That evil is embodied by the others is a most intuitive assumption. The idea that others reveal their true face of evil in conflict is also well known and studied (e.g. by Oskar Verkaaik 2004). But how do we recognise friends? Especially, how do we recognise friends in the unclear zone of shared ideological grounding and solidarity with the causes of others, where the question of “us” is not already decided by firm markers of identity? This question is important for the understanding of how we judge evil, because intuitive solidarity and trust are as crucial for committing atrocities as is the recognition of the enemy as so evil that atrocity is the only proportional and reasonable way to deal with them. People who speak in hateful tones about their enemies as being full of hate, and promote extreme action against the latter, often at the same time describe themselves and their own in terms of love. There is a link between love and evil that is deeper than mere opposition.
My question about the recognition of “us” is a specific one about ideological, moral identification. Being myself raised in a communist milieu that was essentially constituted by such moral identification, I ask this question by means of three autoethnographic vignettes. The first tells of a political disagreement that put a friendship at risk; the second recounts a journey of discovery that remained foundational in spite of shifting ideological views; and the third addresses affective commitment and revolutionary music.
First vignette, about a failure to support revolutionary violence
Today, there is widespread agreement in circles sympathetic with Palestinian people that Israel is acting with a genocidal intent in Gaza, seeking to kill and displace its inhabitants in a systematic manner so as to make Gaza no longer a Palestinian city (either no longer a city, or no longer inhabited by Palestinians, or both). But before there was a genocide, there was a short and intense period of excitement about a war of liberation among many of the same people. I failed to share that excitement, and could “just see more death and darkness” ahead, as I noted in my diary on 8 October 2023. My failure to share the excitement was as shocking to some friends of mine as their excitement was shocking to me. The outcome was my failure to support a cause that could have been ours together.
This was the explicit topic of a discussion I had with an Egyptian friend in Berlin in early November of the same year, a moment when the short-lived euphoria about imminent liberation of Palestine had already turned into shock and anger about the Israel’s apparent determination to destroy Gaza step by step. I was shocked by my friend’s insistence that the attack across the 1948 line of control was not only justified but also useful and positive. That friend was shocked by me questioning its justification and its consequences. We had stood on the same side in the Egyptian revolution, and we had until then thought that we stood on the same side on the Palestinian cause. We argued our points and listened to each other. It was not pleasant. We did not agree. We parted with a hug.
In a moral sense, we have not been able to agree on this. Our shared rejection of the Zionist project of creating an exclusive Jewish homeland by means of conquest, deportation, and most recently, mass murder has failed to translate into a shared support for a war of liberation. Our disagreement cannot be solved by evidence, because each of us is committed to a different ontology of violence. For my friend, revolutionary violence can never be equated with the violence that enabled ongoing oppression and conquest, a view that is in line with Frantz Fanon’s vision of a world divided in two by colonialism (in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon 1963). The Israeli occupation is the cause and source and evil, and they were going to do what they are doing in any case regardless of what Palestinians do. Fighting back with all available means is necessary to stop them. For me, the two kinds of violence (conquest and resistance) are mutually constitutive in a process of escalation that Gregory Bateson (1935) called schismogenesis. The Israeli occupation has become increasingly brutalised in the course of a long and ongoing confrontation, making those working for it willing to do things today that they were not willing to do decades earlier when it would have been easier to do them than today (and the Palestinian resistance and solidarity have become increasingly brutalised as well). Further escalation will result in more brutalisation. From the point of view of each of us, the facts prove our view.
Politically, we have lost much of our former capacity of coming together as “we”. And yet at the same time, both of us have made an effort to maintain our friendship and sense of mutual recognition as in some way belonging to the same community of “us”, even when doing so has occasionally required interrupting discussions before they can cause too much damage. Notably, I have at the same time not made a serious effort to talk about these issues with any of the few open supporters of Israel I know among my friends and family. With those, I do not feel that they and I share enough to justify a probably futile and frustrating effort. The serious effort invested by my friend and me thus means that something about our belonging to an “us” is disturbed, while at the same time we remain connected in a community of “us” intact enough that it may be rescued and repaired.
