More than 150 people turned out in the rain and cold for the Napa Valley premiere of Michael Ramsdell’s, “The Anatomy of Hate, a Dialog for Hope” on Thursday night. This documentary looks at the sources of hate, the manipulation of the fear response in humans and people who have overcome fear to identify dehumanized individuals as creatures like themselves.

Ramsdell spent time working closely with various hate groups, not to change their views, but in order to see them as humans. During this time the question he had been asking himself took shape: “If man desires peace and prosperity for themselves and to pass it on to their children why have we so universally failed.”

The groups Ramsdell chose to look at in his quest included Israeli soldiers and Palestinian insurgents, white power groups and U.S. soldiers in Iraq. What he found was that these groups had a need to pull together for their own defense, which leads to the creation of a shared identity. The cultures then remembered the fear that the original groups knew and pass that knowledge on to future generations. As fear becomes institutionalized, cultures attempt to combat the fear by amassing power, which is channeled to reinforce the original hatred.

In the film Ramsdell illustrates the concept with an animation of a young child enjoying a lollipop. Out of nowhere a man appears and takes the lollipop. The child begins to fear that man and others like him. Suddenly, the child is replaced by a number of angry people holding lollipops looking across the empty space of the screen at narrow eyed aggressively posed others.

The movie is divided into four sections: fear, culture, hate and hope. Throughout each section, interviews with the different groups portrayed are cut together. We hear the stories of an Israeli tank commander and the stories of a retired Israeli soldier. There are a group of young Palestinian boys who live near the wall in the West Bank. There is Fred Kers Phelps and other members of the West Borough Baptist church. These people articulate their rationale for their hate, shout their hate as they march, shoot and threaten, live in their homes, raise their children and mourn their lost husbands.

The brutality of hate is shown graphically through burning crosses, exploding cars and executions of prisoners. But these images of death and the symbols that separate one person from another are not the most powerful moments in the film. The most powerful images come at the end of the film when Ramsdell turns the discussion to hope.

One story followed throughout “The Anatomy of Hate” is that of a man, who as a member of the Christian Identity Movement and its more militant arm, the Covenant, Arm and Sword of the Lord (CSA), was tasked with starting a race war by blowing up a gay-friendly church. The story moves forward and you wait for him to talk about what it was like to kill. Instead, he tells how sitting in the church he hears the people around him begin to sing, “For the first time I put a face on the enemy. These were just people who had moms and dads. Brothers. Sisters. Some of them even have children for all I know.”

He tells how he left the church, taking the bomb he had brought with him. He left the CSA and has spent time ever since helping to educate law enforcement. This is just one of the stories that gives hope to ending some of the hate.

As the lights came on in the auditorium, Ramsdell took the stage to answer questions from the audience. A young Hispanic man stood and began to explain that as a human rights activist and a Hispanic he found himself afraid of police. Others asked about the proper response to hatred and anger, sharing their real experiences and presenting hypothetical situations.