Good morning, SM--

Although your thought-out-loud points to the important observation that hatred is a learned behavior, and that to root it out we need to locate its institutional and street schools, Hitler didn't need to learn anti-Semitism from Muslims or eastern Europeans. He could learn that at home.

He hated Slavs almost as much as he hated Jews anyway, and began to send Poles to the camps after running out of Jews.

Hitler's opinion of Muslims is unknown to me. He courted the Turks as allies, but he was also allied with the Russians (more Slavs), briefly, and got along well enough with the Japanese in spite of their distinctly non-Aryan appearance. I have always supposed he believed that he'd get around to the Yellow Menace once he eliminated the Jews, the Romany, and the Slavs, and cleansed Africa of Jesse Owens's relatives.

Western Europe has its own history of hating the Jews. This home-grown variety was far more likely to have influenced an ultranationalist and racist like Hitler than the hatred practiced by "lower forms" of humanity who lived to the east.

Take a look at the historical overview provided by Antisemitism and Xenophobia Today (AXT, a project of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research) for these cradles of democracy: France;
the UK; and the US.

Then observe Germany's history. It's no accident that Hitler endorsed the Lutheran Church as an appropriate expression of Christianity for the devout Aryan. He wasn't thinking of Lutherans per se, but of Martin Luther.

The site has no listing for Spain, whose history is defined by a spectacular episode of politically-motivated religious persecution. I can only assume this is because anti-Semitism is not a problem Today (the T in AXT).

Notice that, in the West, anti-Semitism as a popular trend tends to peak during times of political stress and/or (I really hate "and/or" but sometimes it's the only way) economic downturn. This points to a classic scape-goat psychology: bad things have to be someone's fault, and it sure can't be us, so it has to be them. Jewish communities, which were self-governing entities across medieval Europe, were blamed for Plague outbreaks -- Jews supposedly poisoned the wells -- and were subsequently destroyed by angry mobs of frightened Christians. Hitler's hatred of the Jews similarly played into the national embarrassment of post-WWI Germany and the economic distress of the Great Depression, which whacked Germany as hard as it hit the US. The Jews must have done it.

When wondering where hatred comes from, rather than looking to another set of thems, I have found that I can find some of it in the mirror. Every time I see the IRA discussed, I confess a grinding ambivalence. My family has been American for four or five generations, and I am appalled by the violence and terror caused by the IRA, but as an Irish-American schoolgirl I was raised to hate the English, to despise Protestants, and never to forget the Hunger. Of these three things, I can only make something good out of the last one, because it teaches compassion for the hungry, whether that hunger is physical, emotional or intellectual. But the altruism is so tied to the motivating anger that I have to separate the two as carefully as eggs for meringue.

Sometimes I see "liberal self-hatred" decried, and I agree that self-criticism can be taken to extremes like anything else. Still, self-examination is the first step to change of the greater world, because (apart from the use of force, a short-term solution) our own behavior is the only behavior over which we have anything resembling complete control.

The heart's best teacher is a good example. We have it in our power to set one.

Regards--
Mary Anne