However, for the purposes of an anthropological understanding of how humans attribute love and judge evil, my friend was right. Shedding tears for the enemy indeed goes against the grain of an existential war framed in terms of either survival or annihilation. Recognising evil as part of a process in which also “we” participate is opposed to the emotions and the reasoning that need to be cultivated in a binary struggle. German pro-Israeli media and government have proved this point abundantly in the following months and years. Many people have asked me how come so many Germans can support a genocide. My answer is that they don’t think that they are supporting one – and a few among them claim that they are preventing one. They are told by pro-Israeli media and politicians that Jewish people are facing an acute threat of a second holocaust. They are offered plenty of information and imagery to sympathise with those who experienced horrors during the 7 October attacks or in captivity. They have not been celebrating the killing of Palestinian children – instead, German radio stations have played to them melancholy songs longing for the return home of the hostages. Repeatedly and persistently grieving for the victims of Hamas and its allies on 7 October has become the key emotional technique towards not grieving for the victims of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza and the mass murder of its people since then. This is a case in point of love in alliance with mass murder.
My friend was probably also right in a second historical sense. Catastrophic losses on the side of the people whose freedom and dignity one supports may, in the long term, provide a path towards an ultimate military victory insofar as those losses strengthen the international of solidarity and weakens support for the enemy. There is an inverse relation between Palestine and Palestinian solidarity: the more of the first is lost, the stronger the latter grows. This can be a winning strategy insofar as it ensures the continuation of the struggle until a day when the balance of powers may shift. The path towards a possible final victory along these lines is long and devastating, may result in catastrophic defeat instead, and in case of success will likely require the death of millions (since Israel’s nuclear arsenal will be employed as a weapon of last resort, and since a lot of people will have a lot or revenge to take) – but it is a plausible path, not the most likely outcome at the moment, but more likely than a peaceful two-state solution.
This disagreement between friends, along with my later recognition of ways in which my friend was right, raise two questions that are useful to understand the complex constitution of “us” in us-and-them and good-and-evil confrontations. The first is: how come were we shocked in the first place, knowing that we come from different places with different histories? And following that shock, how come did we invest emotional work into maintaining our friendship? To this question, the history of my own family members in choosing sides in revolutions based on personal encounters even across ideological differences can offer some clues. The second question is: how come would someone who grew up with a revolutionary faith and participated in a revolution fail to support revolutionary violence although there are good historical reasons to support it? To this question, I believe my own trajectory as growing up with the peculiar ambivalence of communism between affective commitments to world peace and political violence offers a partial answer.
Second vignette, on how my father supported the Cultural Revolution
In 1969, my father travelled to China to witness the Cultural Revolution. Twenty years of age at the time, he had gone to seamen’s school and joined the West German merchant navy. Due to his class position, my father was unable to join the student movement at the universities. But at the seamen’s school and the port of Hamburg as well, discussions took place at the street corners, and the possibility of a revolution was in the air. The Cultural Revolution that was unleashed by Mao in 1966 against the cadres of his own communist party, held great promise among young people in Western countries. But few people from Western countries could visit China or see more than was shown to official delegations – with the important exception of sailors on merchant ships. Thus, my father hired as a deck hand on M/S Mai Rickmers that at the time transported cargo between Hamburg in West Germany and Shanghai in China. “I was curious”, he said when I asked him about his motivation.
He has told me the story many times, with different emphases but the same key events. They travelled around the Cape of Good Hope (Suez Canal was closed after Six Days War), and stopped in Thailand to bunker fuel. During the fuelling stop, people came to the ship on small boats, selling drinks and food. Women sold sex. The poverty and misery were intense and impossible to overlook. When they arrived in Shanghai, they encountered a radically different, well-ordered port and city, with dedicated bars for sailors and rickshaw drivers. The comparison with misery in Thailand was crucial in the story, and in this version of the story, my father highlighted his positive impression rather than censorship and isolation: “When I saw that, of course I was for the revolution”, he said when telling the story in 2022.
