The View from K92

Among all the tensions and trauma of our times, or perhaps because of them, it feels like it’s become OK to hate. I was brought up, as I think most people were, to regard hatred as wrong. This was not a grand theological position, but could be distilled in the simple rule: “treat others as you would like to be treated yourself”.

This sentiment, which I’m sure most people still subscribe to, feels almost absent from our daily political discourse. It seems as though the naked hatred of some politicians, even if it’s confected,  is filtering down through society, making it legitimate, even respectable.

At the apex of this pyramid of hate is Trump. In any “normal” times, his political career would have been over the moment, in 2015, he publicly mocked a person with disabilities. But this turned out to be the shape of things to come. He has turned hatred into a political end in itself. He doesn’t really have policies, besides reducing taxes for the rich and sacking or defunding people or institutions who disagree with him, but he spews a constant diatribe of hatred at targets carefully chosen to achieve maximum division and distraction.

Among the things Trumps wants to divert attention from is the growing awareness of the genocide he is aiding and abetting. Justifying the mass slaughter and starvation is becoming increasingly desperate for those paid to do so. But I find myself constantly dumfounded by the unhinged hatred poured on the Palestinian people by Israeli government spokespeople.

The contagion is spreading. Trump is Farage’s role-model for how to politicise hatred (although he clearly had a strong personal streak of it from an early age). He and Reform, with Jenrick hanging on their coattails, have obviously decided “Stop the Boats” and Trumpian “mass deportation” can win the next election. They’re promoting their message of hatred with the crudest racist stereotypes that would not have been out of place in the Jim Crow South. I fear it is only a matter of time before we see the first asylum hotel lynching, motivated by the crazed sexual fantasy that black men represent an inherent threat to white women.

Predictably, all kinds of political and social media wannabes and attention-seekers are jumping on the hatred bandwagon. We’ve reached a point where someone who writes “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care” is presented, in some quarters, as a victimised champion of free speech. Not surprised to hear the person concerned is due to have meetings with conservative US libertarians.

My home borough has a simple slogan: “Tower Hamlets is No Place for Hate”.  At times, that can feel a bit facile, but if contains an essential truth. As I walk around one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the country – and I know this is true of many others – I’m struck by an almost complete absence of hatred. This was not always the case, and of course, there are exceptions, but we now live in a place where the kind of hatred I’ve been seeing outside the Brittania Hotel recently seems like a throwback to a less enlightened age.

Sadly, this cannot be taken for granted and, during my lifetime, there has not been more fertile soil for hatred to grow. Hate and fear walk hand-in-hand. What I see on the other side of the road from the Britannia Hotel are desperate, deluded, frightened people, being exploited by some hate-filled neo-Nazis and far-right, opportunist politicians who don’t give a damn about the real issues facing working class people.

My mind goes back to one of my favourite films, John Sayles’ “Matewan” (1987). A union organiser is confronted by a striking worker who wants to blame a black person for his plight. The organiser says:

“You think this man is the enemy? They got you fightin’ white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there ain’t but two sides in this world – them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s all you need to know about the enemy.”