Thoughtful Hatred
Whom should we hate, for what, and why?
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, emotions were understandably running high. Strong emotion is infamously not a reliable basis for good decisions, and accordingly, many bad decisions followed in rapid succession.
One was the invasion & subsequent multi-decade occupation of Iraq, but that isn’t the focus of this article. Another was a series of shameful & unfortunate attacks on “middle eastern looking” people living in New York at that time, some of whom weren’t even Muslim. It’s expecting a bit much from riled up American jingoists to know what Sikhs are.
Islam
9/11 was perceived by many as a declaration of war, by the Islamic world, on the Western (read: white Christian) world. But that was imprecise thinking, & the interpretation Bin Laden himself intended. We could not afford then, and cannot afford now, to be at war with the Islamic world; that’s two billion people, with a B. Roughly a quarter of humanity!
Hatred is an oft maligned emotion, but evolution gifted it to us with good reason. Harm only follows from its misapplication. In most cases that takes the form of applying it too broadly. It’s the most energetically expensive emotion to sustain, and caustic, such that if you aren’t careful, it can injure you as much as whomever you intend it for.
Not cast widely like a spotlight, then, else you’ll squander limited and volatile munitions. Instead, focused like a laser beam, constructively rather than destructively, only onto the appropriate target.
In the case of 9/11, the appropriate target was Wahabism/Salafism. To blame only the hijackers themselves, or only Bin Laden, would ignore the religious and political context which produced them. Sometimes it’s moral to purposely miss the forest for the trees, lest you chop down some that you didn’t mean to. This wasn’t one of those times.
The rubric I use is asking myself, of the target I’ve chosen, “is anyone included in this who doesn’t deserve to be?” In the case of Wahabism/Salafism, the answer is no. This isn’t to say no terrorists come from the Sunnis or Shiites, but if you made either your target, you would necessarily be including many peaceable, educated families in your crosshairs. Not so much the case with Wahabism/Salafism.
It gets messier in the case of migrant crimes. Some are petty crimes of opportunity & desperation, the kind which occur anywhere there’s enough people. But others are plainly religiously motivated, calculated to inflict mass loss of life, and part of a broader pattern we cannot afford to ignore.
Not forgetting the horrors of predominantly Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs trafficking and raping European minors, which by their own statements has a religious dimension to how they justify it. Not forgetting that UK governments conspired to conceal these crimes, and still punish whistleblowers from their own citizenry.
Not forgetting also the comically disproportionate overrepresentation of Somalian migrants in recently uncovered Minnesotan daycare scams. Nor the larger pattern of similar scams being uncovered in other states, ongoing at the time of writing.
Unless you’re blind, deaf and dumb, it won’t escape your notice that certain NGOs are facilitating the same illegal mass migration of primarily Somalians & Pakistanis into Japan, as is ongoing in the UK and United States. Why multiple nations at once? Why Somalians & Pakistanis? Why only to developed countries? Who funds those NGOs, and what motivates them?
Eventually, you must wake up to the fact that you have an enemy or enemies who are actively fighting you, or at least taking the most grotesque advantage possible of your trust & goodwill. Then you must determine (carefully and with precision) who those enemies are, before settling on what you intend to do about it.
China
This brings us to China. In the wake of Covid, emotions were again running high. People who lost family members were looking for who to blame. When it came out that the most probable origin of Covid was a lab in Wuhan, which the Chinese & US governments both attempted to cover up with the “wet market” narrative, a series of shameful & unfortunate attacks on Chinese or “Chinese-looking” people followed.
You may remember this as the “Stop Asian Hate” movement, short lived because it was founded under the assumption that the attacks were being perpetrated by white supremacists. When an overwhelming pattern appeared in the demographics of the attackers which contradicted the movement’s narrative, it abruptly evaporated.
This is another situation where it pays to sit and think about who your enemies are, before taking a swing at them. If you start fighting before you know for certain who you’re fighting, you’re liable to fight the wrong group, making enemies of people who might’ve been allies.
Now consider that multiple discreet Chinese biolabs have been discovered in the US with stored samples of contagious diseases, and Chinese nationals smuggled a fungus which afflict crops into the US (coinciding with that same fungus destroying said crops). It becomes impossible to ignore that we’re being fought.
Not the conventional sort of fighting, but the low down, dirty kind. However patient, however longsuffering and magnanimous we might wish to be, if you’re being fought by a determined enemy and you don’t fight back, eventually they kill you. But again, it pays to be precise when picking your target.
”Chinese people” aren’t enemies of America. We would be doomed if they were! There’s 1.4 billion of them, depending how much stock we put into the Chinese government’s tallying methods. It would be sick and shameful to pour out our anger over the CCP’s underhanded biowarfare onto Chinese immigrants to the US, who in most cases fled here specifically not wishing to live under the sort of government which fields organ harvesting vans.