Supporting the revolution did not mean that they were credulous and compliant. My father and his friends were only allowed to drink at the international sailors’ bar, which was expensive, and they were followed constantly by a political officer. They got bored and escaped the officer, and found their way to the more affordable rickshaw drivers’ bar. They had a good time there. Afterwards, they were reprimanded by the officer. All radios had been confiscated from the ship during their stay in Chinese waters, except one used by the ship’s radio operator. During their stay in Shanghai, the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon, and the R/O spread the news among the crew. My father and his friends retaliated to the political officer by telling that the Americans had just landed on the moon, which the officer refused to believe.
In spite of such ridiculous excesses of censorship, Shanghai presented an impressive face of a revolution creating order and progress. He brought as a souvenir a printed image of Shanghai which hung on the wall of my childhood home in Helsinki. Also today, it is prominently placed in his home.
In spring 2026, we looked at photographs of the trip he had collected in an album. A page titled “At roadstead Thailand” shows a leisurely atmosphere with small boats selling goods and young sailors drinking beer. There are no pictures of China in the album. After the pictures, he added: “I thought I was travelling to the future, but we were the past.” In this comment, two different lines of storytelling come together: The Cultural Revolution, for my father in 1969, was a powerful possible future. But his way of travel was about to become the past: break-bulk carriers like Mai Rickmers would be replaced by container ships soon afterwards. Thanks to the long discharging and loading times of break-bulk cargo, he had access to a kind of exploration of the bars of Shanghai that sailors of the container age do not have. The future turned out to be one of a dialectical transcending (Aufhebung in the words of Hegel and Marx) of the Cultural Revolution and bulk carriers alike: a capitalist China led by the Communist Party providing the world with industrial products in giant container ships.
The Cultural Revolution began as a chaotic and violent popular rebellion lead by none less than head of the state, directed against functionaries of his own party and government, as well as traditional social and cultural institutions. Seen from abroad, the Cultural Revolution appeared as the most revolutionary a revolution could be: determined to overthrow every remnant of old culture, society, and institutions in a radical bottom-up movement of the masses. It was obvious that violence was necessary (Song 2011). Between one and two million people were killed (World Peace Foundation 2026).
In 1967, Shanghai municipality had been replaced by a people’s collective. By 1969, the People’s Liberation Army had grown increasingly powerful and was busy bringing the radical faction under control. The order and progress that Shanghai radiated to West German sailors in 1969 was in fact an effect of the Cultural Revolution ending with a temporary power grab by the commander of the army. Outside urban centres, China’s economy and administration were in a state of disarray (Yan and Gao 1996: 285-309; 393-395; 463-471).
My father learned these things later. He did wonder how come other people who had seen more of its dark side still spoke in support of the Cultural Revolution. But he did not wonder about his younger self being idealistic enough to have believed in the revolution. My father’s appreciation of his encounters and the effect they left upon him has remained remarkably untouched by his later political transformation. After having been a leftist until his late 20’s, he became a supporter of the free market, and with advancing age began to support nationalist positions that resonate with the populist right. While his ideology has shifted, he has maintained an instinctive working-class solidarity. For him, the reasons to support the Cultural Revolution in 1969 remain valid: he experienced in personal encounters the misery of Thailand and the order of Shanghai.
The validity of personal encounters regardless of a later ideological transformation offers a tentative answer to the first question I asked in conclusion of the first vignette. My Egyptian friend and I may have come from different places with different histories, but we went through the same formative political experience of the Egyptian revolution (in addition to other less political formative experiences later), an experience both of us consider true and valid, even while the conclusions we draw today about new revolutions differ.
Third vignette, on growing up with revolutionary music
I grew up in a world clearly divided in good and evil. Until my late teens I was confident that the political faith of my family, communism, held the concrete promise of a better life for humans in freedom and equality. My homeland Finland was a liberal democracy that held friendly relations with the Soviet Union and posed as neutral in the Cold War. Communism was a popular political movement gaining between 10 and 20 per cent of the vote at the time, and many young people who had been inspired by the leftist revolutionary movement of the 1968, in the early 1970’s joined the radical minority wing of orthodox Marxist-Leninists fully loyal to Moscow.1 My mother was among them.
