At her blog feministkilljoys, radical feminist scholar Sara Ahmed has republished a piece she wrote over a decade ago that has gained new relevance over the past week. Entitled “Fascism as Love,” the piece examines how some white-supremacist groups frame their hated for non-whites in the language of love—love for the nation, for the white race, for their families, etc. Read an excerpt of the piece below, or the full text here.
How has politics become a struggle over who has the right to name themselves as acting out of love and in the name of love? What does it mean to stand for love by standing alongside some others and against other others? 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. Indeed, a crucial part of the re-naming 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 this first place. Hence in the above quote, the hate watch 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 energies the work of such groups; it is out of love that the group seeks to defend the nation against others, whose presence them 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 erase!’ Here it is the very critique of racism as a form of hate, which becomes seen as the conditions of production for hate; the ‘true’ hated group is the white groups who are, out of love, seeking to defend the nation against others, who threaten to steal the nation away.
The renaming of hate groups as love groups, and hate watch as Love Watch, exercises a narrative of love as protection by identifying white subjects as already at risk from the very presence of others. These groups become defined as a positive in the sense of fighting for others, and in the name of others. The narrative suggests that it is this ‘forness’ that makes ‘against-ness’ necessary. Hence those who identify hate groups as hate groups are shown as failing to protect the bodies of those whose love for the nation becomes a condition of vulnerability and exposure. By being against those who are for the nation (anti-racists, anti-fascists etc.), such critics can only be against the nation; they can only be against love. The critics of hate groups become defined as those who hate; those who act out of a sense of ‘anti-ness’ or ‘against-ness’ and thus those who not only cannot protect the bodies of white Americans from crimes, but re-enact such crimes in the use of the language of hate. We might note then the slide from the crimes against white people committed by unnamed others (‘170 million crimes committed’) to the crimes committed by Hatewatch (‘they steal what they can’) in this narrative.
Image via NY Times.