THE ETHICS OF HATING

...Every war produces its intellectual, as well as its financial war profiteers...

...Writers of mediocre detective stories and all-around literary critics become transformed, in their own imaginations at least, into "authorities" on German history, politics, economics, and psychology...

...At least this is the impression I gain from reading the correspondence columns of the New York Herald-Tribune, which seems to be the favorite reading matter of the aforesaid bloodthirsty commuters...

...Patriotic Russians who owned factories and big estates did their best to make the Russian masses hate the Germans and Austrians in the last great war...

...For those who find this impossible, hate should at least get a clear and unmistakable grade labeling: "Dangerous...

...One can anticipate a dreary series of bad stories and bad movies, exploiting the sadistic theme inspired by the shocking revelation of the cruelties which the Japanese Army perpetrated against American and Filipino prisoners on Bataan...

...A patriotic German Jew named Lissauer wrote a hymn of hate against England during the first World War...

...After it has been pumped up to the point of exhaustion for one purpose it may burst out in other unforeseen and unsuspected directions...

...It would be narrow and illiberal and harmful to our own interests to shut ourselves off from the fullest and freest presentation of the viewpoints of the countries with which we are associated in the war...

...In the light of these examples the deliberate pumping up of indiscriminate hatred against a whole people or race has always seemed to me not only obscene and abominable, but stupid into the bargain...

...One can detect this tendency in much of the comment on the observations of the five Senators, in the one-sided whitewash of Stalin's annexationist claims that is sometimes passed off as serious history...

...One never knows where it will strike next...

...An act of cruelty is equally abominable whether committed by a brown man against a brown man, by a brown man against a white man, by a white man against a brown man or by a white man against a white man...

...Indiscriminate hatred, generated amid the emotional stresses and strains of war, is like lightning...

...Peoples should not be saddled with the hatred that is properly felt for the acts of totalitarian governments and militarist groups, even though peoples must pay the price for their political incapacity or weakness or bad judgment in letting such regimes get into power...

...Fortunately there is something in the make-up of human consciousness that limits its capacity to soak up and retain hate indoctrination for an indefinite period...

...It should be recognized as equally absurd to call anyone a Russia hater because of criticism of Stalin's policy toward Poland and Finland—a policy in the making of which the vast majority of the Russian people have no voice whatever...

...Use in moderation...

...But in the overwhelming majority of cases, these glib epithets, "Russia hater" and "Britain hater," are only a smokescreen to mask the imposition of a more rigid censorship in commenting on foreign governments than any American in his right mind would accept in relation to his own...

...Hatred should be honestly and impartially directed against all acts of cruelty, tyranny, and injustice, regardless of who may be committing these acts...

...Indeed, indoctrination with hatred is one of the most incalculable boomerangs of the modern all-out conflict...

...Perhaps one reason for the relatively milder and more humane character of wars in the past was that more people were illiterate and hence allergic to the drumbeats of the professional hatemongers...

...What the rather condescending technical jargon of the social worker calls the "underprivileged" in Russia began to derive much more satisfaction from shooting "bourgeoisie" than from shooting Germans...

...Out of that war and its aftermath for Germany of brutalization, inflation, and search for scapegoats grew one of the most terrible practical hymns of hate in history, the*Nazi campaign against the Jews...

...A comparison of the proportion of space which our leading periodicals devote to articles by British authors with the proportion of space which corresponding British periodicals devote to articles by American authors would certainly not disprove this hospitality...

...There is much to be said for those individuals who renounce hating altogether...

...But it is equally narrow and illiberal and harmful to our own interests to follow the example of certain individuals and publications and proceed on a "Britain can do no wrong" or a "Russia can do no wrong" basis, branding as criminal lese-majeste any criticism, however temperate, or any assertion of the American side of some disputed international issue...

...The spoils of the intellectual war profiteer also seem to allure poets of dubious achievement and would-be philosophical moralists, ex-sports writers who turn war correspondents, and not a few college professors who, on emerging from their ivory towers of specialized knowledge, sometimes prove the most naive, gullible, and confused spectators of the world tragedy...

...And it is equally silly to raise the cry "Britain hater" at someone who publicly expresses the belief that food should have been sent to the occupied democracies of Europe or that Gandhi would have been a better candidate than Sir Oswald Moseley for release from prison...