At home and in meetings of Democratic Pioneers, the children’s organisation of the party, I learned that powers opposed to communism were the powers of evil: Fascist regimes such as those that had recently fallen in Europe, capitalist democracies under the leadership of the United States, and emerging religious revolutionary states such as Iran. At pioneer camps, I experienced this binary in the fulfilling shape of a summertime adventure. I learned about international solidarity with socialist countries (Nicaragua was most prominent at the time). I also learned to distrust people from the Eurocommunist majority wing in the Communist Party of Finland, and although nobody explicitly told me so, I began to think of them as perhaps even worse than the capitalists.
Around this time occurred also my participation in one of the most immediate actions of evil that I have committed: I participated in the collective bullying of a boy in the tent we shared at a pioneer camp. The lead bullies were two brothers, sons of friends of my parents. The older of the brothers, Teemu Keskisarja, would later become a prominent and controversial member of the parliament for the extreme-right True Finns party. His ideology may have changed since we last met, but I see an affective continuation between him as the charismatic leader of our gang of boys bullying the weakest person in our tent, and his style of populist politics in the Finnish parliament today. We constituted ourselves as “us” partly by attacking somebody we recognised as different and vulnerable.
Teemu’s father was a hardline communist revolutionary. My mother later told me that many young men in the party were opposed to serving in the army out of a pacifist conviction (which my mother shared). He, however, insisted that they should all do their military service so that they could fight when the revolution begins.
I learned that the Russian revolution of 1917 had been the greatest positive transformation of the century. I knew of the Russian Civil War that continued until 1922, and I knew that Stalin had gone too far. I was not aware of the death toll. Between 7 and 9 million people, and possibly more, were killed in executions, concentration camps and forced resettlement, and famines in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule.2
I supported the idea of a world peace based on nuclear disarmament and joined peace marches as a child. I was just too young to remember the marches in support of North Vietnam before its 1975 victory in the Vietnam War. My mother tried to give me a pacifist education without war related toys, but she also assured to me that Soviet nuclear weapons were there to protect peace, to prevent an attack by the Americans. When my parents divorced, I projected my existential insecurity into the fear of an imminent nuclear assault by the United States. Until the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, I had a fundamental faith that socialist states were inherently prone to peace and democracy.
My change of mind was not an individual one. I turned away from communism only when the socialist regimes of Europe collapsed, and millions of other people took the same turn. I read extensively about the crimes committed by communist regimes, and travelled to countries whose economies and ecologies were in crisis after decades of actually existing socialism. But I did not find a new political home in either liberalism or anarchism which I flirted with at times.
Throughout this process, communist songs from the 1970’s have remained my favourite music. The radical movement in Finland of the 1970’s was accompanied by an artistically high-quality music scene with a modern pop edge and distinctive sound. As a child, I learned these songs by heart, and learned through them to understand and feel about the world. As a young adult in the 1990’s, I listened to these songs ironically, that irony being part of my process of growing apart from communist ideology. As a middle-aged man, I listen to these songs because I love the emotions they raise in me: hope, compassion, determination, spiced with a taste of tragedy
Love and violence run through this genre as key themes. Songs of this genre often celebrate revolutionary violence. But they do not describe it in detail. (The violence by Fascists and capitalists is addressed in detail.) Instead, justified violence merges with hope and affection among revolutionaries and between peoples, as in Foundation by the band Agit Prop:
Äiti, äiti, sait jälleen voitosta tiedon.
Muistatko vielä sen ensimmäisen päivän, jolloin ensimmäinen kivääri suojeli syntymäkotiamme?
Muistatko tumman joukon, joka vartioi palmujen alla?
Kansanvalta, kansanvalta!
Se on kivääri kädessäsi, öisillä poluilla valvovan äidin varjo, sisaresi vihreä asetakki.
Kansanvalta, kansanvalta!
Se on lukemaan oppiva ihminen nuotiolla, se on ensimmäinen taistelu ja voitto!
Mother, mother, again you received news about victory
Do you still remember the first day, when the first rifle protected our home?
Do you remember the dark group that kept watch under the palm trees?
People’s power! People’s power!
It is the rifle in your hand, the shadow of your mother guarding the trails at night, your sister’s green uniform jacket
People’s power! People’s power!
