We have this organisation called Hope not Hate in Britain, basically a para-state organisation that monitors and propagandises against what is broadly called “fascism” but in actuality constitutes everything more right-wing than Labour in 1997—along the way they sweep up assorted nutters, such as Piers Corbyn and David Icke; the latter insists that inter-dimensional reptiles literally run the planet; Hope not Hate would maintain that he secretly means the Jews, even though he says he does not speak metaphorically—if you step back from this debate it is really quite hilarious.
Hope not Hate is a para-state organisation in the same way as in Venezuela the Chavistas have motorcycle gangs who clonk you over the head with a monkey-wrench if you say too many things out of line. Technically, never associated back to a party or the state—yet cover is always run, no deep police investigation will be made. Deniable control. So while all the main party leaders make obeisance to Hope not Hate the hardcore (antifa) runs free with information from the organisation.
What is “hate”, anyway? I experience a negative physical reaction when I see two men kiss—I have to turn away. Hateful. Actually, it is disgust—an involuntary physical reaction: I also feel disgust at mould and dog faeces, yet nobody would say that is “hateful”. A suppurated wound disgusts me, but I do not hate it. Hate is abstract; it is not gustatory, it is intellectual.
Take a teenager who confides to a friend over an illicit cigarette that he hates his dad. “Yeah, I hate my old man too. Boomers.” Does that mean his father disgusts him? Unlikely. He means something more like he has a laundry list of disagreements with his dad and that he has worked all these disagreements into a semi-coherent whole that he mentally reviews and feels anger over and ultimately wants to destroy; and this is what hate is. Except, really, the teenager has no problem with his father as a person—he has intellectual disagreements and is in a power struggle with dad until he leaves home, at which point the “hate” diminishes. Dog faeces might disgust me—yet I would hate the abstract “type of person who never cleans up after his dog”, a picture of whom I have built up in my mind.
I walk down a street in Tower Hamlets and say: “It feels really alienating to be the only British person in the street.” Hate! Leftist hypocrisy—if a black academic says he feels alienated because he is the only black man on the faculty the left thinks his discomfort should be eased. The left projects. The rightist says, “I don’t hate Islam; it just so happens most terror attack in this country originate with Muslims.” The left reads this as hate because their modus operandi is dualism—good/evil—so if you criticise “X” you must mean all “X” are evil and must be destroyed; just like capitalism must be dismantled to end the climate emergency.
Which side of the political divide “hates dad” (still, at forty-three)? The left: even their hate figure, “the racist”, remains abstract—there is no natural disgust reaction to “racism” because in-group preference is natural; people who react negatively to “racism” do so in a contrived way. The reaction is not the same as if you turned out of bed one morning and found a dog turd on the landing—it is the opposite, feminine hysteria. Rightists have natural disgust reactions to certain events and take steps to isolate themselves from these things; even if this act is undertaken peacefully, as in “white flight”, it becomes designated as “hate”. Yet it is not hateful; there is no abstraction to it, no desire to destroy an abstraction—whereas all left-wing “evils”, from capitalism to white supremacy to dad, are abstracts that you hate; indeed, the left is not against hate as such—and will happily say, “Love football, hate racism”. The left is hateful.