From Ancient Athens to Syria: A Reflection on the Roots of Genocide

Exile was a common political practice in ancient Athens, carried out through a tradition called (ostrakízein), in which voters would carve the name of a leader who had become too powerful or arrogant on a piece of pottery. The individual who received the most votes was expelled from Athens for ten years. It is said that a commoner approached Aristides the Just, the famous Greek leader and politician, not knowing who he was, and asked him to help him inscribe Aristides’ name on a piece of pottery. Aristides asked if he had been wronged, to which he replied, “No, I have never met him, but I am tired of him being called just everywhere.”

Aristotle saw the democratic function of exile without trial as a means of disciplining power, keeping political elites in check, and preventing their excesses. However, he did not overlook its potential for misuse as a tool by envious individuals to eliminate their opponents. Indeed, several admirable figures fell victim to this tradition.

Definition of Envy

“Pain at the sight of another’s good fortune” is how Aristotle defined envy. The English word “Envy” is derived from the Latin “invidia,” which translates to: to glance at something, to gaze at it, to follow the gaze. In other words, envy is associated with seeing, with a look, with a stare that observes another’s blessing and compares it to the beholder’s own condition. Such a comparison can be mistaken and highly subjective, often focusing on appearances rather than the true reality.

In ancient civilizations, the concept of the evil eye was commonly associated with envy and the harm it could bring. To this day, in Arabic, we use expressions like “عين الحسود” (the envious eye), “ضربة عين” (eye strike), and “أصابه بالعين” (he was affected by the evil eye).

Ancient humans recognized the seriousness of envy as a powerful motivator of the soul and attributed a significant place to it in human imagination. It can be traced throughout human history since it was first recorded. For example, in the Old Testament, we see that Adam’s firstborn looked at his younger brother Abel’s offering, which was accepted by the Lord, while his own remained neglected and rejected. His face “fell,” and out of envy, he killed his brother. Cain, the first human born, did not even know what murder was, and evil whispered in his ear: “Take a stone and strike his head.”

Denying Envy in Politics

Envy has long been recognized as an important political and social factor. Aside from amulets and vows, humans have developed many behaviors aimed at warding off its evil. For example, a wealthy farmer might buy small, scattered plots of land instead of a large one, and the rich sometimes carefully imitate the clothing of those less fortunate and avoid extravagance to prevent incurring a curse that could threaten their status. In conservative societies, it is not uncommon for beautiful women to wear veils out of fear of the evil eye.

However, what is striking today is that envy is almost absent from public debates. It is rarely cited as an explanation for social or political phenomena or actions. Although everyone acknowledges its destructive power and some even believe in its supernatural influence, none of us admit to feeling envious. This individual and collective denial makes envy a perfect political weapon. A forbidden, shameful, repressed emotion that we do not even recognize within ourselves is easily fueled and then twisted, hiding behind various moral justifications.

Envy as a political motive has not been limited to the left, where it has been associated with “class envy”—a critique used to undermine demands for social justice and portray such demands merely as the grudge of the poor against the rich. Today, however, it clearly acts as a political driver on both the populist right and the “vigilant” liberal left—a paradox worth contemplating.

The following joke by Slavoj Žižek illustrates how envy operates in contemporary politics: A peasant finds a magic lamp in his field, dusts it off, and a genie appears to grant him a wish, but with a condition: “I will give your neighbor twice as much as you wish for yourself!” The peasant responds: “Gouge out one eye for me.”

Contemporary right-wing politics capitalizes on feelings of envy.
In the United States, for example, Republicans stubbornly oppose proposals such as student debt forgiveness, universal healthcare, or raising the minimum wage. They often justify these positions with slogans like “personal responsibility,” “reward for effort,” and “freedom of choice,” which subtly conceal a deeper desire to deny others opportunities that perhaps they themselves never earned or simply do not want for others.

At best, this rhetoric suggests: “I didn’t get out of debt, so why should you?” or “I had to work for low wages, so why should your life be easier?” At worst, it implies: “Who are you to think you have rights and deserve help to live a decent life? Who are you to demand equality?” Similarly, the German right criticizes social assistance to refugees under the pretext of “oppressing German taxpayers.” During the early wave of refugees, many articles condemned refugees for carrying smartphones—an embarrassing stance where the distressed are envied by those better off—forgetting the billions of euros that Germany’s treasury loses each year due to tax evasion by its wealthy.

