Hate is a strong word

Hate is a strong word
is what I used to say. Now:
no Love without Hate

Inspiried by David Graeber’s Essay Hatred Has Become a Political Taboo included in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World – an eye-opening book, to say the least. He says:

…even in the case of racism, anti-Semitism, or ethnic chauvinism, to frame these things in terms of “hatred” almost necessarily means focusing on the followers, not the leaders. The great murderers of the twentieth century were not men driven by terrible passions, they were cynics who fomented and exploited the passions of others. …the passions they they manipulated were from every part of the emotional spectrum, their followers murdered just as much from love of humanity, or at least love of nation, family, community, than from hatred. To treat the lesson of all this as that one should be against “hate”, and create a category of “hate crimes”, is tacitly placing the blame on the dupes and simply informing would-be mass manipulators that thier craft is perfectly legitimate, just that there are certain levers that they really shouldn’t push.

Without the existence of hatred, love is meaningless.

Real love, the only kind genuinly worthy of the name, is a kind of dialectical overcoming. It only becomes possible at the point where one comes to understand the full reality of one’s beloved, which necessarily means encountering even those qualities one finds infuriating, loathsome, or detestable. For surely, if you know enough about anyone, you will find something in them that you hate. But it’s only when one encounters that, and decides to nonetheless love them anyway, that we can talk of love as an active, redemptieve, and powerful force.

…real love can be love only if it conquers hatred, not by annihilating but by containing and transcending it, and not just once, but forever.

Once we stop seeing hatred as something to be ashamed of, it will simply become obvious that even the deepest, most personal hatreds can be overcome within relations of solidarity – in fact, are overcome, on a daily basis, in a any social group that isn’t entirely dysfunctional – which, in turn, will make it obvious that once those institutional structures are destroyed, no human being will remain beyond redemption.