Lumping victims of the CCP in with the government persecuting them because they’re the same race is the same sort of reckless, imprecise thinking to blame for the persecution of Arab Americans & Sikhs following 9/11. Hatred is a warranted reaction, in the wake of Covid, to the discovery that the same government whose negligence (or malignance) loosed Covid-19 on the world…has been attempting to purposely cultivate subsequent pandemics in the US.
But again, our enemy is a government, not a race. The CCP is communist in name only. One need not search far outside glittering neon special economic zones like Hong Kong or Shenzhen to find scenes of rural poverty which shouldn’t exist in a moneyless, classless society.
Modern China has, anatomically speaking, a National Socialist government with Technocratic characteristics. Things are what they are, not how they define themselves, else we must believe that North Korea is a Democratic Republic.
Technocratic National Socialism is perhaps the most ruthless combination of attributes one could possibly choose to combine. Favored ethnic monoculture of fanatic supporters? The Han majority. Alien enemy and scapegoat? The Uighurs, whom were sent in truckloads to “re-education centers”, something not even Brits have done after Muslim migrants raped their daughters en masse.
It isn’t remotely irrational or bigoted to recognize the danger posed by a rising National Socialist world power with expansionist ambitions. Least of all when the global race for AGI brings the CCP unavoidably into conflict with America over Taiwan, biggest single supplier of high performance microprocessors in the world.
This is usually where the whataboutism begins, from the mouths of the devil’s many advocates. Funny how he never seems to want for those! “China is just following in America’s footsteps.” Setting aside for a moment that China’s activities in Africa make the crimes of European colonizers look like a Disney Cruise, let’s grant that conceit.
Even in a world where we pretend Chinese human rights abuses are no worse than America’s, by whatever slanted framing apologists are using this week (such as defining the Israeli war with Palestine, which has so far killed 4% of its people in 3 years, as a genocide…history’s slowest & least efficient) the US and China are still two big fish in a small pond.
I love Chinese culture. How could anyone dislike Wuxia? Who didn’t enjoy the Three Body Problem? Isn’t Chinese food popular everywhere? I know many lovely, educated, peaceable Chinese people (living in the US). I wish with all my heart that Sino-American relations could be as warm as those between the US and Japan. But as the Chinese idiom goes, “One mountain cannot contain two tigers”. Or in Americanese: “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us”.
Like certain strains of Islam, the CCP has promised world domination to its supporters, except one of them can actually put real power to put behind the threat. It’s hard to imagine lasting coexistence with a neighbor whose express ambition is to conquer you and drink your milkshake.
That attitude, instilled into its most ardent nationalist supporters by the CCP, is a problem of ideology rather than race or even culture. Depending how granular we get when defining what we mean by culture, anyway.
Iran, Israel
Talmudic teaching concerning Jewish supremacy, chosen by God, destined to rule the world by covenant & birthright, has similarly contributed to popular antisemitic sentiment for many centuries.
It’s hard to feel warmly toward a people whose word for you means “cattle”, & whose precondition for eschaton is that all the unwashed barbarians of the world have been conformed to Noahide law. (It seems our ancestors were unwittingly waiting, all this time, for the Jewish people to teach us correct morals.)
In every such case, the people themselves are fine. Individual Jewish people are lovely. Individual Chinese or Arabic people are beautiful, undiminished specimens of humanity; the problems we associate with each never had any intrinsic basis, whatever the internet’s slovenly, craven racists might tell you.
Persians in Iran, for example, were an educated, peaceable and modern people until the Islamic revolution. Many Persians took to X following Operation Epic Fury to celebrate the death of Khamenei & his short-lived successors. Imagine what a small minded error it would’ve been, to write off “Iranians” as our enemies!
India
Indians have suffered a reputation hit in recent years due to increasingly prominent discussion of H1-B abuse by major US corporations, used to bring in low paid tech workers who cannot unionize under penalty of deportation.
Imagine how foolish it would be, to blame Indian tech professionals! For them, however exploitative the H1-B program is, it still represents a golden opportunity to earn wages unheard of in India, by which to support their wives and children back home. Can you blame them for that?
As with prior examples, the problems of India (for which it’s often callously lampooned online) aren’t intrinsic to the Indian people. Remember, India is a world power. They have a space program! Not a theoretical one like ESA, which buys rides on Russian rockets. They have no shortage of world class aerospace engineers. Indian men are plainly intellectually gifted, and have a famous aptitude for STEM.
So what should we make of PSAs urging them to make use of public restrooms? Why do they swarm comments sections under videos documenting literal poop-flinging festivals, bathing in trash-filled rivers, or medicinal consumption of animal urine/feces, defending each practice?
