-group. The offensive rhetoric pro­vokes a defensive and hostile emotion­al response from the out-group, which is perceived by the members of the in-group as an unprovoked insult and as confirmation of the stereotypical wickedness and evil intentions of the other group. The hostile communica­tive exchange continues making both groups into what Girard terms “mon­strous doubles,” that is, in any sus­tained symmetric conflict both sides become equally aggressive and uncon­sciously start to imitate each other’s behavior. Emotional contagion within each group produces a uniformly bel­ligerent determination which Girard terms “violent unanimity.”³

The impact of hate speech on each of the hostile groups generates reac­tions mainly on the level of collective unconscious emotions. The seemingly rational element of the rhetoric serves, most of the time, only to justify the negative emotional attitude toward the other group. As part of this hos­tile collective emotion-generating process, hate speech is a very variable and versatile discursive phenomenon. It is one of the most efficient forms of communication, because it oper­ates by the means of symbolic images, both symbolic language and audio­ visual symbols. It is very difficult to restrain hate speech legally because it refers to an implied prejudiced meta-narrative — something that Goebbels would have called the Big Lie, and can lead to other symbolic and euphemic terms as soon as the metanarrative is legally unacceptable.

It may be very difficult to detect even relatively intense hate speech because, first, it is visible to only one of the conflicting sides. Second, the implied metanarrative is fully under­standable only to the members of the in-group. A third-party outsider who is not deeply immersed in the local context may have a hard time noticing any hostility in subtle hate discourse. Thus the detection of linguistically variable ideological constructs requires us to look deeper and identify the unfriendly collective attitudes behind the visible rhetorical elements.

While the whole mechanism of detection is more complex than it is possible to explore in this article, I will name the 13 main criteria or early warning markers that allow expos­ing and proving the presence of hate speech in public discourse as a part of the socially destructive process of per­ceptional violence. These attitudinal markers indicate the presence of hate speech in public discourse:

1.  A polarizing hostile attitude (ideol­ogy at later stages), based on negative historically rooted stereotypes, divid­ing one society into them versus us. The most telling example is the classi­cal Nazi propaganda scheme portray­ing German citizens of Jewish descent as non-German, thus artificially divid­ing German society into an in-group and out-group.
2. The old content of an existing ste­reotype replaced with new content, linked to the current political agen-da.⁴ Before and during the Bosnian war, Serbian extremist propaganda depicted the local Muslim community as the impersonation of the ancient Ottoman invaders of the 14th and 15th centuries, calling them ‘Turks.’⁵
3. Core code words and their deriva­tives that can be used in hate pro­paganda of varied sophistication (at later stages, a structured set of core code words).⁶ In the Rwandan case the Hutu extremist propaganda called Rwandan citizens of Tutsi descent Inyenzi (cockroaches). This allowed the development of a number of euphemic derivatives such as ‘cleaning the house,’ a coded message preceding the mass killings.⁷
4.  Dehumanization is a hate pro­paganda technique, which depicts the out-group as less human than the in-group or not human at all. Psychologically, violence against a non-human victim seems less dis­turbing to perpetrators than violence against equals.⁸
5. Demonization is another hate pro­paganda technique. In its essence this is scapegoating; blaming the dehu­manized group for everything that is wrong in society. It transforms other­ness into a clearly defined image of the archetypal Enemy.⁹
6.  Creation of a siege mentality is a very advanced and intense hate propa­ganda technique. The main symptom for this marker is a sustained presence of conspiracy theories in the main­stream media. Most of the time, this results from organized manipulation of the media discourse by increas­ingly influential extremist circles. The creation of a siege mentality is the next step in the further devel­opment of the already demonized image of enemy. Media production inspired by the conspiracy theories portrays the “enemy” (scapegoat) as extremely powerful, because of his/ her alleged powerful co-conspirators abroad. According to Girard and Chakotin, this propaganda technique allows the portrayal of very small and uninfluential groups as having posses­sion of some mythical power capable of harming the larger society. This also provides an excuse for “witch hunts” for “traitors” and “agents of the enemy,” those moderates and dis­senters in the midst of their own in-group.¹⁰
7. Accusation in mirror is a very aggressive, and often program­matic hate propaganda technique. Mucchielli defines this as “accusing the other of one’s own intentions.”¹¹ He further explains the concept with a generic example. Country A wants to start war against country B. In order to overcome the moral defenses of the population and to mislead the international opinion, A accuses B of planning a war against A. After that, A pretending that this is pre-emptive, attacks B.¹²
8.  Authorization of hate is a subtle hate propaganda technique that targets the collective unconscious (Jung’s term) implicitly, absolving any individual participant of the hate campaign from personal moral responsibility. In the context of the discussed methodology, this means endorsement of the aforementioned hate propaganda activities by people holding political, financial and/or moral and religious authority among the larger population. This group of influential people can, to some extent, also be described by the classical soci­ological term ‘opinion-leaders.’ The authorization of hate may appear as statements supporting the hate agenda or as absence of condemnation by the opinion-leaders of hate-motivated public actions and hate rhetoric in the media.¹³
9. The self-victimization technique of hate propaganda helps to lower the natural psychological and moral defenses of the members of the in-group. Self-victimization, in this typology, means self-labeling as a vic­tim, i.e. pretending to be a victim.¹⁴

