Hate of America

Submitted by Michael McCanles (United States), Mar 19, 2003 at 10:55

I would modify Paul Johnson's comment only in this: that hatred per se, the need to hate, and consequently the need to find a recipient of that hate, is what motivates the marxists today and has ever since the time of Marx himself and before. I don't believe for a nanosecond in the left's concern for the downtrodden: this is their cover, their justification for their hatred. When one thinks about this, it appears that these people are, after all, cowards to the extent that they fear appearing publicly as people who just want to attack others for the sake of attacking them, hating them because all they can do is hate. Appearing so, naked of "reasons," "justifications," "causes" makes them look too sick, too repellant and odious. Look to the animus that runs just below the surface of Rousseau's treatise on the "causes of inequality," and you will find one of the first articulations of this generalized hatred. The person who rises above the pack is finally not hateful because he does so; he is hateful because in so rising he is more visible. Talking about people who hate because they hate is difficult and therefore not often attempted, because it lacks intelligibility. But read Milton's version of Satan's determination to hate--it is a cliche that such hatred is really a rebound of self-hatred, but that doesn't tell us all that much--where he says that he is going to hate whatever consequences to himself. That is the horror of hatred, finally: that it is ultimately a blank of roiling, seething unintelligibility. No wonder haters invented "ideology": it gives them intelligibility.

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