Hate Explains Everything What’s So Bad About Hatemongers, Gun Nuts, and Paranoid, Tax-Resisting Extremists? by Jim Goad So what’s the truth? Are the militias malicious? The experts will tell you that they are. But despite their millions of dollars of top-flight research, they can’t come up with better explanations for WHY they’re malicious than these: HATE and PARANOIA. That would be sufficient, if there were nothing to hate and no reasons to be paranoid. HATE SPEECH is the most Orwellian concept to emerge from the twentieth-century twilight. It is especially deceptive because it hides behind a Happy Face mask. Most people want to be on the side of love, right? Like all dangerous ideas, the notion of hate speech sounds good until dismantled piece by piece. The first problem is with the term’s vagueness. Hate speech, apparently, has become anything they hate. Through relentless exposure to well-meaning, soft-suds imagery, otherwise intelligent people have been brainwashed to believe that "hate" is a satisfactory explanation for any human action. Reducing complex sociopolitical struggles to a matter of "hate" is as simplistic as blaming it on "sin," but they fall for it. A Manhattan lawyer who describes himself as "America’s leading expert on the militia movement," writes that he hugged his three-year-old kid the night of the Oklahoma City bombing. He told Junior that it happened "because they hated too much." For now, let’s accept the premise that one hundred sixty-eight humans died in Oklahoma City because people "hated too much." I think it’s a silly and reductive proposition, but let’s accept it. Now answer these questions, if you’d be so kind: Did a federal sniper shoot Vicki Weaver in the face because he hated too much? Did our government conduct the Tuskegee Experiment with syphilis on black soldiers because it hated too much? Does our justice system ignore a quarter-million jailhouse rapes a year because it hates too much? Did LBJ lie about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, causing the deaths of 60,000 Americans and nearly a half-million Vietnamese, because he hated too much? Did our tax dollars recently finance over 200,000 corpses in El Salvador because our government hated too much? Did 116,708 Americans die in World War I because our government hated too much? Did 54,246 Americans die in the Korean "conflict" because our government hated too much? Did "our" government never come clean and admit that these wars were all useless wastes of human life that only benefited the wealthy because it hated too much? Did the U.S. government intern Japanese citizens in concentration camps during World War II because it hated too much? Did the British police drag IRA members from their beds, drop them from helicopters, apply electrodes to their genitals, drug them, and insert blunt objects in their anuses until they fainted because they hated too much? Do Israeli police shove ball-point pens inside the urethras of Arab political prisoners because they hate too much? Did Stalin and Mao each kill more people than Hitler did because they hated too much? I’ll expect your answers next Monday morning. America’s first hate-speech law was 1798’s Sedition Act. Barely twenty years after the Declaration of Independence advocated overthrowing the British government by force, the United States made it a crime to advocate overthrowing the government by force. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. It became a punishable offense to say or publish things that could "excite popular hatreds" against government officials. So maybe all this chest-thumping about "hate speech" has less to do with racism than it has to do with criticism of government. That’s the hate-speech uproar deconstructed. So now hatred is the enemy that the experts fear. Like all objects of fear, it’s something they don’t understand. The problem with most "experts" on hate is that they seem truly bewildered as to what causes people to hate. They’re aware that hate surrounds them, but they don’t know why. They don’t appear to be people who’ve ever had much legitimate cause to feel burning, frustrated hatred in their lives. People in Northern Ireland know what it’s like to hate. Blacks in America know the feeling. But the experts scratch their heads and ask for more federal grant money to solve the problem. Some of them actually want us to spend millions of dollars to research what causes human hate. They implore you to fight the hate. They want you to kill it, squash it, suffocate it, exterminate it. Blind as bats, they entirely miss the point that the problem isn’t hate, it’s human nature. Especially when human nature rubs elbows with wealth and power. Why do people hate? It’s a natural human emotion, not some sinister aberration. Just as love comes from satisfaction, hate comes from frustration. Hate is as useful as love, and it often works a hell of a lot quicker. Hatespeak is usually more honest than lovespeak, and it’s always better than doublespeak. Some things seem worthy of hate. People hate being told lies, especially when they might die because of those lies. People hate when others are indifferent to their situation. People hate when they realize they’re being robbed and can do nothing to stop it. HATRED comes from powerlessness, whereas DISDAIN-the sort that highfalutin media yogis show for the redneck rabble-rousers’ ethno-geo-ideological world-is more often reserved to the cushier classes. Poor people hate, while the affluent show disdain. The powerful have always regarded the powerless with a supercilious contempt that could very rightly be called hate. So they’re in no position to act holy about so-called hate speech. How can you protest your oppression (perceived or actual) and sound lovey-dovey about it? The MOST important type of speech to protect is hate speech, because it often contains desperate truths that would lose their urgency if expressed calmly. Most revolutions throughout history could hardly be called acts of love. You know what I consider hate speech? Words or phrases that are dangerous falsehoods, such as "friendly fire." That’s hateful to me. Peace with honor. Collateral damage. Pacification programs. Peacekeeping actions. National security. Vital interests. Bald-faced lies that get people killed. When D.C. powermongers accuse Montana pitchfork-bearers of terrorism and make a garish media parade of it, they should really wipe their own dirty asses first. When government PR-puppies wag fingers and preach that "with free speech comes responsibility," they should check their own words. The government never flinched from infecting Americans with hate speech whenever "vital interests" were at stake somewhere on the other side of the planet. My brother had never met a Vietnamese person until the feds armed him with an M16 and told him to go murder them. When he came home on furlough and talked about how he wanted to "kill gooks," it wasn’t the Klan who put that idea in his head, it was his Army officers. At six or seven years old, I remember seeing The Green Berets with John Wayne and being convinced of America’s meritorious mission in Vietnam. Was I influenced by hate speech? Probably. Maybe they’re brainwashing everyone to love each other because they realize we’ll all be fighting over the same loaf of bread. Excerpt from The Redneck Manifesto, by Jim Goad, copyright 1997. Available for $15.40 from http://www.Amazon.com/