On the other side, among the “woke” left, envy is no less present, though it often disguises itself under different banners such as solidarity, justice, and exposing injustice. In the “race of grievances,” the criterion for deserving voice, leadership, or even sympathy becomes the amount of suffering one has endured—or rather, the historical suffering of the particular identity group to which one belongs. This begins a game of comparison and measurement: Who has been oppressed more? Who is more marginalized? Who belongs to the structurally weaker identity?

The race of grievances, therefore, is a struggle for resources rather than a genuine fight for equality. Moreover, it is a contest over the symbolism of pain—pain itself becomes a political currency, a badge to be flaunted and wielded.

In his critique of this tendency, Žižek insists that such envious rivalry does not lead to liberation; rather, it divides. Envy is directed toward an ally, a comrade whom we perceive as having gained more attention or status than they deserve. This is one of its fundamental features: its focus is on the close and similar. As Helmut Schock states in his book Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, he says: “We envy those whose possessions or achievements reflect what we lack. They are our neighbors and peers. Above all, they reveal the nature of our failure. Envy is not directed toward those who are far removed in social status, but toward those whom we see as similar.”

Envy thrives where differences are observable and directly comparable. This does not necessarily mean that envy of the much more fortunate does not exist, but it is less prevalent because a significant gap reduces the urgency of self-comparison and makes it more difficult to envision, which poses a major obstacle for liberation movements today, especially as the class divide widens at an unprecedented rate.

Envy as a Driver of Collective Hostility

In the context of antisemitism, envy has reached its most horrifying manifestations, where individual resentment has been transformed into deadly collective narratives. It becomes a systematic and institutionalized envy that legitimizes hatred and paves the way for ongoing extermination, exclusion, or contempt.

Since the Middle Ages, European Jews have been placed in a paradoxical symbolic position: they are the hated, excluded, and condemned minority of the Church. At the same time, they are portrayed as holding the keys to money, influence, and mysterious knowledge. This contradiction is not incidental; it lies at the core of how envy functions. As Shook points out, we envy those who resemble us—those in whom we see our altered mirror and improved selves. Jews are not complete strangers; rather, they are former relatives who have deviated, survived, or excelled in crooked ways. They represented a blind spot in the Christian moral eye: neither fully accepted nor entirely ostracized. They remained in a liminal space, a perfect site for envy to nest and become institutionalized.

Jews were accused of killing Christ, spreading the plague, poisoning wells, usury, and forming alliances with the devil. Although these accusations seem superstitious today, they led to repeated pogroms long before the emergence of modern notions of nationalism or ethnicity. Nazism did not invent antisemitism; it inherited, invested in, and reworked it on a cold, industrial scale. It reduced this sentiment to its simplest form: the other possesses what we lack—a presence, a purity, a secret—and must be exterminated, not because they pose an actual threat, but because they serve as a constant reminder of our inferiority.

Žižek states: “Hostility towards Jews in Europe did not stem from hatred, but from a tinged attraction towards them. The European Christian saw them as possessing something unsaid, something desired, something to be envied.”

In the Arab and Muslim context, the dominant discourse accuses Jews of controlling the media, money, and international politics, and of secretly driving major events. The worse the state of the world becomes, the stronger this belief grows. These are not merely constructs of conspiracy theories, but a collective projection of repressed envy, unfulfilled desire, and failure attributed to a symbolic group believed to have survived a history that is crushing us. The dominant discourse implicitly asks: Why them? Why did they succeed? Why did we fail? Why did we fall behind while others advanced?

In short, anti-Semitism manifests itself by turning Jews into a narrative necessity: our storytelling cannot explain our failures without them, nor our successes without a conspiracy. Instead of self-criticism and confronting difficult questions, envy is transformed into a transcendent political and moral outrage. Its worst manifestation is the endless moralization of laziness or failure, repeated over and over again.

Power and Revolution: The Envy Complex

Since the beginning of the Syrian revolution, envy has been lurking in the scene: in the voice of the authority and in the voice of the revolutionary street. When protesters called for freedom, the response was not only repression but also mockery: “You want freedom? Do you even know what freedom is?”

