In Defense of Hatred: A Review

                           By Aedon Cassiel

               

C. B. Robertson
In Defense of Hatred
Independently published, 2017

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It is my honor to introduce the first release by someone who I think is only going to grow as an important figure within our circles. That figure is Christopher Robertson, and the release is In Defense of Hatred (henceforth, IDOH).

I first met him as a mutual Facebook friend of Jack Donovan. The stylistic similarities between them begin and end at their dedication to living an authentic and physically engaged, real-world lifestyle. If I had to compare him to another writer in the Alt Lite or Alt Right, the first that would come to mind is Vox Day: willing to engage in arguments, even with “the other side”; but not prone to encouraging petty drama. His book is clear and to the point, and strongly informed by classical (and thus implicitly white) history and literature: IDOH quotes Kipling, references the story of Vlad Dracula III’s invasion of Turkey in the fifteenth century along with several other historical invasions and rebellions, includes allusions to Aesop’s Fables and Shakespeare, and discusses the Iliad at length (he calls it his “favorite work of fiction of all time”). Furthermore, the book discusses both Christopher Hitchens and the Bible in such a careful way that I have a hard time imagining either Christians or atheists being turned off or annoyed by either section.

Without a doubt, the book makes a natural fit on a bookshelf right next to a work like Greg Johnson’s Confessions of a Reluctant Hater. And it’s extremely relevant for anyone who ever reads, or writes, at someplace like Counter-Currents, as it addresses a theme that absolutely anyone who dares talk about any of these subjects will have to address eventually.

Robertson is an excellent writer – what I mean by that is that he’s extremely effective at getting a point across. Printed off my computer, the book came out to seventy single-sided pages. I kept highlighting different passages trying to find representative quotes for my review, but by the end of it I found I had quite literally highlighted almost the entirety of every page. And the different arguments flow so naturally into each other as a unified whole that it would almost feel awkward to quote one of these passages without including the surrounding text, so if I don’t stop somewhere arbitrarily, it would end up including nearly the whole book. In this way, the book almost reads more like the text of a speech.

So the only real criticism I can possibly make of the book as a piece of writing is that I wish Robertson had expanded further on many of his arguments. There’s so much fertile ground for deeper exploration here that any given subsection could easily have been transformed into a whole chapter in its own right, and still would have kept my attention. But that’s as much a testament to the efficacy of the writing that is there as it is a critique; it essentially amounts to, “I want more of this!”

My favorite part of the book comes just a short way in. Rather than simply making logical or historically-informed arguments, the book takes a relatively brief but highly valuable wade through a phenomenological analysis of the nature of what we call “hatred” (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines phenomenology as “the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view”).

The lessons from this section, because they really came from my own introspective analysis of myself and not solely from Robertson’s argumentation, have stuck with me more than any other part of the book. To summarize them in simplified form: anger is what we feel when we are appealing an injustice with someone who shares our own basic standards, where we can trust that our appeal will be treated as if it has value in and of itself; hatred is what we feel when that same injustice occurs and we do not trust that anyone we could appeal to would share our standards of justice.

The implication of that lesson for us is also clear: what distinguishes us “haters” from everyone else is not that we have some moral defect that causes us to ooze poison from our hearts for no reason. We became “hateful” because we started out seeking justice, and eventually realized that we cannot rely on appeal to any common principles in our society to rectify the injustices we see. The righteous and justified energy of anger, which innately trusts that there can be a peaceful path to resolution through appeal to moral principles, was therefore left with no other option but to revert to hatred.

My first concern with the argumentation of the book was this: aren’t our enemies also hateful? Were a social justice warrior personality type to read this book, wouldn’t he only find himself emboldened in his own hatred of us, since the book places so much focus on justifying the value of what is called “hatred” generally?

The answer, of course, is yes – but even getting the SJW to acknowledge this would place the argument in far different terms: rather than singling some people out arbitrarily as “haters” and shuffling everyone else’s hatreds under the rug, we would admit that all of us hate, we just hate different things, because we love different things. Then we could, perhaps, move ever so slightly towards actually debating those choices more openly and honestly.

Were those presuppositions to ever be set in place, we could focus on discussing why we love what we love, and the reasons why we hate what we hate would flow naturally from there. Hatred is, of course, seen fundamentally as a “white disease” – especially a white man’s disease. Hatred is “sexism” and “racism,” and these things are defined as nothing more than the hatred of people who aren’t white men.

This calls to mind a point I made in an article I published just after Donald Trump’s inauguration, explaining that fake “hate crimes” – where non-whites, gays, and others stage hate crimes against themselves – aren’t just fake; they are actually hate crimes against whites, because their underlying purpose is to send the message that it’s okay to hate whites and men back, because they are the ones who have initiated the hatred. I discussed the story of a black woman in Louisiana who set herself on fire with her own lighter and then claimed that she was attacked by the KKK, and the story of the owner of a gay bar in Chicago who admitted to torching his own establishment after writing anti-gay slurs on the walls.

Of course, these fake hate crimes will never be counted as hate crimes against whites or men. When four blacks broadcast the savage beating of a white special needs teenager live on Facebook, they were charged with hate crimes – but against people with special needs, not whites, even though they were screaming “fuck Donald Trump” and “fuck white people” during the video while saying nothing about his mental capacity. Yet, despite the skewed way these statistics are collected, white people commit fewer “hate crimes” than their numbers would predict, whereas non-whites commit more. The official statistics show “whites” committing only fifty-two percent of all hate crimes while comprising seventy-seven percent of the population, with blacks committing twenty-four percent of all hate crimes at thirteen percent of the population. If this book were to embolden a social justice warrior to explicitly embrace his own hatred, I’d say it achieved something worthwhile.

After spending the first fifty or so pages defending hatred, the final twenty are spent balancing that defense with advising caution. In brief, this advice amounts to encouraging all “haters” to make sure that their hatred doesn’t outlive the purpose which fuels it. And I’ll end with this quote:

There is a time to love, and a time to hate. Just as the opposite of love is not hatred, but indifference, the opposite of hatred is also indifference – both being facets of caring. We should not love blindly, nor should we hate blindly. As the old saying goes, guard your heart above all else, because everything else comes from that. Do not let it be cut out, nor let it run wildly, and the appropriate seasons to love and to have will become even more clear.