It is a human learning to read at a campfire, it is the first battle and victory!3
Not all songs have the same explicit militancy. I’m a communist by the same Agit Prop from 1974, translated from Nâzim Hikmet’s Turkish original, articulates communism as a love for the world in becoming:
Olen kommunisti.
Olen rakkautta kiireestä kantapäähän.
Rakkautta syntyvään lapseen.
Etenevään valoon.
Rakkaus on näkemistä, ajattelemista, ymmärtämistä.
Rakkaus on kehdon ripustamista tähtiin.
Rakkaus on teräksen valamisen vaivannäköä.
I'm a communist,
I'm love from top to toe,
love for a child to be born,
for advancing light.
Love is seeing, thinking, understanding.
Love is hanging a cradle on the stars.
Love is the effort required to cast steel.4
A song that for good reasons counts as the most iconic work of this movement takes up the relation of love and violence directly. Written and sung by the poet Aulikki Oksanen as a response to the celebration of love by the late 1960’s hippie movement, In whose ranks do you stand? tells us that revolutionary violence is the condition without which love is a mere illusion.
Ei ystäväni,
ei synny rakkaus maailmaan
odottaessasi taivaan armoa,
vallanpitäjien sääliä
Ei ystäväni,
niin kauan kuin leivästä
jää reikä leipojan käteen
jääköön rakkaudesta puhuminen pastorien houreiksi
Pitäkööt Leijonat makeiskorinsa,
puolueettomat humanistit korulauseensa
Tätä vääryyttä vastaan ei taistella kukkasin
Tätä verta ei pysäytä pehmeä myötätunto
Nälkäisten vatsat eivät suudelmista täyty
Kenen joukoissa seisot,
kenen lippua kannat
Ei synny rakkautta ilman oikeutta
ei synny oikeutta ilman taistelua
ei taistelua ilman yhteistä rintamaa
No my friend,
there will be no love in the world
while you wait for heaven’s mercy
pity by the powerful
No my friend,
as long as crumbles
are all the baker keeps of the bread
talking about love shall remain a delirium of the priests
The lions can keep their candy baskets
the impartial humanists their decorated words
Against these wrongs you don’t fight with flowers
This blood won’t be stilled by gentle compassion
The bellies of the hungry won’t be filled with kisses
In whose ranks do you stand?
Whose flag do you carry?
There will be no love without justice
There will be no justice without a struggle
No struggle without a united front5
In hindsight, I consider the tension between love and violent revolution this song expresses a distinctive feature of communism and other radical leftist movements. As a way of being in the world, simultaneously occupying a love for the world and the willingness to destroy for the sake of a new world, it is highly compelling.
My ideological estrangement from communism was only ever a partial one, insofar as it was fuelled by the other face of communist commitment: a love for the world, an idea of humanity having the ability to come together in peace, love, and shared work where everybody gives according to their possibilities and receives according to their needs. It kept drawing me towards leftist circles and finding a sense of comfort in them regardless of ideological friction.
Thus when a revolution began in Egypt in 2011, I supported and joined it because my leftist friends from the countryside supported and joined it. I did it in spite of having only months earlier argued in a conversation that I did not expect or hope for a revolution in Egypt because in a revolution, things get broken, people get killed, and in the end, the wrong people come to power. My awareness of this recurring historical fact was counteracted by the immense power of hope, a love towards a world that appeared to be emerging in that very moment in front of my eyes. When the revolution was defeated by a counter-revolution that I had ended up supporting, the effect was one of an overwhelming disillusionment. The defeat of the Egyptian revolution resulted in a widespread emotional transformation of the defeated and their friends and allies. Some of them held to the idea of revolution and resistance as the very substance of meaningful human existence, while some others became disillusioned with the idea of revolution and preoccupied with the destructive unintended consequences of radical action (Aboughazi 2026).