10) Conditioning by association is a sophisticated hate propaganda tech­nique that targets the unconscious on both individual and collective levels. This term refers to a cluster of condi­tioning techniques used in combina­tion with the ideological imagery in media and serving the indoctrination process. It includes the organization of mass rallies, legal and physical intimidation and other techniques. This can be illustrated by the classical Nazi indoctrination scheme. Nazis created ‘Positive Christianity,’ a mix of political doctrine with ancient Germanic mythological associations with adapted elements of Christian

 imagery that was aimed at justifying their anti-Semitic ideology. By per­secuting the dissenting Confessing Church members, they coerced the churchgoing masses into acceptance of their doctrine.¹⁵

11) “Rationalization” of the irrational and emotional content is an advanced hate propaganda technique that usu­ally appears at late stages of mass indoctrination when the extremist movement already has seized power or at least become very influential and dominant in society. Coordinated indoctrination creates an ideologi­cally coercive social environment and causes, in the individual psyche, dissociation between the previously accepted moral norms and the new emotional information that has been forcibly loaded into the collective unconsciousness. Since psychologi­cal comfort requires harmonization (also often termed as ‘integration’) of unconscious and conscious parts of the information, this provides an opportunity for hate ideology to “explain” the new emotional load in pseudo-rational terms, which in real­ity are sophisms.¹⁶

12) A glorious vision of the nation’s future as a liberating mission, which by its very logic may only be achieved through violence. It is an indication of a fully formed hate ideology that has acquired violent programmatic attributes. It usually claims to redress past injustices and solve the present problems allegedly caused by the past injustices. Such pseudo-logic is based on a self-centered, vengeful vision of the world. It can be summarized in a short sentence: “The world would be a better place without you!”¹⁷

13) The face of the national hero becomes identical with the face of an extremist leader and his friends. This is the last step of indoctrination, mak­ing the process complete and extreme­ly efficient. The image of the Leader becomes the central symbol, contain­ing in itself all other symbols and the whole meaning of the hate ideology.¹⁸ Chakotin, having personal experience with anti-Nazi propaganda warfare, testifies to the exponential increase

 of the power of indoctrination once the cycle has become complete with a Leader/Hero image.¹⁹

From the viewpoint of Christian ethics, hate speech is a lie, false testimony and an evil deed. Its evil­ness consists both of the bad inten­tions of the agent and the broader negative emotional impact on others. Considering that hate rhetoric is only the visible part of the larger process of perceptional violence, it is a group phenomenon for which there is no adequate scientific language from the viewpoint of the social sciences. Theological terminology is perhaps still the best approximation in this case. Jung views it as the psychological equivalent of the concept of demonic powers subverting the meaning of good and evil in society.²⁰ Girard regards this phenomenon as “false gods of violence” characterized by “reciprocal relationships of idola­try and hate.”²¹ James McClendon describes it by the Pauline language of “powers and principalities.”²² The whole paradigm is too broad and complex, reaching into too many academic fields to be defined in an explanatory way, therefore the best approach seems to be to address it from the point of view of its separate functionalities.

