Sunday 15 October 2017

Revolutionary vs Reactionary Hatred: An Important Distinction



"Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we must use to crush the enemy."
-          Mao Zedong

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency.  To forgive them is cruelty.”
-          Maxmilien Robespierre

“How can you fight an enemy so filled with hate that they do not fear death? Even their children spit at our soldiers!”
-          General Fedor von Bock, remarking on Soviet resistance to the Nazi invasion, 1943

                Good and evil do not exist organically within nature.  Animals have no need of right and wrong; they simply fulfill their role within the ecosystems they inhabit.  Human beings are the only creatures on this planet with a need for good and evil because we have developed as a species beyond the confines of any ecosystem and have developed capabilities that grant us power over nature and each other.  This material reality gives rise to the necessity of moral responsibility.  When it first became thinkable for one human being to sacrifice the well-being of his or her fellow human beings in order to selfishly advance themselves in some way, this is when morality became necessary for the first time.  The presence of parasites and exploiters makes morality an essential feature of human life and survival, one that has become more and more essential as class society has advanced from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism.  Hatred, moral censure, indignation, and punishment are logical responses to the parasite that exploits the labor of others for its own gain.[1]
Just as Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton stressed the difference in his writings between revolutionary suicide (sacrificing one’s life for the greater liberation of the proletariat and humanity) and reactionary suicide (taking one’s own life in despair) there is also an extreme difference between revolutionary hatred and reactionary hatred.[2]  Revolutionary hatred is hatred shown toward the true enemies of humankind: the capitalist class and its defenders, whose crimes are enormous and whose threat to the survival and well-being of the human race is clear and well documented.[3]  Revolutionary hatred is hatred based on knowledge and class consciousness; a hatred that fuels the progressive struggle for working class emancipation and the revolutionary overthrow of class exploitation and alienation in all its forms.  Reactionary hatred is very different.  Reactionary hatred is based not on knowledge but on fear, scapegoats, bigotry and ruling class lies meant to keep working people divided, alienated, and blind to the nature of their true oppressors.[4]
Reactionary hatred is the tool that has been used again and again from the beginning of civilization by ruling class circles to divide and conquer the people they exploit.  Radio Liberty and other pro-capitalist propaganda sources worked hard to aggravate national separatism in the USSR for this very reason, using quasi-fascists recruited from non-Russian Soviet republics to encourage the breakup of the country.  By 1990 a full-scale sectarian war had broken out in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and sectarian strife between Armenians and Azeris had taken dozens of lives.  The USSR as a whole was well on its way toward dissolution and capitalist restoration, with reactionaries fueling the process at every stage.[5]
It is the monstrous nature of reactionary hatred, so well publicized especially with regard to racism and xenophobia, that causes so many people on the left today to renounce hatred altogether and argue that only love and unconditional non-violence will make the world a better place.  But this is a perspective we cannot afford to take.  Without revolutionary hatred all the love in the world will be useless in the face of ruling class power and the bigoted forces of reaction.  History is very clear that you cannot love your way to revolution, you must fight your way to revolution.  This was captured perfectly in the eulogy given to assassinated Mozambican revolutionary leader Eduardo Mondlane by his comrades in the FRELIMO movement fighting against Portuguese colonial rule in Africa:

And we honor him because he taught us to hate, for he taught us whom to hate and why to hate.  Son of a freedom fighter, descendant of freedom fighters and a leader of freedom fighters, he knew the importance of the right target for hatred, what a formidable weapon it could be if directed correctly: “Yes, our men must kill...but not fight against the color of the enemy, fight against the things he fights for, systems of economic and social control”.  All his efforts to provide all possible support to the armed struggle reflected a bitter and serious understanding of the power of the enemy, a clear understanding of who the enemy is.  We now add to all this our knowledge of the brutal way in which he was murdered.[6]

