The Hate That Hate Makes

“To fear what you do not understand is to mistake ignorance for safety.” – Ginn Hale

I write this with a sense of fatigue, despondency and relief at a point in time when the vacuum of facts is filled with supposition, speculation and the desire to make sense of the inexplicable. I’m tired because horrific acts of inhumanity seem to be on a perpetual news cycle, dejected because the hatred is far too often present in the actions of men and relieved, because my beloved of 21 years works in Westminster and has nothing more than inconvenience to worry about. Today, in Westminster, a sickening attack on innocent people has caused loss of life and catastrophic injuries and again, I’m confused as to the rush to label this attack as an act of terrorism.

Murder has visited the heart of British democracy and understandably, there is an obvious association to be made with what appears to be a highly symbolic act of extreme carnage. But it’s still murder. The fact that it is labelled as a terrorist act will not increase its gravity to the victims and their families and only serves to stoke the fears of ordinary people. But more than that, it stokes the narrative that when a person goes out and randomly kills groups of people that it is somehow part of some grandiose political/religious struggle. It’s like hate crime being used as a moniker when murders are committed across different races - which bizarrely seems to attract harsher sentencing. Isn’t all murder a hate crime? Isn’t murder still murder, irrespective of the sobriquet attached to it?

I often wonder if calling murderous, barbaric acts terrorism gives too much credence and recognition to psychopathic behaviour. Granted, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter but taking innocent life is never justified. And the nagging fact persists that the cycle of violence is perpetuated infinitum. Residual anger on the part of formerly colonised people get’s exacerbated by real and/or perceived slights perpetrated against them by their former colonial masters. They see their women and children suffer the consequences of Western policies and feel that their culture and religions are being diminished, disrespected.

So the narrative goes and having listened to tales of colonial abuse from my grandparents and elders, I can both sympathise and empathise. But murder is murder and hate begets hate. Good doesn’t eject evil, that’s a myth. And evil doesn’t send good on it’s way. But the proactive and energetic supplant the submissive. That’s why it’s so important to take control of the narrative with dispassionate, accurate language. However, this is irrelevant if we don’t recognise that love and tolerance need to become more universal dialects if we hope to address the increasing socio-political chasms between us.

If we fail to do this then the fear and confusion (the terror?) that ensues will continue to be exploited by the fanatics, the demagogues, the dictators, the autocrats, the politicians – by anyone seeking to exploit humanity to benefit their own pernicious ends – and the twin concepts of terror and hatred finally win. And then we have all lost because reciprocating hatred just causes it to multiply exponentially. Hate cannot be used to conquer hate. Only love can do that; love combined with reason. If we allow fear to take the place of reason the result is usually hatred and discord.

Disconnect from the hate that hate makes. We spend so much time building walls that we forget to build bridges and as such, hatred becomes so much easier to gain than love – but it’s so much harder to get rid of. So let’s stop crediting murder with the terror label because it implies a level of sacrifice for some noble struggle; and it allows the demagogues to manipulate our resultant fears and create policies that perpetuate the hate and division that precipitate the murderous actions of the ‘terrorist’. That’s why our freedoms are being eroded under the guise of security and every budget seems to take more from education and caring (e.g. school budgets in the UK, meals on wheels in the US) in order to give more to exclusion and war (immigration in the UK and US). Now is the time to show the love and reject the hate. The ‘terror’.

When we use hate and fear to make judgements the verdict is always going to be guilty.