Protests in Ottowa with hate symbols
Synagogues, schools vandalized; worshippers attacked
A bible teacher sharing antisemitic methods
Students in Alabama doing the Nazi salute
Attacks in New York, banning books about the Holocaust and slavery, taking away voting rights, more companies with anti-Israel bias, and on and on. People are attempting to erase events of the not-too-long-ago past from the pages of history books: slavery and Jim Crow laws, Native American relocation and elimination, redlining, etc.
We have experienced an increase in polarization across groups and in hate incidents in schools, college campuses, and public places across America. The number of hate groups is at an all-time high. There have been thousands of incidents of swastikas, nooses, white-supremacist fliers, and hate crimes reported across the country, from synagogue shootings to arson attacks on Black churches in the south.
WHY???
After Colleyville, I wanted to better understand the uptick in violence and what we should be doing about it. Last month I read Mark Oppenheimer’s book about Squirrel Hill and the Tree of Life shooting, which was excellent, but I didn’t find much about the underlying reason why that gunman hates immigrants.
I thought I understood the roots of far-right violence: Fear. Economic change. Perceived marginalization. New/social media. Belonging. Isolation. I have some amount of compassion for these issues, though they are leading to misguided action.
It turns out that did not understand even one tenth of the issue.
I’m almost finished reading three books about hate and I will share what I’ve learned.
From Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right by Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, I learned some new terminology and code words, various strategies being used to create polarization in society, especially in youth, and some conspiracy theories that made me laugh-out-loud. (Did you know that the government is turning people gay with chemical bombs???)
From ADL executive director Jonathan Greenblatt’s It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable—And How We Can Stop It, which I just finished, I learned what warning signs were present in societies that led to genocide, about the lobbying and high-level meetings that ADL is having with companies to counteract the spread of hate, and about hate as a global phenomenon.
Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, is by far the best education I’ve gotten on how distorted thinking comes about. I am learning what social and psychological processes lead to violence in the name of God, the role of religion in society, and why antisemitism is not about Jews at all… it is “the first warning signal of a world order in danger of collapse.”
I will devote a separate post to each of these three books so I can share key points and eye-opening quotations from them.
* * *
Further posts in this series:
Hate in the Homeland and It Could Happen Here
- Political religious extremism – what is it and why is it happening now?
- What social and psychological processes lead to altruistic evil?
- What is the first warning sign of a world order in danger of collapse?
- What does “apocalyptic politics” mean and what causes it?
- Where do we go from here?
