Hate is always hungry

Hate can be a powerful bonding and motivating force for groups of people. Defining someone as ‘other’ helps to firm up the edges so we know who we are. Coming together to fight the hated other gives us focus, common purpose and identity. We bolster each other’s feelings of self righteousness and remind each other how justified we are in stamping out the hate object.

If we win, we either have to give up on the heady intoxication of hate or we have to identify a new hate object. A new enemy of the people. And then we all have to band together to destroy them. 

In the beginning, the targets are always the most marginal and vulnerable people. It’s easy to garner support for the abuse of people who are already mistrusted for some reason or another. As a violent and oppressive regime rolls on, it has to identify new targets for hate and inevitably when you’ve taken out the marginal folk, a new margin emerges. People who start the violent uprising can find that they’ve become the people at the edges who are the new targets.

I don’t know how many thoroughly committed Nazis were killed by the Nazis, but that number is not zero. I don’t know how many dedicated cultural revolutionaries were killed by Chinese communism, but that number isn’t zero either.

It is amazing to me that anyone could hear the call to hate and violence and assume that’s always going to go well for them. Hate is always hungry and sooner or later it eats its own.