For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee. – Captain Ahab
An article from last summer, Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist, offers powerful indictment of what the modern Left has devolved into. The points made are strong, with three in particular standing out. The first – the notion that people on the Left oftentimes have no idea what the opposition’s positions or beliefs actually are – is noted as Reason 5. The second – a reference to a famous (in some circles) interview of Milton Friedman by Phil Donahue – is the last paragraph of Reason 2. The third, and the point of this particular essay, is Reason 1: Hate.
If you spend any time talking or reading or on-line-blogging politics, you will cross paths with hate-spewing liberals. Their targets are myriad, but if you truly read those targets, they’re often constructs, amalgamations and gross and selective exaggerations. The George W. Bush they hate bears some resemblance to the actual former President, but their characterization is a grotesque extreme. The Koch brothers, another favorite pair of bogeymen, are portrayed as evil, greedy, rent-seeking pigs, when any rational assessment shows them to be nothing of the sort. Republicans are automatically presumed to be poor-hating, racist, bigoted, bible-thumping, ignorant, gay-hating, greedy, selfish, et cetera and so forth.
What’s most troubling about this is that the power of hate has throughout history been harnessed and exploited by those who seek to dominate others, to impose their will on populations and to destroy others. None of this is what liberalism purports to be about. We are told the Left are the champions of the poor, of the oppressed, of minorities, of the working classes. Hate, however, is the tool that the Bolsheviks used to agitate the masses, that the Nazis used to lead Germany into war and to exterminate millions, that the Klan and other racist groups used to agitate, and that all the various factions of militant Islam use to motivate and recruit. Hate endures, hate burns, hate poisons. Hate can drive a man for a lifetime, hate can push a person to commit horrific acts, hate stands strong against rationality, hate resists question or dissent, hate closes the mind.
Hate is certainly not the exclusive province of the Left. If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to stumble upon the Stormfront web page, you’ll find it in heaps. If you’ve ever seen a recording of a Westboro Baptist protest, the hate oozes off the screen. Those people, though, don’t purport to care about others, just themselves and their own. The Left, however, openly declare that they are motivated by their care for others. They further declare that they are the ONLY ones who care for and about others. They assert their good intentions, and use hate as the motivator behind those good intentions.
The parallels in history couldn’t be more obvious. Hate rooted in envy motivated the rise of communism and socialism around the world, with disastrous results for both the nations that embraced them and for the world itself. Yet the Left would have us follow that same path, would have the government take from those who have, would use force to suppress dissent and conflicting ideas.
Some people today warn against the possibility that America could become a nation similar to the oppressive totalitarian regimes of recent history, and call on curtailing the ever-expanding power of government to avoid this eventuality. The Left scoffs at that notion, yet it is utterly blind to how the hate it embraces, lives, eats and breathes is exactly how totalitarianism has always arisen.
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