John Mearsheimer: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Underneath it all is just, I wonder why there is so much hate against groups, why it’s such a sticky way of thinking. Not just tribalism, proud of your country and kind of hating another country, but really deeply hating. Hating in a way where it’s part of your identity kind of hate. Well, just to make a general point on this issue in our conversation here today, you often talk about individual leaders, and the word individual often pops up in your vocabulary. I believe that we are ultimately social animals before we are individuals. I believe we’re born into tribes, we’re heavily socialized, and that we carve out space for our individualism. But we are part of tribes, or social groups, or nations. Call them what you want, ethnic groups, religious groups. But the fact is that these tribes often crash into each other. And when they crash into each other, they end up hating each other. If you go to a place like Bosnia, the Croats and the Serbs, oh, my God. And then throw in the Bosniaks, which is the term for Bosnian Muslims. And Muslims, Croats, Serbs, and the tribes hate each other. And in a funny way, that hatred almost never goes away. And I guess, there are some exceptions to that. If you look at the Germans after World War II, they’ve gone a long way towards reducing, I wouldn’t want to say completely eliminating, but reducing a lot of the hatred that existed between Germans and their neighbors. But that’s really kind of an anomalous case. I mean, you go around East Asia today and the hatred of Japan in a place like China, the hatred of Japan in a place like Korea, just not to be underestimated. But I think a lot of it just has to do with the fact that you’re dealing with social groups that have crashed into each other at one point or another. And there are those lingering effects. And by the way, this gets back to our discussion a few minutes ago about trying to get a two-state solution between the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews now that you have had this horrible war, which is ongoing. It’s interesting to ask, to go back to World War II- … To ask to go back to World War II. Now, you said you studied Nazi Germany in the ’30s from a perspective of maybe offensive realism, but just to look at the Holocaust, it’s sometimes popular in public discourse today to compare certain things to the Holocaust. People have compared the Hamas attack on Israel to the Holocaust, saying things like, “It’s the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust,” which kind of implies that there’s a comparison. People have made that same comparison in the other direction. What do you make of this comparison? Is it comparable? Does the use of the Holocaust have any accuracy in comparisons of modern day international politics?…

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