ABSTRACT
How does politics involve a struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love? What does it mean to stand for love by standing alongside some others and against other others? As I pointed out in Chapter 2, it has become common for ‘hate groups’ to rename themselves as organisations of love. Such organisations claim they act out of love for their own kind, and for the nation as an inheritance of kind (‘our White Racial Family’), rather than out of hatred for strangers or others. A crucial part of the renaming is the identification of hate as coming from elsewhere and as being directed towards the ‘hate group’; hate becomes an emotion that belongs to those who have identified hate groups as hate groups in the first place. In the above quote, the Hatewatch web site, which lists racist groups on the internet, is juxtaposed with the Lovewatch site, which also lists these organisations, but names them as ‘love groups’. Such groups are defined as ‘love groups’ through an active identification with the nation (‘those who love this nation’) as well as a core set of values (‘anyone who loves liberty’). Love is narrated as the emotion that energises the work of such groups; it is out of love that the group seeks to defend the nation against others, whose presence
then becomes defined as the origin of hate. As another site puts it: ‘Ask yourself, what have they done to eliminate anything at all? They feed you with, “Don’t worry, we are watching the hate groups” and things like this. You know what they do? They create the very hate they purport to try to erase!’2
It is the critique of racism as a form of hate that becomes seen as the origin of hate; the ‘true’ hated groups are the white groups who are, out of love, seeking to defend the nation against others, those who threaten to ‘steal’ the nation away.