This short autobiography of affective attachment and ideological friction offers a tentative answer to the second question about how come somebody would fail to support revolutionary violence in spite of ample historical evidence about its effectiveness. My failure to join the Palestinian War of Liberation in 2023 was not only the outcome of a strategic calculation of likely outcomes, and also not a principled pacifist stance (after all, I have supported violent struggles time and again). To an important extent, it was carried by an affective loss of hope, a reverse love for the world that focused on what was being lost, not on what could be won. This is an anti-revolutionary affect, and yet it is one grounded in a revolutionary history where the communist love for the world has been complicated by a recognition of the destructive outcomes of revolutions.
In a righteous struggle, love for the people who have been wronged and for the justice and liberation they ought to gain, along with the mutual love of people coming together in struggle, allow us to not look too closely into the destruction we cause while we are winning, nor into our complicity in the losses that our side suffers when we lose a battle we willingly joined. But when that same love is separated from the hopefulness of struggle, it turns into an anti-revolutionary mourning for what might have been saved – an affect that is not useful for determined action.
My family’s and my own political biography shows the capaciousness, the range of stances, as well as some of the likely frictions that can emerge from the communist double commitment to world peace and violent world revolution. That commitment carries a well-known tendency of fragmentation where ideological difference becomes easily so irritating that people who are on the same side cannot bear hearing each other’s view of what is to be done. But it also has a capacity to create senses of “us” that exceed identitarian lines and indeed extend around the globe. Capaciousness is a term usually used with positive judgement (for example by Shahab Ahmed (2016) about Islam). But I insist that it includes the capacity to extreme evil as well as border-transcending love. Both the love and the violence involved in communist commitment are genuine. And there appears to be no necessary pre-determined path whereby one or the other will inevitably prevail. Taking the death of millions for granted as a necessary cost of the great work of revolution is as logical a conclusion of a communist commitment as is striving for world peace to save those lives and enable their thriving in this world. Neither is innocent of the other, in the sense that different and at times contrary commitments emerge in schismogenetic processes from this original dialectic tension, the other part of the tension always being there as a potential, whether realised or not.
(This essay was presented at the workshop “Judging Evil in Anthropology” at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient on 29 September 2026. A revised version will follow in a scientific journal one day. Thanks are due to my anonymous friend, my parents, Asmaa Essakouti, Ahmad Moradi, Alireza Doostdar, Annastiina Kallius, Sana Chavoshian, and Basit Iqbal.)
References
Aboughazi, Mariam. 2026. “Short notes on home: Emotional infrastructures of belonging between revolution, leaving, and return.” Conference paper at EASA biannual meeting, Poznań, 23 July.
Ahmed, Shahab. 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bateson, Gregory. 1935. “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis.” Man 35: 178-183.
Fanon, Frantz. 1963 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated from the French by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.
Song, Yongyi. 2011. “Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).” Mass Violence and Resistance - Research Network, 25 August. https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/chronology-mass-killings-during-chinese-cultural-revolution-1966-1976.html (Accessed 8 October).
Verkaaik, Oskar. 2004. Migrants and Militants. Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
World Peace Foundation. 2016. "China: the Cultural Revolution." Mass Atrocity Endings, 14 December. https://web.archive.org/web/20240225111424/https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2016/12/14/china-the-cultural-revolution/ (Accessed 8 October 2026).
Yan, Jiaqi and Gao Gao. 1996. Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution. Trans. and ed. D.W.Y. Kwok. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Footnotes
1The majority within the party adopted a Eurocommunist doctrine that departed from the Soviet model, inspired by Italian communists. The tension between the two wings was strong and also extended to the youth organisation. The uniforms I wore as a pioneer in the radical minority wing were different from those in the Euro-communist majority wing, and children from the two wings attended separate summer camps.
2For an overview of competing estimates and methodologies, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_Stalin#Total_number_of_victims (accessed 8 October 2026)
3Peruskivi (fundament), transl. Matti Rossi from an original attributed to Nam Giang, performed by the music group Agit Prop in 1972, my translation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C7JebZVgRo (accessed 8 October).
4Nâzim Hikmet 1962, Finnish transl. Agit Prop 1974, English translation from Finnish Juha Rämö, https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=en&id=64427 (accessed 8 October 2026).
5Aulikki Oksanen, 1970, my translation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elMzDEtB26U (accessed 8 October 2026).
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