You’re Still Fighting Hate With Hate — Not Love
It’s easy to claim that you’re fighting hate with love, but are you really? It’s tougher than it sounds. Just look at last week’s chaos in Charlottesville.

“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
The quote above, most often attributed to Martin Luther King Jr., is tossed around often enough in idealistic attempts to promote love instead of hate.
There’s a problem with its recent use though: a lot of the people espousing the “idea” don’t quite get it. Popular consensus now seems to be that “hating the hateful” is “love”.
I’m going to tell you why that’s wrong.
The recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, have once again pushed those ideas of love and hate into the mainstream consciousness. Tangent ideas follow — tolerance, identity politics, free speech… all of these have turned into buzzwords at the center of debates and discussions. Long story short, a group called ‘Unite the Right’ stepped out to rally against the decision to take down the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. As a segment of this group rallied under banners bearing swastikas and the confederate flags, they were quickly labelled Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists. Counter-protesters came out in full force and the mayhem began. People were hurt, a couple died.
Already, angry and passionate people have stormed social media and celebrities are raising it on their talk shows and interviews, everyone eager to give a piece of their mind.
“There’s so much hate, too much hate,” the righteous will say. “We have to answer it with love.”
And, so saying, they begin to denounce and condemn groups with whom they disagree, cheering when those groups meet misfortunes. Shortly after the events of Charlottesville, a movement begun to identify the so-called White Supremacists from the photos of the rallies posted online, in order to shame them and even get them fired from their jobs. People were soon celebrating these people being terminated from employment, basically ganging up on them online to revel in glorious schadenfreude.
They’re Nazis, after all, right? They’re a hate group, unlike us. They’re intolerant, unlike us. That’s why they deserve the worst that’s coming to them. They deserved to have their rally broken up. It is a good thing to beat them with baseball bats; a noble thing to punch a Nazi in the face.
Many people carry this opinion — an opinion that they’re free to have, and which is largely based on known history. No one of sound mind wants a repeat of the holocaust, after all, of slavery. However, a lot of these people are also proudly proclaiming on their status messages that they’re crusaders of “love” against “the hate movement”, when they’re actually fighting hate with even more hate.
It’s not just the rallies of Charlottesville that has seen this kind of phenomenon. It’s all over the globe and, sadly, nothing new. People who stand on a side that declares love and tolerance as its mantra are dangerously susceptible to thinking that everything they do is an act in the name of love.
But whether your basis is sacred or secular, acting in the name of love often means extending that love to your enemies, to people whom you don’t agree with, and even condemn. Love is, by definition and common understanding, a wish for the well-being of another.
To hope for the worst for another individual is “hatred”, no matter how “hateful” this other person is. So, no, despite the divisive rhetoric often spewed by Donald Trump, there is no ‘love’ in walking up to a stranger wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ gear and slapping them across the head, or harassing them, as some have already experienced.
It’s hard to offer wishes of well-being on people who hate someone based on their skin color, or someone who entertains thoughts of genocide, isn’t it? And yet fighting hate with love (and I mean to reeeally fight hate with love, in action, and not just because it makes a good byline on Facebook and Twitter) requires exactly that.
You have to humanize your enemy, something that is enormously difficult, whether you’re Right or Left or up or down or whatever the heck your subjective political opinion demands for a label.
A few months ago, I had a conversation with some friends about ISIS’s terrorist activities, where I said something along the lines of, “There must have been a great failure of upbringing for ISIS terrorists to think the way they do.”
While I don’t think that’s wrong, that discussion did reveal to me that it’s a lot more complicated than that. It turns out that so many ISIS terrorists are disenfranchised and neglected members of society, outcasts, people who have been shunned by society and otherwise had no one to turn to at the lowest points in their lives. ISIS propaganda, when it reaches their ears, becomes a haven for them. Some might even say that there’s something ‘beautiful’ in the promises ISIS offers to people who join their cause. It must be, frighteningly so, if it can drive people to commit horrific acts of mass murder. It was the first time I was forced to think of ISIS terrorists as people, with motivations and fears, with end-goals — warped though they are — and not just as failed products of upbringing.
It’s not just madness. There’s method to it. There’s reason.
How many of you who declare they’re “fighting hate with love” have tried humanizing the Nazis and terrorists you’ve faced, both face-to-face and across a computer screen? How many would have rather seen them losing their jobs, getting physically abused, getting shamed online, and reveled in their misfortune because ‘they deserved it’? Some people would be surprised to find out just how disenfranchised some of these ‘privileged’ actually are, surprised at how much shit they’ve actually have to put up with. For those willing to open their minds, some of the ‘white men’ who’ve been lumped in with the Nazis in Charlottesville have wrestled with neglect, abuse, judgement, even sexism and racism themselves — and when the so-called “privileged” white male has endured due to their race and gender, we must know that there’s something wrong here. This is broadly explored in Cassie Jaye’s award-winning documentary The Red Pill.
Don’t point to an imaginary ‘system’ as a counterpoint. Point to their actual, concrete experience. Until you know what their experience is, you haven’t extended love to your enemies. The moment you lump someone with a group so it’s convenient to assume the worst about them, and therefore feel clean wishing the worst on them in turn, you have battled hate with even more hate.
As long as people deny this, as long as people shriek and cover their ears and ignore the plights of “the other”, people like Donald Trump will continue to be president (votes of silent majorities), and melees like that of Charlottesville will continue to happen (punch first, ask later). When you let your politics dictate your morals rather than vice versa, you become another cog stuck in a big rusty machine.
It’s the tribal nature of humanity, the instinct that always demands some form of ‘us versus them’. It’s so difficult to try searching for common ground with people whom you disdain because God forbid that these people might actually have a basis in their views (not that their views are correct, but that their individual experience/education/struggles have pushed the toward one side of the political fence). According to Philosopher Daniel Dennett, searching for common ground is always the first step of “arguing with empathy”. When your end-goal becomes understanding and learning, rather than punishment and revenge… then, you start fighting hate with love.
There’s no need to compromise values, here. One’s approach can always change regardless of one’s values. Fighting fire with fire is always easier, though the world may burn. An eye for an eye is always easier, though the world may go blind.
But fighting hate with love? That’s that idealism looks like. Doesn’t look so easy now, does it?
Think about that before you so boldly tell people about it on social media.