...Now it may be that there are some Americans so stupid or so illiberal that they actually hate all the 47,000,000 inhabitants of the British Isles or the far larger population of the Soviet Union...

...All in all, one would be justified in setting down both hate and hasty accusations of hate as tricky and dangerous emotional weapons...

...There is far too much tendency in some quarters to shout "Britain hater" or "Russia hater" instead of patiently examining the facts and arguments in the case...

...And disagreement with an action of a foreign government should not bear and need not bear and usually does not bear any relation to the people who live under that government, but who, especially in time of war, have little control over its decisions...

...And one never knows what unsuspected witches' brew will come pouring out of it...

...Unfortunately hate is an erratic and uncontrollable element...

...Handle with care...

...I had occasion recently to listen to an address by a lecturer of Russian origin that was not only properly laudatory in relation to the Soviet war effort, but, in some of its implications, derogatory to the American and British...

...Americans have reason to remember without pride a sultry Summer day last year when a good many white Americans and Negro Americans in Detroit gave convincing proof that they hated each other a good deal more than they hated the Germans and the Japanese...

...It is a curious but unmistakable fact that some crusading organs which are not models of sweetness and light in aspersing the characters and motives of persons and groups with which they disagree like to assume a pose of outraged virtue in rebuking anything that savors of criticism of the policies of nations which are associated with us in the war...

...But in the final account the hate aroused in these Russian masses was skillfully built up by a revolutionary genius named Lenin against the Russian propertied classes...

...I am merely pleading, paradoxical as it may sound, for an element of ethics in hating...

...The intellectual war profiteers, like the cost-plus contractors, will experience a deflation after the last shot is fired...

...Unfortunately most people who go in for hatred prefer to take it straight, without dilution...

...Above all hatred should be divorced from the poisonous injection of racism...

...A considerable number of commuters in the New York suburban area, living in places such as Rahway, N. J., and Westchester, N. Y., seem to take a good deal of time enough gloating over ingenious schemes of revenge to be meted out to the Axis peoples...

...Many Britons hold critical views of their own Government's attitude in these questions...

...The Stork Club is a rendezvous where hymns of hate are sometimes intoned to an accompaniment of popping corks...

...Their vicarious bloodlust is not slaked by the fact that a considerable amount of vengeance has already been exacted from the German people by means of indiscriminate air bombing which aims at the destruction of whole cities and often leads to the literal burning alive of large numbers of civilians...

...Newspapers and magazines which often daub with smear words Americans whose views they do not like are fond of using expressions like "Russia haters" or "Britain haters" in an effort to silence anyone who suggests-that Stalin's annexationist aims in Eastern Europe are not in harmony with the Atlantic Charter or that the British Empire policy could be improved...

...Another is the emphasis on racism...

...One undesirable by-product of this exploitation of the theme of cruelty will probably be an increase in crimes in this country by unbalanced perverts who are susceptible to suggestion...

...But I could not repress a fleeting thought of what possibility there would have been to deliver in the Soviet Union a speech slanted in the other direction...

...It would, of course, be preposterous pharisaism for anyone who believes that the Negro should be "kept in his place" to get into a dither over British methods of rule in India...

...The hate weapon had backfired...

...All the Americans I have known who took an interest in the cause of Indian freedom were keenly conscious of our own shortcomings in race and color prejudice and eager to do what they could to amend those shortcomings...

...It is the kind of emotional faucet that is so much easier to turn on than to turn off...

...The American audience took it very well...

...But this very rarely happens...

...Dangerous Emotional Weapons It is a little recognized truth that no people in the world is less "isolationist" than the American in its willingness to give a hospitable reception to foreign viewpoints...

...This puts them in the category of the frustrated crackpots who hate all Jews, or all Negroes, or all people of Japanese stock (including the Japanese-American soldiers who have made a fine fighting record in Italy), or all Germans, including those in exile or in concentration camps because of their opposition to Nazi tyranny...

...Good And Bad Hatred I am not suggesting that there is not good cause for hate in many of the grim and terrible things that have taken place and are taking place and will take place in the morally and culturally barbarous age in which we are living, amid all the tools and gadgets of mechanical scientific civilization...

...It would be the height of absurdity to call anyone an America hater because he expressed disapproval of some aspect of Administration foreign policy or censured the poll tax system in the Southern states or the deportation of Japanese-Americans...