Thoughts on love and hate

The last time I saw the word “love” it was in the phrase “Love is love”, which, being meaningless, gave me no idea what it was supposed to be promoting. I thought it must be homosexuality because I’d heard Stephen Fry say the words, which was depressing enough. How could an intelligent man do something so inane as to repeat a meaningless slogan? But if homosexuality was the subject, what was the message? I thought it might be that it is love and not lust that brings homosexuals together, which people might accept now that it’s a generation since anyone heard of anything like the study that found that a third of American homosexuals had had as many as a thousand sexual partners.[1] It stands to reason that the longer censorship goes on, the more you can count on public ignorance.

On the walls of the classroom where the words “Love is love” were displayed were other slogans, like “Black Lives Matter” and “Celebrate Neurodiversity”. The teacher’s tee-shirt bore the words “Protect trans kids”. No multiplication table or picture of Abraham Lincoln was in sight. Apparently neurodiversity refers to things like autism and Tourette’s.

But I looked the slogan up, and it’s not about homosexuality; it’s about queerness. At least, I assume there is a difference. The idea is to ask “straight, cis people to see queer people’s humanity”. According to the article, not all queer people like it.[2] Some think it’s telling them they must make themselves palatable if they want to be seen as human. One, who might have been asking too much of a slogan, complained that it didn’t address the “hugely disproportionate rates of intimate partner violence affecting bi+ women”. Another averred that queerness must always be queered, which would require “levelling up from ‘love is love’ to slogans that recognise the complexity and intersectionality of queer struggles”. I suppose he’s right.

But leaving aside the queer, how is love among the normal? Immediately we are interrupted. Did someone say “normal”? Doesn’t he know that normality, the target of the revolution, must not be mentioned? We mustn’t refer to what is being overturned in case it sounds as if we think there’s something to be said for it. Rather, we must look on with approval as every norm is replaced by its opposite: not just heterosexuality by homosexuality or “queerness” but reproduction by willed self-extinction, for White people, that is, if they care about the planet; meat-eating by veganism or at least vegetarianism, although this doesn’t apply to Muslims; and Christianity by “wokeness”. We must think it only right for the disabled to have priority over the able-bodied, the mentally ill to be found more interesting than the sane, and for disorders to be celebrated as ideals. Above all, we want there to be women wherever there used to be men, and Black people wherever there used to be White people.

But to return to the subject, love is not exactly thriving among the majority. It was once found mainly in families, flowing between husbands and wives, parents and children, but not much of this remains. The husband is the ex-husband, living in a bedsit while his ex-wife and her boyfriend share the house. She hopes that the children are being well looked after by whoever has the job while she does more important things. The children for their part aren’t as safe as children used to be, especially at school, where they might be being taught how to masturbate or asked if they’re sure they’re boys or girls.

But things haven’t gone far enough. Every attempt is made to persuade women in particular to do whatever will destroy the last of love. Breakfast television steers them away from the necessary and good towards the freakish and transgressive, with topics such as “I’m selling my virginity to the highest bidder” or one about a gold-digger and her sugar-daddy, where the girl didn’t even need to sleep with the shrivelled old millionaire she’d paired up with, who presumably expected her to find her sexual satisfaction elsewhere.

Men bad, women good or men dumb, women smart was the idea that governed all the clips I saw. This was in 2018, when other topics were “My husband cheated on me with our daughter’s friend”, proving that men are bastards, and “I sleep with men to save their marriages”, which showed that if a woman has sex with your husband, she’s doing it to be helpful. Come to that, why not invite her to join the marriage? “We have the perfect polygamous relationship” was another topic.

The assault continues. The idea of women being loved in return for loving others, devoting themselves to them, making sacrifices for them, is very much in the past. It’s in women’s nature to be like that, and nature must be inverted, so they must be induced to behave in the opposite way. It is themselves they should love now, according to the media, and so Vogue says: “I love myself. Why is that so hard to say?”, Darling asks what self-love truly means, and a feminist interviewed on television holds up a book called I Love Myself.[3]

But the media’s latest product, which they are apparently selling hand over fist, is female infidelity. It’s empowering, they say.[4] Cosmopolitan has told women what to do after they cheat: first and foremost, don’t tell him. Women’s Health has explained why women shouldn’t regret having an affair. The Times has suggested that cheating might put a spring in their step. Call Her Daddy, a podcast produced by women for women, is selling a tee-shirt saying “Cheat on him”. It’s amazing, really, how quickly the media can ruin a society. It only seems a couple of decades since women’s magazines were telling their readers how to keep their marriages in good shape. Now, appealing to the radical selfishness they have instilled, they’re inciting them to wreck them.

*   *   *

Turning from love to hate, this word has replaced “hatred” for the same reason as “racist” has replaced “racialist”: it makes what it refers to sound worse and itself sounds more aggressive. “Racialist” sounded almost soft; call someone a racist and you’re hissing at them. “Hatred” sounds about as sharp as “grapefruit”; “hate” sounds like a stab.

The way people use the word today is an absurdity. To be accused of hating someone, or more commonly a group, you only need to disagree with your accuser. Unfortunately, as activists and the media present unfavoured opinions as malicious, half the population follows them and shuns anyone with such views, which usually have more going for them than ones that are approved.

As for hatred itself, as soon as you start to think about it you realise there’s nothing wrong with it. Some people hate cauliflower; some people hate the opera; some people hate the French. Some hate Mondays or their neighbours or Tony Blair. So what? No one’s going to get hurt.

Oh, but they might do, people will say. If you hate your neighbour, you might attack him. They needn’t worry. I can contain myself. Yes, but imagine if you did! It would be a hate crime! Can someone tell me why hate crimes are supposed to be so bad? Would it be better if I attacked my neighbour out of boredom?

