| | Making hatred a virtue | |
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LindyLady
Posts : 176 Join date : 2009-10-22
| Subject: Making hatred a virtue Tue 27 Oct 2009, 8:17 pm | |
| Elite mouthpiece tries to blame public for culture of hate, assuming it even exists.
Making hatred a virtue Tom Rosshirt Sunday, October 25, 2009 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/25/INGN1A90V0.DTL
When President Obama and former President George H.W. Bush made a joint appearance at Texas A&M University last week, Bush used the opportunity to call for greater civility in public discourse.
He identified the right problem but called it by the wrong name. When people say, "Obama wasn't born in the United States" or "Obama is instituting death panels" or "W knew about 911" - that is not incivility, that's hatred.
Hatred takes aim at a person's moral character. It imputes evil motives. It is impervious to facts and reason. Hatred's goal is to demonize and destroy its object - and to do that, it tries to recruit others to share the hatred.
This spread of hatred is society's greatest danger. If it continues, it will undercut cooperation and end our ability to govern ourselves.
Stopping it won't be easy. Those who hate almost always deny it. When they admit it, they do so with a satisfying self-deception: They claim that their hatred is a principled response to the bad character of another. As their hatred rises, so does their moral self-regard.
This is why certain media personalities become heroes to the people whose hatred they express. In a country steeped in the teaching that love is the greatest commandment, they reassure their audiences that their hatred is not a sin but a sign of their own virtue.
The lie is so seductive because the truth is so painful. We don't hate people because of their bad character, we hate people because of our bad character. We hate people who interfere with our view of ourselves. We hate people because they are more powerful than we are - because we have a lust for power ourselves and they are standing between us and the supremacy we seek for our people, our party, our views. But seeing this truth would be admitting that we are no better - and possibly worse - than the people we hate. This would bring pain beyond what most people can bear, and so most run from it by imputing an evil to their neighbor awful enough to justify the magnitude of their hatred.
More than 50 years ago, Carl Jung warned of groups whose "chimerical ideas, upborne by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality" and are "dangerous as sources of infection."
These groups, he wrote, "hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum."
The most alarming development today is not the rise of hateful ideas themselves but the large number of people we might have counted in the "mentally stable stratum" who have instead given the hate campaigns either vocal support or silent assent.
Every time politicians or opinion leaders refuse to denounce expressions of hatred that come from people in their party - whether out of fear or greed or because they share the hatred - they are letting the fire burn ever closer to the heart of this society.
Bush was wise and good to invite Obama to Texas and to speak against incivility. Perhaps he could expand his idea and invite others to join him. He might assemble and co-chair with former President Bill Clinton a bipartisan group of political leaders who agree to speak out publicly and decisively against hateful statements and movements that come from their side of the political divide. These leaders would have the stature to call out and discredit the hatred. If respected voices don't speak up in opposition, it's hard to know how else we can stop it.
Tom Rosshirt was foreign affairs spokesman for Vice President Al Gore and national security speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. Contact us at forum@sfchronicle.com. | |
| | | Silent Wind
Posts : 261 Join date : 2009-10-24
| Subject: Re: Making hatred a virtue Tue 27 Oct 2009, 8:26 pm | |
| Oh the propoganda pieces by those who get paid very well to deceive. Once one fully wakes up, they see straight through the lies and the backwards world. | |
| | | ScoutsHonor
Posts : 1360 Join date : 2009-10-20
| Subject: Re: Making hatred a virtue Wed 28 Oct 2009, 10:59 am | |
| IMHO, there is a time and a place for hatred. What would the appropriate emotion be for a Hitler, or a Stalin?
In addition, what is "hate speech" to some, is honest criticism to others... | |
| | | C1 Admin
Posts : 1611 Join date : 2009-10-19
| Subject: Re: Making hatred a virtue Wed 28 Oct 2009, 5:47 pm | |
| I don't normally send a letter to the editor, but after reading this I sent-off the following to that paper.....
Mr. Rosshirt's Insight piece is like reading an article that appeared in the Nazi volkischer beobachter (voice of the people) newspaper, where the public is framed as evil, and thereby threating the security of the "Master Race" when the people dare to question their authority.
The fact of the matter is that ponerizing society is something the elite funded think tanks have been diligently engaged in for at least the past century. One does not have to look far to find the work of social philosopher Herbert Marcus at the Frankfurt School, where Marcuse acknowledged that "humans have inner drives which in the majority aren't violently evil," so he switched the source of evil from the inner individual, to society, where the sickness of society does not emanate from the individual, but from the society itself.
Further, I wonder if Mr. Rosshirt referred to any of the Club of Rome (where Rosshirt's former boss, Al Gore, is involved) reports before blaming the public for being a source of "hatred." For if Rosshirt had done the least bit of due diligence, he would have found that this global elite group had published reports making statements such as “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man," as well as, "The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
Moreover, with only slightly more due diligence Mr. Rosshirt may have found an interesting statement made by Mr. Gore's carbon venture business partner, Maurice Strong, where he said during the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"
So, Mr Rosshirt, I ask you to look again at who is it really that is filled with hate, who is it that funds this hate, and who is it that has turned the business of hate into a science and who has weaponized this science and is deploying onto society? | |
| | | youngbuck
Posts : 19 Join date : 2009-11-04
| Subject: Re: Making hatred a virtue Fri 06 Nov 2009, 1:13 am | |
| - Quote :
- end our ability to govern ourselves.
Yep, can't have us governing ourselves. We need big brother to govern us because he doesn't hate like us - he's loving, caring, compassionate, and knows what's best for us. He makes the case that we "hate" too much, and then tells us what the consequent is. | |
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