“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” Sermon: “A Knock at Midnight,” 1958 Martin Luther King
“I hate you!” Who has not screamed that invective, or had it directed at them? It is generally short-lived, an intense, emotional response to an accusation, characterized by anger, contempt and/or disgust.
Such words are usually directed toward specific individuals, things, or ideas. In most cases those feelings are ephemeral. But I write about what I call ‘institutional’ (for lack of a better term) hatred, where an individual or group deliberately foments hatred toward a person, race, ethnicity, or nation. Time is a healer, even of ‘institutional’ hatred. Bill Clinton was despised by Republicans during the 1990s, and as Matthew Hennessey wrote in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Hate is too mild a word for how Democrats felt about George W. Bush while he was in the Oval Office.” Today, in both cases, hatred has vanished.
But such hatred is not always transient. Blacks were hated by many in this Country for decades, culminating in the white-robed Ku Klux Klan, whose remnants still exist. The consequences were the killings – many by lynchings – of tens of thousands of black Americans. For more than ten years, from the mid 1930s through May 1945, Nazis maintained a nation-wide hatred toward Jews and others they classified as undesirable. The consequence was that between fifteen and twenty million civilians were imprisoned, tortured, mutilated and/or murdered, in a network of over 44,000 Concentration Camps scattered across occupied Europe.
Hatred clouds reason. Hatred of Jews is what the Nazis employed to get ordinary citizens to go along with their despicable extermination policies. Reason, on the other hand, is what permitted the Allies to ultimately defeat Nazism.
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Author: Ruth King
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