Individual Indians are plainly not deficient. Again, they build & launch rockets. They successfully landed Chandrayaan-3 on the Lunar surface, a feat many private American space companies still fail at. Unless one is incurably insistent on genetic determinism, dysfunctions in Indian government & society aren’t reasonably attributable to race.
India is a very old nation, Hinduism predates even Judaism. It has long been a mecca for spiritual seekers, including the likes of Alan Watts. It has a burgeoning tech industry, & has made a long list of contributions to science & mathematics.
So, what’s holding it back? Corruption, mainly. The more I’ve browsed Indian Twitter/X, the more complaints I’ve seen, from Indian nationals, about their corrupt officials.
My first suspicion was that the caste system might be somehow implicated, but I could imagine equally persuasive arguments to the effect that those barriers are a load bearing pillar; Segregating indirectly by IQ & teaching menial laborers to be content with their lot so they might accrue good karma & reincarnate into a higher caste.
Instead, most credible commentators I’ve seen attribute corruption in India’s politics to “izzat” (honor). A cultural mindset of petty tit-for-tat, “I’ve got mine” thinking similar in many ways to the Chinese concept of “little cleverness”, what we in the West might call “life hacks”.
High Trust vs. Low Trust
A common illustrative example is whether or not one returns shopping carts after use, or leaves them in the parking lot to be collected by a store employee. You stand to gain nothing, directly, by performing some fraction of the cart tender’s duties for him. Izzat would regard it as foolish, retrieving your cart is someone else’s problem.
Buffets are another example. A while back, a trend went viral wherein Chinese tourists piled their plates high at buffets with the most expensive foods (like lobster tails or crab legs) only to eat a small fraction and then throw away the rest. This was regarded not as inconsiderate or wasteful, but intelligent.
In their minds, it was the buffet owner’s fault that he didn’t think to install any safeguards against those who would take advantage. They (probably Han, probably CCP stumpers) were favored sons & daughters of the new rising power, soon to control the world. Why shouldn’t they do as they please?
Or styrofoam-filled concrete bridges. Why do high quality construction, for low wages? Or running over someone twice, because you’re on the hook for their medical bills if they survive. Or restaurant employees, caught on film collecting oil from the trash or gutter for re-use. Buyer beware, right? So long as nobody catches you, and no one who gets sick can prove anything, it’s just shrewd business!
Especially when living under the thumb of a totalitarian state ingrains in you that small acts of rebellion are the only possible kind! These aren’t biologically driven behaviors. They’re the result of spiritual deformation under lifelong totalitarian repression, also observed in Russians & North Koreans.
This principle is the defining attribute separating high trust from low trust societies. It’s why boomers grew up in suburbs where nobody locked their doors, and now grow old in a world where everything in the store except books, sunscreen & deoderant is kept under lock & key.
It’s not impossible to live this way, indeed much of the world has for thousands of years. It’s just not how most Westerners want to live, within an inside-out fortress, hardened against its own occupants.
Closing Thoughts
Do you see how transformative this single insight is to our perspective of China & India? What a blunder it would’ve been to scorn the people of either nation, neglecting our due diligence to get to the bottom of certain patterns of objectionable behavior?
I don’t believe now, and never will, that any group of people is necessarily the enemy of any other. Nor that any group of people is objectively deficient, compared to any other! I believe in the inherent dignity & equality of human beings. However I do not, and never will, believe in the equality of ideas or ways of life.
We, by virtue of our position of privilege & power in the world as Westerners, are the focus of a great deal of politically motivated propagandizing. Entire degrees exist in “grievance studies”.
In such courses, one learns that while all nations in premodern times engaged in conquest & slavery, it only became wrong when Europeans got way the fuck better at it than everyone else. For this original sin of being unfairly proficient, everyone descended from Europeans owes a full ride to the collective losers of irl Risk.
A great deal of time & money has gone into campaigns of demoralization, urging that if we will not voluntarily end our own lives, we should at least live in shame and servitude, assisting the destruction of our nations and cultures. A life of tearful cuckoldry & atonement which will never be sufficient, until there are none of us left to punish.
In fairness, given how long & varied the rap sheet of colonizer atrocities really is, it’s an understandable reflex for descendants of slaves or indigenous people to look upon white people with hatred. But only to the extent that hating New Yorkers of Middle Eastern descent was an understandable, yet misguided reflex. In either case, a misattribution / targeting error.
Trying to persuade people with real grievances of this concept must sound like pissing on their shoes & telling them it’s raining. But nowhere in this article have I urged you not to hate. Just that before launching your weapons, it’s wise to first triple-check that they’re pointed in the right direction.