I legit cannot understand how someone can hate like that. Like it just does not make sense to me. Hate and anger is so exhausting. There aren’t many folks I truly hate, but those I do hate are individuals who have wronged me in profound ways and/or have made certain parts of my life Hell.
I can’t imagine how tiring hating entire demographics is.
It’s often not blind hate but something more like “we need to save them from themselves” or “actually they’re the hateful ones we’re just protecting Our Kind”
I mean the feeling comes from somewhere right? You don’t just wake up hating people, there has to be some propaganda effort that gives a reason to hate groups of people.
Yes, but we have to go back further, to find the cause. Rather than the propaganda, which people willingly latch on to, I see the material circumstances as primary. And next is the individual decision of racists to make “weaker” people suffer for their benefit. People marked as targets by hegemonic structures. They do this to materially elevate themselves, to be actually better off. And short term, it works. In the mind of French racists, Muslims need to be disciplined to keep up wage disparity and keep Muslim workers doing the kind of work they don’t want to do themselves, keep them living in the bad neighborhoods (banlieues) and so on. They don’t need to understand economics for that. They see the difference in living standard every day.
This consciously evil decision comes first. They then go out and look for propaganda to deal with the resulting cognitive disconnance. To be able to go on thinking of themselves as “good” people. This theory is materialist in putting the real conditions first, dialectical in explaining how ideas arise and influence back the material and it also explains, why the propaganda can often be so incredibly bad: it doesn’t need to be convincing. The racist has already made the decision to let themselves be convinced, before they seek out the propaganda. They are willing to accept anything that offers a band aid on their aching psyche after they wounded it themselves by deliberately suppressing their inborn human empathy in a consciously evil act.
It’s the base influencing the superstructure influencing the base etc. a lot of the islamophobia can be traced to the crusades, later west europe’s fight with the ottoman empire (people tend to forget that it laid siege to Vienna, twice!), it got used and repurposed through the ages and is currently being stoked by the bourgeoisie to divide the labor-class into a labor aristocracy and a proletariat. If you wanna know why an individual is racist it’s obviously gonna differ from person to person but a lot of the tropes can easily be traced.
The “muslim/asiatic horde” for instance even etymologically comes from the ottoman “ordu”, the turkish word for army.
I suppose it comes down to ingroup/outgroup psychology and the ability to dehumanize your opponents. It’s a shame we still haven’t made it past such basic barriers as a species
Framing racism in purely biological terms misses the historic component: lived reality in capitalism makes people alienated, destroys solidarity and communal structure and instills the feeling, that life is a zero sum game, where someone has to lose for you to win. Racists are suffering from economic contradictions and make the conscious choice to not turn against those powerful people and structures responsible. They feel too weak for that. In a deplorable step, for which they are fully accountable, they rather go after those most marked as targets by the very powers that oppress them too. To this end and insulting their own intellect, they readily accept the most obvious lies and propaganda.
In a communist societies, communal structure would exist, where people encounter each other, experience true solidarity and feel powerful to confront any injustice (because they would be). Solidarity, empathy and working together in groups is far more fundamental to human nature than ingroup/outgroup thinking. It’s the historically contingent economic structure around us that severely punishes and criminalizes the former, while strongly pushing the latter.
I legit cannot understand how someone can hate like that. Like it just does not make sense to me. Hate and anger is so exhausting. There aren’t many folks I truly hate, but those I do hate are individuals who have wronged me in profound ways and/or have made certain parts of my life Hell.
I can’t imagine how tiring hating entire demographics is.
It’s often not blind hate but something more like “we need to save them from themselves” or “actually they’re the hateful ones we’re just protecting Our Kind”
I think that’s just the dishonest justification, not the actual feeling behind it.
I mean the feeling comes from somewhere right? You don’t just wake up hating people, there has to be some propaganda effort that gives a reason to hate groups of people.
Yes, but we have to go back further, to find the cause. Rather than the propaganda, which people willingly latch on to, I see the material circumstances as primary. And next is the individual decision of racists to make “weaker” people suffer for their benefit. People marked as targets by hegemonic structures. They do this to materially elevate themselves, to be actually better off. And short term, it works. In the mind of French racists, Muslims need to be disciplined to keep up wage disparity and keep Muslim workers doing the kind of work they don’t want to do themselves, keep them living in the bad neighborhoods (banlieues) and so on. They don’t need to understand economics for that. They see the difference in living standard every day.
This consciously evil decision comes first. They then go out and look for propaganda to deal with the resulting cognitive disconnance. To be able to go on thinking of themselves as “good” people. This theory is materialist in putting the real conditions first, dialectical in explaining how ideas arise and influence back the material and it also explains, why the propaganda can often be so incredibly bad: it doesn’t need to be convincing. The racist has already made the decision to let themselves be convinced, before they seek out the propaganda. They are willing to accept anything that offers a band aid on their aching psyche after they wounded it themselves by deliberately suppressing their inborn human empathy in a consciously evil act.
It’s the base influencing the superstructure influencing the base etc. a lot of the islamophobia can be traced to the crusades, later west europe’s fight with the ottoman empire (people tend to forget that it laid siege to Vienna, twice!), it got used and repurposed through the ages and is currently being stoked by the bourgeoisie to divide the labor-class into a labor aristocracy and a proletariat. If you wanna know why an individual is racist it’s obviously gonna differ from person to person but a lot of the tropes can easily be traced.
The “muslim/asiatic horde” for instance even etymologically comes from the ottoman “ordu”, the turkish word for army.
I suppose it comes down to ingroup/outgroup psychology and the ability to dehumanize your opponents. It’s a shame we still haven’t made it past such basic barriers as a species
Framing racism in purely biological terms misses the historic component: lived reality in capitalism makes people alienated, destroys solidarity and communal structure and instills the feeling, that life is a zero sum game, where someone has to lose for you to win. Racists are suffering from economic contradictions and make the conscious choice to not turn against those powerful people and structures responsible. They feel too weak for that. In a deplorable step, for which they are fully accountable, they rather go after those most marked as targets by the very powers that oppress them too. To this end and insulting their own intellect, they readily accept the most obvious lies and propaganda.
In a communist societies, communal structure would exist, where people encounter each other, experience true solidarity and feel powerful to confront any injustice (because they would be). Solidarity, empathy and working together in groups is far more fundamental to human nature than ingroup/outgroup thinking. It’s the historically contingent economic structure around us that severely punishes and criminalizes the former, while strongly pushing the latter.
Thanks, I had the feeling that societal and economic characteristics also influenced it but didn’t know how to express it