This question was not always a rational critique in the face of perceived sectarianism among the revolutionaries, but also an envious emotion expressed as: “You don’t deserve what you’re asking for.” Envy, disguised as disqualification, transformed the demand for a legitimate, fundamental right into a shameless greed. Freedom became a privilege that only those accustomed to power or close to it deserved. It became conditional and a luxury item, not something to be demanded but granted to those who “deserve it and understand its meaning.”

However, envy was not one-sided. From the very first week, slogans spread among the rebellious street: “Christianity is for the coffin, and Alawite is for the coffin.” These slogans reveal an envy of a symbolic privilege believed to be enjoyed by these groups. According to this perspective, Christians were seen as being spared from the conflict, while Alawites were burdened with the entire legacy of oppressive power.

This mutual envy led to a mutual distortion of the collective image, leaving no room for understanding sensitivities or justice to facts and details. Instead, it ignited the latent hatred within Syrian society and destroyed any emancipatory energy within the movement.

After Assad’s smooth and sudden fall, and the complete surrender of what was perceived as the regime’s popular support, we witnessed a resounding explosion of anti-Alawite sentiments and envious hostility. This began with narratives blaming all Alawites for the entire slaughter, and then manifested in brutal genocidal acts against them. Like the Jews in Nazi propaganda, the Alawites were portrayed as a small, malicious minority that seized power, control of the army and security forces, and single-handedly subjugated the majority for decades. Syrian elites deliberately blurred the distinction between the Assad regime and the Alawite community, leaving no room for the Alawites to position themselves outside of the crime.

We saw the proliferation of bizarre myths hostile to logic and reality, which took the form of irrefutable “truths,” such as a minor security officer being more powerful than the prime minister. A grievance was built around the narrative that the “Alawite” regime killed two million Sunnis solely because they were Sunnis, and that it was secular and opposed to Islam and Sunnis—all claims far removed from reality, serving to justify sectarian violence and usher in an era of extreme religious authoritarianism.

Despite three months of harassment and the subsequent bloody genocide in March, the slogans persisted: “Where were you 14 years ago?”, “We were displaced and killed, and now it’s your turn,” and “Two million Sunnis are dead, while a thousand Alawites are not worth mentioning.” Some even mocked the high number of Alawite doctors, pharmacists, and engineers who were victims of the genocide with comments like: “You all ended up as doctors and pharmacists.”

In the extremist imagination, the Alawite is no longer seen as an individual but as the embodiment of Assad, intelligence agencies, survival, and supposed privileges—similar to the Jewish figure in Nazi ideology. It is no coincidence that they are labeled as “internal Jews.”

This is how the story of Syrian nationalism collapsed, and the conflict was fully sectarianized, with all sins pinned on the Alawi-Alawi Assad as the one who monopolized the homeland and must be held accountable on behalf of everyone. Reminding that hundreds of thousands of Alawis died, were exiled, imprisoned, impoverished, oppressed, and suffered like others is of no use. Nor does it help to say that the regime protected no one, but used everyone, or that the revolution devoured its own children.

Sublimation, not tolerance

Nothing disrupts the path to liberation like unforgivable envy. The first step toward transcendence is to acknowledge it: not as an original sin, but as a psychological and social condition. There is nothing inherently wrong with envy. The problem lies in denying it and constructing a false morality that conceals our desire to destroy the other instead of elevating ourselves.

In psychoanalysis, sublimation is the only defense mechanism that neither denies nor represses desire, but redirects it into a higher symbolic sphere. Rather than seeking to thwart the other, we turn inward and ask: What does this feeling reveal about us? What do we truly want? How can we create what we desire instead of wishing it away from others?

In the Syrian context, as in others, transcendence does not mean ignoring pain, erasing history, or betraying memory. What we need is not tolerance — a concept that presupposes superiority — but a new political imagination that refuses to let suffering become a means of reproducing injustice. Instead of transforming the demand for justice into sectarian or regional revenge, it is reframed as an opportunity for coexistence, shared breathing, and shared survival.

Perhaps this is the most radical understanding of justice: not asking the other to bleed so that we can be equal, but helping each other to survive and thrive together. Recognizing that justice is only achievable when we redefine victory — not as a crushing triumph over another, but as bringing that victory into a world fueled not by envy but by a genuine transcendent desire for liberation. Envy says: “I don’t want the thing unless it’s mine alone,” and seeks revenge, while liberation says: “Let us see together, let us create together what none of us yet possess and what we all need.”