It’s not just Hate

Liberal analysis of Xenophobia is woefully inadequate

50 more people have joined the growing list of those who have been killed white-nationalist terrorism. They join the six killed in Quebec city (2017), the 11 killed in Pittsburgh (2018), the nine killed in Charleston (2015), the six killed in Oak Creek (2012), and the many others who have fallen victim to white-nationalist acts of terror. The victims all sharing their belonging to racial minority groups and religions.

Every death prompting the same question — why?

Hate

The answer that keeps being repeated is hate. Hate is what motivated them. They hate minorities and people of colour. Islamophobes. Racists.

This answer is not wrong, it is, however, inadequate.

Limiting the conversation to the concept of hate leaves it at an abstract level, one that requires no introspection as to why this hate is there. One that provides no practical path for solutions. It also becomes the platform for cheap political point keeping manifesting in slogans such as ‘love trumps hate’ or of speeches at vigils like the one I attended in Toronto after the Christchurch shooting that implores us to respond to this hate with ‘Love’, with ‘refusing to be divided’. What good do these platitudes serve when people are being slaughtered in places of worship, what good does this rhetoric do for the three-year-old toddler killed in Christchurch?

The limitation of our analysis to Hate is not too different from George W Bush’s speech to Congress after the 9/11 attacks. He tells a captive audience and world that “They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

His analysis amazingly brushes over the fact that it was the US that armed and funded the Taliban during the cold war, or that, although the Taliban has unelected leaders and that “they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” The US had no problem propping up the Ghadafi’s and Saud’s and Hussein’s of the world as long as it was in their interest. Saddam Hussein, who would be later overthrown and killed for possessing and using chemical weapons; weapons who’s acquisition was facilitated by the US as they were supporting both sides in the Iraq-Iran war during the ’80s. To his credit, however, even Bush, through his speech was wise enough to differentiate between Islam and Terrorism.

What’s amazing about the speech given by George W Bush is that it might as well have been said by anyone opposing US imperialism!

Today, the same speech given by Bush in 2001 is being recycled and we are missing the, equally if not more important, analysis as to why Hate has surfaced.

Fertile soil

If we are to believe that Hate is the answer to the question of why? where does this hate come from?

It certainly cannot be confined to a presidency or a few other actors who have recently surfaced. Although they do share in the blame of fermenting sentiments of fear and hatred and should be held accountable. Nevertheless, they too are products of an overarching system. This is to say that the hatred being espoused today is not a contemporary issue. It is one with deep roots.

These roots were absent from the vigil I attended and are largely left unexamined in the media.

They are the roots of imperialism that allowed Bush, Obama, and Trump today to continue their interventionist policies in the Middle East and South America. A history that spans back to the Spanish-American war in 1898 where a lie similar to that of Iraq possessing WMD, about an explosion on board the USS Maine was used to justify liberation type intervention only to then subjugate the island of Cuba to US interests. A pattern that will repeat itself again and again through the Cold War in Asia and South America. A pattern of regime change and brutal suppression of dissent including the support of fascist death squads dependent on the drug trade to finance weapon purchases — the same drug trade that the US was waging a war against but covertly facilitating to further their interests.

They are the roots of slavery and colonialism which provide the global north with its wealth as well as the first instance of the ‘white man’s burden that established a relationship that, once direct conquest became unfashionable, led to the creation of international monetary bodies that now extort poorer nations into accepting free trade conditions that will decimate their local economies for much needed financial aid.

They are the roots of settler-colonialism found in Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand which required the genocide of native populations and their confinement to open-air prisons called reservations. Even today, after lacklustre and superficial attempts of ‘reconciliation’ or ‘nation-to-nation’ relationship building, communities hoarded on these lands continue to have their sovereignty impinged on for the sake of pipelines and military bases.

Today, the Native population and Aboriginals are looked at as drunkards and gambling addicts. Those of African descent are still looked at as animalistic and have bananas thrown at them at soccer games. Arabs are barbarians as is their religion. They always needed us to civilize them and always will.

Apologizers for this history, or rather, those who think there is nothing to apologize for and point to the great advances of ‘western’ civilization, rightfully say that all of these events have nothing to do with race, rather it is a matter of power. Why shouldn’t a country who has possession of this much power intervene to ensure their interests are safe? Why should a country not subjugate another people who, due to their own lack of advancement, are unable to defend themselves?

The liberal response here is equally inadequate, pointing to abstract topics of morality and ‘right’. I must, unfortunately, say, that those espousing conquest have a more accurate read on the situation. Just as individuals compete for resources, so too must nation-states; and in this capitalistic competition there is no room for morality or ‘love’. Rather a new morality is substituted, that of Social Darwinism and supremacy.

It is clear now that we can no longer confine our analysis to that of ‘hate’ rather it is that of supremacy. A supremacy that is founded in a long and violent history. How can we dream of countering that with something as abstract as ‘Love’?

Crisis intensification

This supremacy was always there, the violent outbreaks we are witnessing today, however, are a result of the fact that this supremacy is now being challenged.

It is being challenged by many things including demographic changes and climate change. Climate change, on the one hand, is requiring the curtailing of unfettered economic growth which is based on political power and is, as such, seen as a direct threat to this supremacy; while demographic changes including rhetoric around female empowerment and gender identity challenge the cultural norms that are correlated with former glory.

Those who have been pumped with the idea of their supremacy are now having to see mosques go up in their neighbourhoods, veiled women in their supermarkets, gay couples holding hands, people from ‘shithole countries’ immigrating into their countries and, in a sense of indignation and horror, exclaim “How dare you think you have the same rights that I do! How dare you think you can have the same things that I have! Don’t you know that it is because of me that you are even alive?”

Concrete analysis

There is no question that this line of thinking is being reinforced by contemporary actors. Actors that maintain that the economic supremacy of their countries must and can only be maintained by the subjugation of others by making sure that the Other ‘knows their place’. This rhetoric comes in forms varying from ridiculing calls for change to flat out xenophobia and calls of physical violence.

The calls to say no to ‘Hate’ do not tell us how to deal with these. Neither do they acknowledge the underlying system of capitalism that dictates supremacy through competition and the suppression and subjugation of the Other. As a matter of fact, the abstractness of ‘Hate’ leads to further frustrations to defeating supremacy by opening the door to the equally abstract debate on freedom of speech that serves no one.

At the vigil I attended, speakers, like clockwork, made sure to let us know that thought and prayers were not enough, that we needed more. Yet none of them expounded what this ‘more’ is. Only one speaker said that we must confront racism where we see it. But this form of individual action is not enough, especially when, in nearly every city, there are groups actively organizing on the foundation of supremacy.

Confronting racism when we happened to come across it does not qualify as a way to confront these organized groups. However, building awareness of them and frustrating their efforts is. The most effective way of doing this is through our own organization and shedding our liberal sensibilities so we can show up to counter-protests and meet power with power. Is to realise that supremacists organizing is no longer an issue of free speech or the (nonexistent) free market of ideas, rather it is supremacy manifest. Such concrete manifestation of supremacy cannot but be met with an equal and more concrete manifestation of anti-fascism.

Even then, however, this confines us to reaction, to immediate resistance. What is needed here, then, is a double movement, the first of immediate resistance; and the second of sustained campaigning to dismantle the structure on which this supremacy stands. A consistent campaign to move us away from the competitive forces that create the conditions of Social Darwinism and forces us to compete as individuals and nations for the resources we have. In its place, we need to build a more democratic and collaborative system that allocates resources based on need. A system that does away from the concepts of capitalism, of race, of borders, and of supremacy.