There are Bad Rulers, there are Really Bad Rulers, and then there’s…

For those who hate our leaders with a burning passion, a reminder to be thankful for small mercies: the president of Gambia rounds up people suspected of being witches (blamed for his aunt’s death) and makes them drink hallucinogens until they confess.

This Yahya Jammeh guy also believes himself to be capable of curing AIDS (perhaps the Pope would like to speak to him?). And wants to mandate representatives of the government to murder homosexuals according to laws “stricter than those in Iran”.

That is to say, he is about as crazy as a creationist crossed with Saparmurat Niyazov, ex-president of Turkmenistan, who famously re-named a month after his mother.

Children and Hatred

Everybody was once a child.

This is, it seems to me, a significant factor when deciding who to hate. Every single person, from Josef Fritzl to Josef Mengele, every murderer, torturer, and tyrant, petty or grand, used to be a small child, desperately dependent on adults beyond their control.

Moreover in many respects everyone is still a child. There’s no moment when we suddenly switch from childhood to adulthood. And many of the features of children – vulnerability, ignorance – are also general features of human beings.

And this makes it hard to hate them. How can you hate a child? How can you hate someone else just like you, dependent and feeble, struggling to make sense of the world. How can you hate someone who, in most cases, was also a victim, as a child or as an adult, brutalised themselves?