Anyway, even if I did attack him out of hatred it wouldn’t be a hate crime because he is White and heterosexual and so am I. I can only commit a hate crime against someone of a different race, religion or sexual orientation or someone who’s disabled or transgender. Those are the protected classes.[5] I can attack able-bodied, straight White Christians all I like.

Not that I’d have to hate a protected person to make them the victim of a hate crime. I’d only have to target them wholly or partly because I felt hostile to their group, where hostility can take the form of any negative state of mind including unfriendliness or dislike.[6]

But in fact I could make them the victim of a hate crime regardless of my motive. The police aren’t interested in my motive; they’re interested in accumulating hate-crime statistics. That is why they don’t seek evidence, only allegations. If someone — it doesn’t matter who — alleges, or “perceives”, as they put it, that I attacked my victim because they were Black, say, that’s good enough for them. The person making the allegation “does not have to justify or provide evidence of their perception that the crime was motivated by hostility”, where the hostility — the dislike or whatever — would have arisen from the victim’s possession of a protected characteristic.[7] “Officers and staff should not challenge this initial perception”. Finding out the facts is the last thing the police want to do. It could cost them a hate crime.

I wonder why these classes of people ever received their special protection. Was it to suggest that they were especially at risk, like the way someone might shield their face to suggest that someone was about to hit them? But we had to have hate crimes, I suppose, or White people wouldn’t have been able to be punished any more than anybody else, and we’d still have equality before the law.[8]

Going back to my advisors, who think I need to watch my hatred, it’s nice of them to take an interest in my emotions. With so many other people in the world whose inner lives they could be probing and evaluating, I’m gratified that they found time for me.

Hatred is not just usually innocent; if you don’t feel it in certain circumstances there’s something wrong with you, the circumstances being when someone attacks or threatens something that you love. What are you going to feel for someone who mugs your mother? Affection? Unless you feel a degree of hatred, your limbic system is out of order; either that or you don’t love your mother. It’s the basic logic of the emotions: if you love, you can hate; if you can’t hate, you don’t love. This could be why we’re encouraged to see hatred as the worst of feelings. Take it out of us and they’ll have disarmed us and eroded our attachments into the bargain.

I suspect that the people behind today’s anti-hate campaigns want us all to be like the parents of Amy Biehl, an American woman who was murdered in South Africa by a mob of young Black men shouting racial slurs. When in 1998 the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission released the four who were convicted after they’d been in prison just four years, her parents flew over to show their support for the move.[9] Her father shook the killers by the hand. They don’t even seem to have shown any remorse.[10] Anti-hate propaganda promotes our self-destruction. If we’re going to pal up with people who kill our daughters, surely we might as well kill them ourselves and save the howling mobs the trouble.

What anti-hate movements largely do in promoting our self-destruction is promote hatred, specifically of all that’s good, like free speech, your people and your country. There needs to be a movement promoting hatred of all that’s bad.

[1] David Horowitz, 2000 (1998), The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future, New York: Touchstone-Simon and Schuster. Chapter 5, “A Radical Holocaust”, mentions a study from 1978.

[2] Mashable Middle East, June 30th 2023, “The problem with the ‘Love Is Love’ slogan”, https://me.mashable.com/sex-dating-relationships/29732/the-problem-with-the-love-is-love-slogan.

[3] (1) Vogue, Feb. 13th 2021, “I Love Myself. Why Is That So Hard to Say Out Loud?”, https://www.vogue.com/article/i-love-myself-why-is-that-so-hard-to-say-out-loud; (2) Darling, Feb. 14th 2018, “We Asked Real Women What Self-Love Truly Means and This Is What They Said”, https://blog.darlingmagazine.org/real-women-define-self-love/; (3) Fox News, Dec. 16th 2017, “Professor argues eating meat promotes toxic masculinity. Jesse Watters, Anne DeLessio-Parso”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir4Ltgj4o84. Anne DeLessio-Parso was a brainless, inarticulate feminist, who loved herself nonetheless.

[4] This was according to a young journalist, Freya India, on The New Culture Forum, Aug. 24th 2023, “How Feminism Exploits Young Women”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P165MCUVGOY.

[5] College of Policing, 2023, Responding to hate, https://www.college.police.uk/app/major-investigation-and-public-protection/hate-crime/responding-hate.

[6] Ibid.

[7] This is the College of Policing’s current subjective concept of a hate crime, from the “Hostility” section of the cited document (ibid.), which says that a crime “should be recorded and flagged as a hate crime” if the victim or any other person “perceives that they have been targeted because of hate or hostility …”. The “Hate crime” section of the same document also employs a subjective concept in defining a hate crime by reference to someone’s perception of the offender’s motive, making no reference to their actual motive. But the document also has an objective concept of a hate crime. The “Hate motivation” section defines hate crimes by reference to the part played by the hostility or prejudice felt by the offender for an identifiable group in determining who is targeted, which implies that the offender’s feelings are known and taken account of. It makes no reference to what anyone else might think the motive was. The “Hostility” section, as well as employing a subjective concept, employs an objective one in requiring the offender either to demonstrate hostility or prejudice in his actions or be motivated wholly or partially by hostility or prejudice, where again his feelings or attitude would need to be known.

[8] At the behest of the Home Secretary Jack Straw, hate crimes were brought into UK law as “racially aggravated offences” by the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998.

[9] Occidental Observer, Aug. 23rd 2023, “Amy Biehl, Forgiveness, And the Nature of ‘Hate’” by RockaBoatus, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/08/23/amy-biehl-forgiveness-and-the-nature-of-hate/.

[10] At least, reports gave no indication that they had expressed remorse. Certainly the crime didn’t upset their friends, who when it was described in court reportedly burst out laughing (ibid.).