Scientists exploring the biological origins of the group behavior often regard hate rhetoric as a false alarm, abusing the group instinct of self-pres­ervation of species. In other words, by manipulating collective imagination, the public is misled into emotion­ally accepting an image of a fictional enemy. This causes mobilization for a group defense and poses an urgent need for a leader.²³

Communication experts view the organized hate rhetoric as a highly effective, condensed and symbolic way of communication, which operates within its own closed semantic field and therefore cannot be defeated in its own territory.²⁴ From the perspec­tive of social psychology, enhanced by relevant theological insights, we can say that in the phenomenon of hate speech (as part of the paradigm of perceptional violence) we are deal­ing with subversion of the corporate character of society.²⁵ According to Mucchielli, an intense hate propa­ganda campaign is able to create an artificial and imaginary threatening environment. Individuals in such a society are subject to a coercive dou­ble pressure.²⁶ First, it is the pressure of the indoctrination message and imagery that haunts the person every­where and at all times. It becomes a continuously sustained, dominant, outside stimulus overwhelming all other stimuli and creating an unbear­able psychic condition. The other coercive element comes as peer pres­sure from the surrounding society, which has gradually been won over by the hate propaganda. In other words, the corporate character of society has been undermined by the hostile pro­paganda; the meanings of good and evil have exchanged places.²⁷

Individuals cannot successfully chal­lenge such a corporate manifestation of evil. If they disagree, they either have to emigrate, or become despised, lone dissenters or even martyrs. In Allport’s view this happens because of the primacy of collective socio-psychic phenomena over the individual. Each individual becomes a personality only in a particular social environ­ment that Allport terms his or her ‘group of reference.^’28 McClendon and Erich Fromm, each using their own terminology, both agree with this viewpoint.²⁹

Furthermore, Fromm raises an important issue: is there a way of opposing a society that has been overcome by insanity? He views such an opportunity only as an alternative social environment. In other words, to successfully challenge a vicious corporate character of society there has to be a strong supportive virtuous community with shared convictions and moral communal practices.³⁰ According to Girard and McClendon and a number of other authors, emo­tional contagion is a universal dynam­ic that theoretically can work both ways, spreading a negative behavioral model as well a positive one. A vicious model can thrive only in the absence of a better alternative. This is why evil regimes coerce people and suppress all other viewpoints. Thus, following this logic, a positive communal behav­ioral model can produce a spill-over effect that could potentially remedy the viciously subverted character of society.³¹

A Better Way: Just Peacemaking

Christian communities are con-victional communities with shared communal practices by definition. Therefore, they seem to be appropri­ate candidates for a new role-model mission. In Latvia, however, the Christians are mainly unaware of the role that the inter-ethnic hate rhetoric of the media plays in their society. They are even less aware of ways Christians could contribute to cura­tive efforts of inter-group relations and to rescuing the civility of public discourse. The first unawareness could potentially be helped by spreading the knowledge of the cross-disciplinary dynamics and the early warning mark­ers discussed above. For the second one, Glen Stassen’s practices of just peacemaking can serve us as guide.

