Handke "Clip"

The bus driver’s anger was vocalized as follows: “They have always hated us. They got everything they wanted, and still they hate us. More than ever. In more of a blind rage than ever. More blindly than ever. They have their own country now. They are a nation now, like the Lithuanians, like the Catalans, like the Transnistrians, like Cisnilians, like the Valley Kalmuks, like the Mountain Slovenians, like the Danube and Mekong Delta Autonomians. They are a national people and, now that their great dream has been realized, a one-people state, they still hate us, what remains of the second people, which has no state of its own, hate us as if we remnants were the national people instead of them. And they need not even teach this hatred to their children. It simply gets handed down, from generation to generation, from gene to gene, long past blood feuds and wars. Your hatred of us became baseless ages ago and has taken on a life of its own, if indeed there ever was a basis for it, but no, there never was a basis. It has become not your national consciousness but your life force. Ha, life. Your state merely provides a vehicle for living out your hatred, protected by your national boundaries, your flags that signal hostile intent, your anthems that are anthems of hated. Your hatred for everyone who is not of your nationality, for everything that is not the nation. You derive no pride from your nation, only legitimation and perpetuation of your hatred. And in that respect you typify all nations nowadays, you are the quintessential modern nation, the new form of nation. Nation and hatred go together. Ha, these parents and grandparents—who not only did not energetically dissuade their children from hating others, hating us, but on the contrary passed the hatred on to them—should never have been allowed to become a nation, such a nation. Ha, such parents and grandparents, tribal chiefs and clan leaders, politicians and teachers, star athletes and poets—to whom it never occurs to whisper in angelic voices, yes, angelic voices to your little children, just learning to walk and hold on to things, and to drive out of them with utmost concentration of energy the rock-throwing gene, to smoke out the rock-throwing instinct, to whisper away the hate-pounding drum from their little ears, reaching into the deepest recesses of their brains—never do they, never do you have the right to a nation of your own. But nation or no nation: your hatred never ceases.”