What is a hate group?

The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. We do  not list individuals as hate groups, only organizations.

The organizations on our hate group list vilify others because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity – prejudices that strike at the heart of our democratic values and fracture society along its most fragile fault lines.

The FBI uses similar criteria in its definition of a hate crime:

(A) criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.

We define a “group” as an entity that has a process through which followers identify themselves as being part of the group. This may involve donating, paying membership dues or participating in activities such as meetings and rallies. Individual chapters of a larger organization are each counted separately, because the number indicates reach and organizing activity.

R_P wrote:

Yep, they're free to squander the credibility of their organization as they please. It just undercuts the very important work they used to do.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 
Seems to me they can count any way they want, as long as they can justify it, do it consistently, and are open about it. The same for their definition of a hate group.

R_P wrote:

SPLC (the source of that number) has some serious credibility problems with their reporting. They count a lot of groups more than once, count local chapters as separate groups, and have a rather...flexible definition of a "hate group."

This critique is three years old but they haven't changed their methods.

Number of hate groups hits 20-year high amid rise in white supremacy, report finds

How a traumatized America finds relief in hate

(...) The connecting line between addiction and hate, according to Maté, is trauma. "What happened in Pittsburgh is a manifestation of trauma," Maté told the Inquirer. "There is no mass killer who wasn't a traumatized person."

Trauma is not foreign to Maté. He was born in Budapest to Jewish parents a month before the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944. His grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and his father was sent to forced labor. For his safety, his mother decided to give him to a Christian stranger. They were separated for a few weeks. Family members were eventually reunited and made their way to Canada. He became a physician, treating people in addiction on the eastside of downtown Vancouver, the drug-use capital of North America. During this time, he was a workaholic, depressed, and addicted to purchasing classical-music CDs, once spending as much as $8,000 on music in one week.

Just like addiction — to drugs or classic music — provides relief to people who were traumatized as children, so does hate.

People like the shooter from Pittsburgh have, according to Maté, "anger (that) has got nothing to do with what they think they are angry about. They are just angry because of what life has done to them as children and then they find external targets." Politics plays a role, too. "It will give them a target and an explanation to their rage and an outlet to express their rage," and "adds more and more fuel to direct their violence toward certain groups," he says. (...)

The Power of Hate and Fear

W.J. Astore

Who are we supposed to hate today?  The Russians for allegedly throwing the presidential election?  The Chinese for allegedly stealing our jobs?  The North Koreans for allegedly planning our nuclear destruction?  The Iranians for allegedly working to acquire nuclear weapons?  The “axis of evil” for being, well, evil?

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously told Americans that the only thing they had to fear is fear itself.  However, recent American presidents have encouraged us to fear everything.  Let’s not forget the stoking of fear by people like Condoleezza Rice and her image of a smoking gun morphing into a nuclear mushroom cloud.  That image helped to propel America into a disastrous war in Iraq in 2003 that festers still.

One of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen in any movie came in the adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984.  The film version begins with the “two minutes of hate” directed against various (imagined) enemies.  Check it out.  Doubleplusgood!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KeX5OZr0A4

Especially disturbing is the rant against Goldstein, the enemy within.  Here I think of Donald Trump claiming that the Democrats are anti-military for not rubberstamping his budget, a dishonest as well as ridiculous charge, since both parties support high military spending.  Indeed, high Pentagon spending is the one bipartisan area of agreement in Congress.

The top tweet is typical of Trump: Accusing Democrats of not caring about “our” troops

This is among the biggest problems in America today: the stoking of hate against the enemy within, e.g. “illegal” immigrants (rapists, gang members, killers, according to our president), Democrats who allegedly don’t support our military, rival politicians who should be “locked up,” protesters who should be punched and kicked and otherwise silenced, high school students who are dismissed as phonies and professional actors, and on and on.

Irrational fear is nothing new to America, of course.  Consider the fear of communism that produced red scares after World Wars I and II.  Consider how fears of the spread of communism led to criminal intervention in Southeast Asia and the death of millions of people there.  Massive bombing, free-fire artillery zones, the profligate use of defoliants like Agent Orange, the prolongation of war without any regard for the suffering of peoples in SE Asia: that behavior constituted a crime of murderous intensity that was in part driven by hatred and fear.

And when hatred and fear are linked to tribalism and a xenophobic form of patriotism, murderous war becomes almost a certainty.  When the zealots of hate are screaming for blood, it’s very hard to hear appeals for peace based on compassion and reason.

Anger, fear, aggression: that way leads to the dark side, as Yoda, that Jedi master, warned us.  Hate too, Yoda says, must be resisted, lest one be consumed by it.  Sure, he’s just an imaginary character in the “Star Wars” universe, but that doesn’t negate the truth of his message.

God is love, the Christian religion says.  Why then are we so open to hate and fear?

 JrzyTmata wrote: 
gotta love the puddin' hammock!  ;^)

 miamizsun wrote: 
or Crimbo. Hobo Pudding Pants for all!

 JrzyTmata wrote: 
or festivus!

 miamizsun wrote: 
THERE IT IS! It now feels like Christmas

 
i think we are close enough to throw this out there...again

 miamizsun wrote: 
shameless bump

hate

Especially around Halloween, but whenever I'm walking thru the store and see the little mini-candy bars etc., the back of my brain always mutters "Gaint dag of candys."

 miamizsun wrote: 

 miamizsun wrote: 
awwww

 JrzyTmata wrote: 

 lily34 wrote: 

 miamizsun wrote: 
no one is getting anything until I see Winter's Big Boy Christmas List.