The community of Christian peacemakers in Latvia has to have a higher motivation than a utilitarian orientation toward short-term prov­able success. Thus, it has to have a motivation that can come only from an eschatological vision, such as that of the in-breaking Kingdom of God here and now.³² Such a vision invites us to participate in God’s plan and makes our efforts meaningful. The teleological essence of this peacemak­ing is a change of heart and a change of corporate character from vicious to virtuous.³³

In the Latvian context, this means voicing prophetic dissent with the evil practice of collective hate and hate rhetoric in the media. This also means refusing to engage in a conflic-tual dialogue between the two hostile discursive parties, offering a new semantic field and viewing the local context from a completely different perspective. In other words, to end

 hate speech one has to first remove the hatred. The hateful emotional group attitude serving as motivation for the continuous, offensive rhetoric must change.

Glen Stassen’s just peacemaking approach emphases non-violence, non-punitive (redemptive) justice, non-judgmental attitudes, a Christo-centric vision and an insistence on the normativity of Sermon on the Mount for Christians’ personal and commu­nal behavior. Stassen’s approach pro­vides the wisdom and sincerity that is necessary for such a mission.³⁴

Just peacemaking practices, when adapted to the Latvian context, result in the following seven peacemaking steps or transforming communal ini­tiatives:

1. The Christian community must challenge the corporate evil prac­tice by publicly saying “no” to hate rhetoric and hateful group attitudes. Christians must refuse to participate in it, exposing and demystifying the processes that it abuses and feeds on. In other words, do not be silent, but be salt and light to the world (Matthew 5:13-14).
2.   Engage in peacemaking proactively. Renounce the current passivity and draw inspiration from James 2:14: “What good is your faith… if you do not show it in your actions?”
3.  Demonstrate what a virtuous community of support means. Stand behind those peacemakers who directly engage in the struggle against hatred and hateful rhetoric. Pray for them openly. Show a loving relation­ship within the Christian community and loving openness to the world. Such relationships will be in sharp contrast to the hostile corporate atti­tudes creating collective frustration in the larger society. With time, this will contribute to a positive spill-over effect.
4. After the destructiveness of hateful discursive practices has been exposed and the presence of hate speech proved on both sides, it is important that the two sides agree to abstain from what the other side perceives as offensive or threatening statements or actions. It means stopping the vicious cycle of retaliation and not respond­ing to evil with evil (Matthew 5:39). This also means practicing a non­judgmental attitude (Matthew 7:1-5).
5. `Talking to the enemy’ is another transforming initiative, which is very important in the current Latvian context. Talking should be about common future goals not about dif­ferences or grievances of the past. The content of such an initiative should help people to realize that they live in one and the same society, not two societies; and that they have a common destiny and only together can they make it constructive, not destructive.
6. Showing genuine concern for people’s needs (James 2:15) is a pow­erful social practice and stands in sharp contrast to the hypocritical, arrogant corporate practices prevalent  in Latvia’s political and economic spheres. In Stassen’s interpretation this would also mean concern for human rights for all, which include not only political rights, but also the right to work and not to go hungry in the midst of plenty.
7.  Work for the Kingdom of God, keeping in mind Stassen’s insistence that peace (just like war) must be waged. Just peace is not an idle situa­tion that can be reached and enjoyed ever after. This would help Christian peacemakers to remain humble and not be carried away by unrealistic ambitions. In the Latvian context, this would mean not absolutizing definitions and rules, but rather being guided by the Spirit and weighing the corporate attitude behind discursive practices rather than their formal compliance with linguistically defined public rules.³⁵

 These seven corporate initiatives would clearly exhibit the differ­ence between a constructive way of Christian peacemaking and the destructive way of hateful rhetoric prevailing in Latvia. It seems particu­larly relevant now, with the Russia-Ukraine military conflict sharply dividing the Latvian and Russian language media of Latvia. In Latvia this summer, I observed a consider­able increase in the hostility of the media’s discourse, which has produced an unwelcome impact on the collec­tive inter-ethnic attitudes in the soci­ety. Christian communities in Latvia should not be intimidated by their relative marginality. On the contrary, they should rather view it as an asset, not a handicap, because not being linked to the political elite only proves their sincerity and increases their cred­ibility in the larger society.