"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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