Without revolutionary hatred toward our real enemies, the true monsters of the world, there can be no victory in the class struggle and their criminal systemic exploitation of the earth and its peoples will continue unabated.  In spite of the often deeply hypocritical Christian rantings to the contrary, the hard truth remains that we must hate our enemies if we want to overcome them.[7]
                It wasn’t love that shut down the murder factory at Auschwitz.  It was not love that stormed the Reichstag and brought Hitler’s monstrous empire to its knees.  It was not love that turned the tide of World War Two so decisively at Stalingrad.  It was hatred that did these things.  All around the world, from America to the Soviet Union to China, people rallied against the reactionary monstrosity of fascism and the horror it was unleashing on the world.  They saw its crimes with their own eyes and they despised it.  They knew that fascism had to be destroyed, that this rapacious, murderous, warmongering force for reactionary imperialism needed to be stopped.  In the Soviet Union’s monumental struggle against Nazi Germany, the Red Army’s commissars cultivated a “sacred hate” for their fascist enemy among the troops, focusing on the terrible atrocities committed against the peoples of the USSR, the horrific tortures inflicted on men and women participating in the partisan struggle who had been captured by the enemy, the wholesale destruction inflicted on the Russian land, and the need for vengeance against the reactionary perpetrators of these crimes.[8]  Thus they displayed revolutionary hatred, they fought against the real enemy, and together they won.
                To abandon hate, even if that were possible, would mean abandoning one of our greatest weapons in the class war and in the universal struggle for human liberation.  When confronted with something as monstrous as capitalism and class exploitation, fascism itself being an extreme version of it, hatred is the only legitimately moral emotion to feel.  To feel love in the face of such blatant monstrosity would mean collaboration, corruption, and moral degradation.  When the Zionist state of Israel imprisons the Palestinian people in ghettoes, keeps them under constant surveillance, constant harassment, constant persecution, and constant brutalization, in the same manner as many European states did to the Jewish people for centuries, then those human beings subjected to such inhumanity have as much right to revolt as the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto did and with just as much moral righteousness.[9]  Hatred has a time and place, as does love, and we must have the proper judgement to know when either emotion is appropriate.
Ultimately human morality cannot be sustained without the hatred and persecution of what is immoral.  This is why Ernesto “Che” Guevara insisted so strongly that “a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy”. 
                Moral degradation is the only way to describe how large sections of the left in Europe and North America have been co-opted in recent decades as stooges for imperialism under the guise of “humanitarian intervention” because they have been trained to uncritically (and lovingly) believe the stories of anyone who claims to be oppressed without actually analyzing the material conditions involved.  The Bosnian and Croatian fascists, Kosovo-Albanian drug cartels, racist Libyan Islamic terrorists, and foreign-backed death squads in Syria, as well as their paymasters in Western intelligence agencies, have all exploited this pathology masterfully to manipulate Western public opinion, even Western leftists who claim to be staunch anti-imperialists, into going to war and invading foreign lands as proxies of the imperialist superpower.[10]   The damage that this inflicts is catastrophic, transforming radicals into apologists for imperialist wars, mass murder, and capitalist expansion imposed on entire populations by armed force and violence.  Thus we see how naive ideas about love and non-violence can mesh with reactionary hatred and ruling class agendas.  A racist glorification of the supposed “meekness” of people in the Third World has convinced many supposed progressives in positions of privilege in the First World that it is their duty to “save” the wretched of the earth, even if it means bombing their countries back into the Stone Age.[11]  This is the nature of liberalism: good natured fools or self-enriching tricksters who try to humanize that which can never be humanized.



[1] For an excellent summary of the evolution of morality as a function of maintaining group solidarity against parasitism and abuse, see Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires.  Plume, 2007.
[2] Newton’s brilliant writings on building revolutionary working class consciousness among African-Americans should be required reading for First World communists in particular.  See Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide.  New York: Penguin, 2009.
[3] See, for example, Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium.  London: Verso, 2008; Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.  New York University Press, 2014; Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World.  London: Verso, 2002.
[4] Reactionary hatred is fundamentally based on false consciousness.  See Michael Parenti, “False Consciousness,” in Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader.  San Francisco: City Lights, 2007, pp 181-186.
[5] Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union.  New York: iUniverse Books, 2010, pg 208.
[6] Cited in Eduardo Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique.  London: Zed Books, 1983, pg 224.
[7] For an excellent criticism of pacifism from a radical perspective see Laurent Moeri, “Why pacifism is morally indefensible,” January 21, 2014.  http://antidotezine.com/2014/01/21/why-pacifism-is-morally-indefensible/
[8] Albert Axell, Russia’s Heroes 1941-1945: True stories of the Soviet patriots who defied Hitler.  London: Magpie Books, 2010, pg 145.
[9] In 2002 the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising aroused the ire of the Israeli state when he threw his support behind the struggle for Palestinian liberation.  John Rose, “Marek Edelman: Last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis,” The Independent, October 7, 2009.  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/marek-edelman-last-surviving-leader-of-the-1943-warsaw-ghetto-uprising-against-the-nazis-1798644.html
[10] The “humanitarian intervention” strategy that the West first employed in Yugoslavia in the 1990s has been repeated again and again since.  See Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia.  London: Verso, 2000.
[11] For an examination of this ideology, which is so rampant among NGOs and mainstream social-democratic politics, see Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.

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