On hate and its consumption
Something which our own Andres pointed out to me this weekend has made me do some deep thinking. It was this post:
I want that motherfucker dead. I want his feral family to lose everything. I want his wife to have to go back to doing softcore porn. I want all his followers to wail and rend their garments.
— Liberal Librarian, Emotional Support Cuban 📚 🥃 (@liberallibrarian.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Many of us, rightfully, are looking forward to this cretin's demise. I take nothing back of what I said in this post. Evil people like Donald Trump, like Pol Pot, like Jefferson Davis, like Adolf Hitler, deserve neither sympathy nor mercy. People like them swinging on a gibbet would provide salutary lessons.
I had and have no problem with Israel taking out Yahya Sinwar. I had and have no problem with President Barack Obama ordering the killing of Usama bin Laden, and disposing of his corpse in the most un-Islamic manner. Again, these were malefactors of evil, and deserve none of the usual niceties.
The questions we have to ask ourselves is this: You hate Hamas. You want as many of them killed as possible. Does that extend to ordinary Gazans. Does that mean that Gazan children should starve to death? Or, you hate Donald Trump. You hate the people in the states that voted for him, and you want them to suffer. But they won't suffer in isolation. Do you want people who voted against him in those states to suffer as well? Are they acceptable collateral damage?
These are not minor questions. They go to the heart of what it means to be a decent human being.
"Hamas poked the tiger, so everything that happens to the people over whom they govern is not of my concern." Really? Is that the morality we're going to take on? As our American Moses said—and no, I do not in any way mean the current Speaker of the House—"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." For once you begin to engage in a cycle of retribution, the logic of it leads to the end of the human race.
Unless. Unless.
This piece is an expansion on a piece I wrote last week, where I lauded the Northern Irish for getting off that merry-go-round of atrocity and counter-atrocity. Hamas carried out a pogrom on Israelis. Does that mean that Israel has a right to destroy Gaza and all its population in totality? MAGA voters put us in this predicament. Does that mean they must all die for this country to move forward? At what point does the charnel house become too clogged with the dead?
Eventually, if you live in hatred, you become no different than those whom you hate. For they hate you. You lose your humanity because you consider those whom you hate to be subhuman. And such a belief system leads to the concentration camp. It leads to the gulag. It leads to Tuol Sleng. Repaying hatred with hatred, repaying atrocity with atrocity, leads to death and destruction and nothing else. It doesn't lead to healing. It doesn't lead to peace. It doesn't lead to a better, healthy human life.
History is the nightmare from which we are all trying to awaken. There are many reasons for hatred. And they all seem righteous and logical. But do they lead to anything better? Do they lead to a world in which our descendants can live without fear?
I am not in any way a pacifist. Pacifism in the face of violent tyranny is an abdication or morality. I do not consider Jeanette Rankin as a hero for her sole vote against World War 2. I consider her a fool for refusing to face the world burning. But at some point, one has to realize that grinding conflict, both internal and external, will yield no results. At some point, one has to choose a different way.
Sadly, we are nowhere near that point. Our enemies around the world want to destroy us. The only moral choice is to fight with all of our strength. Offering our necks for sacrifice is not courage, but cowardice. Eventually, though, we need to get off of this thrust and counterthrust. We have to realize that constant conflict will merely serve the powers and principalities. I do not pretend to know when we will reach that point. Perhaps it will take something as what happened in Northern Ireland, with the Omagh bombing, from people who did not want to give up war, to make us realize that war is not going to get us what we want. May we reach that point soon, for what we are doing now is not working.