Let’s begin to counter hate by trying to understand hatred

IT would be foolishly romantic to imagine that humanity’s base, destructive instincts can always be controlled or even modified as, in recent days and months, hatred seems to be roaring ever louder around the world.

Hate is asserting its malign influence on many, many fronts and costing innocent life after innocent life, destroying dreams and families as it goes.

It is sometimes driven by vainglorious religious extremism, insular, blinkered nationalism, political ambition or ignorance — and very often just plain fear — but its consequences are always tragic for someone, somewhere.

This weekend’s massacre at a nightclub in Orlando, in which at least 50 people died because they were gay or American or both, is today’s headline atrocity but here will be others before too long — and not in a country where the idea of freedom is expressed by an insane commitment to gun ownership and a permanently escalating death toll.

The sad inevitability of the next atrocity is behind the tension that eases ever so slightly as another day of the Euro 2016 championships in France passes without a dreaded attack echoing last November’s Bataclan massacre in Paris that left 130 people dead.

Trying to protect the millions of fans determined to enjoy themselves peacefully must be 24/7 a nightmare. In that context, the violence of Russian and English thugs is a betrayal that endangers all decent fans and the unfortunate hosts.

Maybe the next atrocity will be another bomb in Istanbul or Damascus, in Islamabad or Kabul, delivered by an unhinged zealot or a hapless captive child — or government bombers dropping barrel bombs on its citizens.

It may come in some part of, impoverished Africa, maybe a few more Palestinians or Israelis will be murdered in the self-perpetuating war of ethnic cleansing being waged by an Israel increasingly indifferent to any idea of justice or restraint.

It may come on a different scale altogether.

Maybe it will be another of those incomprehensibly barbaric gang attacks on women in India.

Maybe it will be another childcare scandal in Ireland or a terrorist bomb under a Belfast car?

Who knows where or what it will be but we all know it will be.

But what sustains hatred?

It’s easy to say that Donald Trump’s campaign is the vilest expression of racism and hatred active in the West today — as are elements of Britain’s “Leave” campaign — but that is countered by the idiocies of Igor Lebedev, an executive of the Russian football union and deputy chairman of Russia’s parliament: “I don’t see anything wrong with the fans fighting. Quite the opposite, well done, lads, keep it up!” he said after rioting at Euro 2016.

Speaking at Muhammad Ali’s funeral last Friday the comedian Billy Crystal underlined an eternal truth: “Life is best when you build bridges between people, not walls.”

It is easy to nod approvingly at grand, warming sentiments like that but in an ever smaller world where the old certainties are cast aside and borders mean hardly anything maybe we should be more proactive, more determined to nullify those whose currency is hatred and destruction — and, sadly, how that might be done is as great a question as ever it was.