Hate, hate-speech and hate-crimes

“I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world…. I hate feeling this hatred.”

(Quote from English novelist Margaret Drabble from May, 2003)

As we will see below (and also here), Leftists are great haters and to cover up their own hatreds—of America, the rich, WASPS, the bourgeoisie and anyone who is happily doing well for themselves—Leftists are extremely punitive about any suspicion of hatred in others—leading to the concept of “hate crimes”—crimes which they see as deserving especially heavy legal penalties.

Another writer sums that concept up rather well:-

I have personally never understood why it is worse to kill someone because they’re gay or black than it is to kill someone because you wanted the $12.50 they had in their wallet. It adds a never ending and unnecessary complexity to the law, the natural result of politicians reacting to every news event with new legislation. I remember calls for special penalties for assault committed against teachers after some horrific school violence somewhere. It seems a direct violation of the principles of equal-treatment under the law when we start creating special victim classes

Fred Reed puts the case against the “hate crime” concept very simply:-

The continuing effort to expand laws against hate crimes is not, I think, good for either the police or the country. Let me tell you why.

To begin with, the effect is to create political crimes. In the past, if I shot a Vietnamese, or Mormon, or white Christian, or homosexual, the crime would be murder. My politics would have nothing to do with the definition of the crime. Whether I did it for fun, or because I didn’t like immigrants, or thought Mormons were terrible people, would have nothing to do with it. The crime was killing, not disliking a group.

That seems to be changing. Political view now begins to define the crime. Killing a homosexual because I disliked homosexuals would be a hate crime, while killing a rich man or beggar because I disapproved of either would be ordinary murder and subject to lighter penalties. That is, hating some people is becoming comparatively acceptable under the law, while hating others, if not yet a crime yet in itself, makes a crime carry a heavier penalty. We are criminalizing thought, and giving added legal protection to some but not others.

This is an excellent way to undermine respect for the law, the courts, and the police.

I think we all understand that these laws are not aimed at hate, but at particular kinds of hate found disagreeable by particular political groups, chiefly on the left. (Note that the groups granted special privilege invariably vote Democratic.) That is, we all understand that a woman who kills a man because she hates men will not be guilty of a hate crime, as neither will a black or Hispanic who kills a white from hostility to whites, or a homosexual who, furious at heterosexuals for their lack of respect, kills a heterosexual.

We are seeing the continuation, by means of the criminal-justice system, of the Balkanization of the society that has long been otherwise advanced. It is most curious. We talk about how we believe in equality before the law, and that advantage should not be distributed according to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin. In fact we are on the way to making everything whatsoever depend on these things.

And on the real source of hate in politics, U.K. columnist Richard Littlejohn is succinct (Quote from The Sun of Oct. 12th, 2002):-

The fact is that the real Nasties are all to be found on the Left. Most of the spite and class hatred comes not from Conservatives but from Labour, whether in the vindictive campaign against the countryside or the war on motorists.  Or by deliberately trying to prevent private school pupils from getting to the best universities, regardless of how well they did in their exams. The siting of asylum seeker camps in Tory constituencies is another example.

I can’t ever remember, in 18 years of Conservative rule, the Tories ever wanting to eliminate all Labour opposition. But Labour wants to drive the Tories into the sea, just as the Arabs want to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. I know from my experience as a columnist that if you attack any vaguely Conservative cause, the worst you can expect is a bit of grumbling and a few angry letters.

But turn against the Left on Palestinian homicide bombers, illegal immigration or fox-hunting and the hate mail and death threats have to be read to be believed. Challenge the smug New Labour/Guardianista axis and expect a barrage of lies, smears and character assassination in return.

But the big recent demonstration of how close to the surface hate is among Leftists is of course the absolute frenzy of hate exhibited towards the very moderate and centrist President George W. Bush, not only among American Leftists but among Leftists around the world.  The most often-noted expression of such hate is an article by the supposedly moderate American Leftist Jonathan Chait.

Jeff Jacoby comments on Chait and political hatred generally as follows:-

“A popular conceit of the left is that political hatred is a sickness of the right, one to which liberals are largely immune. “Just who are these Clinton haters,” asked Time magazine in April 1994, “and why do they loathe Bill and Hillary with such passion?” It answered, in effect: That’s just the way conservatives are. The article quoted historian Alan Brinkley: “Liberals tend to value tolerance highly, so there’s a greater reluctance to destroy enemies than among the right.”

That was a whopper even in 1994, a year when Republican leader Newt Gingrich was routinely vilified as a McCarthyite and a racist. Ten years later, with a storm of Bush hatred raging among liberal Democrats, the notion that the left is too high-minded to savage its opponents is about as plausible as the claim that the moon landings were staged in Hollywood.  The left’s bitter fury toward Bush is more than just atmospherics. It is the big political story of the past two years. The visceral revulsion Bush provokes in so many Democrats fuels the passion that has had such a seismic effect on the presidential campaign ...

In a startling article in The New Republic last year, Jonathan Chait made what the magazine trumpeted as “The Case for Bush Hatred.” He opened with a declaration that until recently would have been unthinkable in a respected journal of opinion: “I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.” Bush’s policies, Chait wrote, “rank him among the worst presidents in US history”—but “I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. . . . I hate the way he walks. . . . I hate the way he talks. . . . And while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.”  Chait went on to make a factual, detailed case for his poor opinion of Bush. But what does “I hate the way he walks . . . I hate the way he talks” mean, if not that the facts and details don’t really matter? Bush hatred isn’t a considered judgment. It’s a distemper; a derangement”.

