The strong are enraged by the powerless because they must suppress their own fear.

Evidence

Women and Jews can be seen not to have ruled for thousands of years. They live, although they could be exterminated; and their fear and weakness, the greater affinity to nature which perennial oppression produces in them, is the very element which gives them life. This enrages the strong, who must pay for their strength with an intense alienation from nature, and must always suppress their fear. They identify themselves with nature when they hear their victims utter over and over again the cry that they dare not themselves emit. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 362

Categorization

• APHORISMS: Reads as a durable piece of psychological wisdom: the persecutor identifies with the victim’s cry precisely because he has forbidden himself to utter it.
• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s previous notes on how perpetual oppression produces accommodation rather than rebellion, and on projection in fascist personality formation. — connects to: Difficult conditions activate underlying weakness beneath nations’ superiority beliefs, motivating self-defense. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 98