Can Hate Be a Virtue?

Whatever your particular belief system is: Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Fatalist, Randomist, Darwinist, Sun-Worshipper, the Cult of mother nature; I find it hard to believe that any deity, transcendental power, or prophet could have ended whatever was inside of Jesse Helms without noting the irony of making his last day take place on the celebration of our country’s first day. On July 4th, 2008; in recognition of his/her failure to to do so when it could have helped, or of having prevented the Senator’s conception in the first place, the supreme being rendered Senator Helms into a rotting pile of flesh, a birthday present for the nation which singularly and increasingly represented everything the man found unbearable. Of course, I have no single words or simple sentences which could accurately display my delight nor any polite way of lamenting that it happened in his sleep.

But for everything the Senator and I disagreed on, there’s one thing I think I’ve grown capable of seeing eye-to-eye with him on: Sometimes we need to give hate a chance.

I told my friends on that holiday morning, with delight, that the Senator had been ejected from this world and that, hopefully, wherever he was going had a whites-only section. I didn’t get a laugh or a smile from most of them, but, as too often seems to be the case with American liberals, they said, “That’s not nice. He’s dead…” or “If you don’t have anything nice to say…” or “He’s beyond politics now…”. Have we become so weak and namby-pamby in this country that we can no longer have even a little tinge of enjoyment when a despicable man gets his mortal comeuppance? Or so relative that we’ve forgotten one basic truth of life: You’re allowed to hate those who hate.

My generation in particular was warned against hatred. Many of these warnings were justified as the country was waking up from a couple hundred years of racism, sexism, and every other categorized prejudice that mankind has thought up. But why do the truly bad forms of hate have to give all hate a bad name. Martin Luther King, quite rightly, asked us to judge people on the “content of their character” and not the color of their skin, but the thing is–we’re still supposed to judge. If no one among is worth hating, than who is worth loving or respecting? No human being is perfect, but in some special cases, such as in the case of Senator Helms, a person’s existence is so repugnant, their views and actions so detrimental to all, and their flaws outweighing their benefits to such a degree that we should be able to say, without reservation, “this person has caused nothing but misery and pain; because I love my fellow human beings, I hate him.”

“while to many Mr Botha will remain a symbol of apartheid, we also remember him for the steps he took to pave the way towards the eventual peacefully negotiated settlement in our country.”

These were the words spoken by Nelson Mandela after the equally late death of PW Botha. Mr.Botha, the penultimate apartheid president, had taken what was a policy of oppression and turned it into a policy of genocide; he took state-censorship and turned it into death squads and assassinations of critics both at home and abroad. When Mandela said that after the man died two years ago, I remember thinking that this was why Mandela is a great man and you and I are just good ones. We do hate and sometimes, if only to be half-way decent, we must hate.