In addition, Powerline is one of many who showed in detail how item after item in Chait’s supposedly “reasoned” explanation of his hatred is a distortion of the facts.  The response is entirely emotional, not rational.  It has a very close parallel in something I consider in detail elsewhere.  One would think that a President who oversaw a major expansion of welfare, deposed a Fascist dictator and gave unprecedented prominence to blacks among his senior staff would be greatly respected by Leftists but the opposite is the case where George W. Bush is concerned.  It clearly shows that the issues that Leftists publicly espouse are not remotely what really drive them.

And an earlier article by Jeff Jacoby was also very good on the endemic hate-speech of the American Left:  “I had noticed that when a prominent Republican or conservative said something offensive about liberals, it typically set off a storm of media condemnation, while an anti-conservative smear voiced by a liberal or a Democrat rarely drew any protest.”  And he goes on to give a heap of examples.

And Alan Bromley gives some amusing examples of unreasoning hate among grassroots Leftists.  And Michelle Malkin has felt the hate personally.

It might be objected that the Leftist haters so far described are minor figures not representative of mainstream Leftism.  So what about the national leader of the major Leftist party in a long established Anglo-Saxon democracy?  Would he be representative enough?  Let’s read about the man who became Federal leader of the Australian Labor Party in 2004, Mark Latham:-

“He has never resiled from the class warrior’s description of himself he gave The Bulletin: “I’m a hater. Part of the tribalness of politics is to really dislike the other side with intensity.  And the more I see of them, the more I hate them.”

Although it’s not the way well-adjusted people work, Latham—who once described himself as “a maddie”—sees it as normal.  “Well, everyone’s got hate in their lives. I mean, it’s just part of life ... I hope my little boy hates a Liberal prime minister who sells out our national interests.

“I grew up in a family that used to hate Bob Menzies. You know, my grandparents and their first education they gave me in politics, you know, what’s wrong with having those feelings about people who you think are hurting the country?  If you are a good Australian, that’s a natural feeling, I would have thought.”

Along with tribal hatreds, licensed violence is part of being a good Australian.  “Look, this idea that politics can be too rough and too personal is a bit rich. I can take you to any sports field any Saturday morning and show you parents getting stuck into it. Having a go at the ref, yelling abuse.  It’s part of the Australian way. We’re not a namby-pamby nation that hides its feelings. I think we’re a nation that’s willing to call a spade a spade and, if need be, to pick up the spade and hit someone over the head with it.”“

(Quote from here or here).

Most Leftist leaders are more cautious in what they say about themselves than that—though their deeds are often eloquent enough (Stalin, Pol Pot etc.) —but his Australian bluntness and outspokenness make inference about his motivations unnecessary with Latham.

But perhaps the clearest evidence of the ferocious hate that burns in many Leftist hearts is the way groups that ought on theory to be highly critical of Islamic fundamentalism are in fact supportive of it.  The most spectacular example of that is probably this:-

“Homosexuals face terrible persecution under the Palestinian Authority and yet, there are actually groups like “Queers for Palestine” that go to anti-Israel demonstrations to shout slogans in support of Palestinians and then they get roughed up and shouted down by the Muslims at the demonstration. There is something very mind-boggling here, and it is connected to the radical feminist who shows up almost nude at an anti-war demonstration taking the side of militant Islam, when the fact is that if she even showed her face under some of the regimes she supports she would be mutilated or raped or killed or burned alive.”

Clearly, their burning hatred of their own society and what they see as its “establishment” blinds them to all else.  And who would have thought that people as anti-religion as most hard-core Leftists are would be so protective of what is probably the most ferocious form of religious fundamentalism there is—Islamic fundamentalism?  Only their relentless hatred of their own society makes sense of it. 

When confronted with the sort of discreditable Leftist attitudes and behaviour that I have referred to above, a common ploy for American “liberals” is for them to to disown their Leftist brethren and say that they are different.  They say that the people I am talking about are extremists and mainstream “liberals” are not like that.  I will believe that the day I hear American “liberals” condemn a certain Communist tyrant by the name of Castro but in fact we don’t even have to look as far as Cuba to see the falsity of the claim.  The man who was at one time front-runner to become Democrat candidate in the U.S. Presidential election of 2004 was Howard Dean.  And here’s a choice quote from him uttered during his successful campaign for the office of Democratic party chairman in 2005:-

“I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for, but I admire their discipline and their organization,” the failed presidential hopeful told the crowd at the Roosevelt Hotel, where he and six other candidates spoke at the final DNC forum before the Feb. 12 vote for chairman.

As Captain’s Quarters comments:-

“Oh my. Does the DNC want the Democrats to become the Party of Hate? And just what kind of faith does Howard Dean have that requires him to “hate” Republicans? I have no problem with opposition; that’s the basis of free speech and democracy, after all. But to have someone who wants to claim the leadership post of one of the two major political parties tell the nation that he hates a plurality of Americans would disqualify a Republican candidate immediately. Apparently, over at the DNC, that’s their primary prerequisite.

Dean and his followers demonstrate the illness that has infected the American Left since the 1960s. They don’t just oppose—they hate. They hate Republicans, they hate suburbia, they hate just about everything America has done. They also hate it when people point out this rather obvious fact, claiming that their critics engage in censorship and McCarthyism. However, it’s pretty damned difficult to maintain that facade when Dean gets up on a stump and says, “I hate Republicans and everything they stand for.”

So let us conclude this article by listening to the words of one of the most enduring heroes of the Left:-

“Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become .”

The words of Che Guevara

So Leftist accusations of “hate-speech” are just camouflage for who the real haters are.

So what should we say to Leftists about that?  I think this is pretty apt:-

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam [is] in thine own eye?  Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye”.

(Matthew 7: 4,5)

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, June 23, 2005 at 10:46 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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