"Living in a Time of 'Institutional' Hatred"

 It may seem odd to leave the serenity of south-eastern Connecticut for the bedlam of the north-Jersey coast, but we have been doing this every August for our sixty-one years of marriage. Growing up in New York City, it is where Caroline spent summers. She describes these couple of weeks as “returning to her playpen.” The photograph depicts us on a cool day last summer at the Seabright Beach Club.

 While I will have my laptop and a portable printer, I am bringing light reading, so don’t expect much in terms of essays. However, in the back of my mind I have been thinking of one on the beauty and grandeur of silence, but we shall see. Also, I have just completed Lynne Olson’s newest book, The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück, which deserves an essay. Perhaps it will be too noisy down there!

 

But cloistering with friends, children and grandchildren and reading mysteries, I hope (and expect) to avoid the ugly ramifications of hatred That has become too common.

 

We expect to return to Essex on Saturday, August 23.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Living in a Time of ‘Institutional’ Hatred”

August 4, 2025

 

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

                                                                                                                Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

                                                                                                                Sermon: “A Knock at Midnight,” 1958

“I hate you!” Who has not screamed that invective, or had it directed at them? It is generally short-lived, an intense, emotional response to an accusation, characterized by anger, contempt and/or disgust.

 

Such words are usually directed toward specific individuals, things, or ideas. In most cases those feelings are ephemeral. But I write about what I call ‘institutional’ (for lack of a better term) hatred, where an individual or group deliberately foments hatred toward a person, race, ethnicity, or nation. Time is a healer, even of ‘institutional’ hatred. Bill Clinton was despised by Republicans during the 1990s, and as Matthew Hennessey wrote in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Hate is too mild a word for how Democrats felt about George W. Bush while he was in the Oval Office.” Today, in both cases, hatred has vanished.

 

But such hatred is not always transient. Blacks were hated by many in this Country for decades, culminating in the white-robed Ku Klux Klan, whose remnants still exist. The consequences were the killings – many by lynchings – of tens of thousands of black Americans. For more than ten years, from the mid 1930s through May 1945, Nazis maintained a nation-wide hatred toward Jews and others they classified as undesirable. The consequence was that between fifteen and twenty million civilians were imprisoned, tortured, mutilated and/or murdered, in a network of over 44,000 Concentration Camps scattered across occupied Europe.

 

Hatred clouds reason. Hatred of Jews is what the Nazis employed to get ordinary citizens to go along with their despicable extermination policies. Reason, on the other hand, is what permitted the Allies to ultimately defeat Nazism. Hatred has returned today, in much of the West, in the anti-Semitism that has infiltrated college campuses, in political speech, and in the language of Podcasters. “Open Jew hatred,” wrote Alvin Rosenfeld in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “is also politically mainstream, with ‘free Palestine’ and ‘globalize the intifada’ now a key part of the left’s political agenda.” The call by French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime minister Keir Starmer, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to have their countries recognize a Palestine state before there is one reflects hatred toward Israel. The meaning of ‘globalize the intifada’ is clear: Kill the Jews. While Israel has been winning militarily, Hamas is winning the public relations war.

 

Here in the U.S., hatred’s most common target today is President Trump, an easy person to demagogue, as his language and actions are often goofy and/or intemperate. This hatred is manifested in opposition to anything he supports or does. In the August 2, 2025 issue of American Greatness, Stephen Soukup wrote: “The left’s hatred [of President Trump] is more powerful than any instinct it might have to do the right thing.” That hatred is displayed by those rallying against the deportation of criminal illegal migrants, and by those opposed to Israel’s war against Hamas. It motivates those who blame man for all climate change and stirs up those who support gender-affirming surgeries. Will Weissert of the Associated Press recently quoted a fifteen-year-old girl from Scotland who was protesting President Trump’s visit to Scotland: “We don’t negotiate with fascists...So many people here loathe him...We’re not divided...We’re just here because we hate him.” One hopes she is instructed on the history of fascism, what its aims, goals and means were. Nevertheless, hatred for Mr. Trump is not new. It began ten years ago when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce his run for President. It was revealed in the fake accusations by the Clinton campaign about Russian “collusion.” It led to the refusal of the media to acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s lap-top was real. I have friends who, to this today, cannot speak the name Trump without a grimace. He is not my favorite politician, but I do not hate him, and I believe he loves his Country. I experienced hatred nine years ago when I refused to join the cortège of those who wished to bury his nascent political career. But hatred is not the exclusive domain of the Left.  MAGA extremists are equally vituperative. We hear it in the voices of many conservative commentators, and in the expressions of those who rail against all immigrants.  But it is most powerful on the left.

 

Mainstream media, threatened with irrelevance, exploits and encourages this scourge of hatred, falsely seeing it as a means to stay relevant. They know their business models are in trouble. Fifty years ago the daily news viewership of the three main networks – CBS, NBC and ABC – was approximately 70 million people, or roughly 30% of the population. Today combined network and cable news programs capture about 30 million viewers, or less than 10% of the population. Newspapers have suffered similarly. In 1975, approximately 62 million newspapers were printed daily. Today that number is less than 25 million. Now, most get their news from social media accounts, like X, Facebook, Instagram and from Podcasts. People listen to what augments their prejudices and not to what challenges their predilections, so these platforms become breeding grounds for polarization and hatred. It is why Alex Jones on the right and Rachel Maddow on the left remain popular, but only with those who share their views. Ironically, greater choice in news has increased our division.

 

In her novel White Oleander, `Janet Fitch wrote: “Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use...It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.” I think she is wrong, but her words reflect today’s culture. C.S. Lewis warned in Mere Christianity that there is a tendency among people to cling to bad stories of people they detest, to “wish that black was a little blacker, [then] we shall see grey as black...Finally we shall insist on seeing everything – God and our friends and ourselves included – as bad.” I suspect he is right; it is something to guard against.

 

Can we return to a time when respect and tolerance were common? Thirty-six years after he had been freed from slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote in his autobiographical story, Up from Slavery, a remarkable sentiment we should all feel – and one that anticipated by fifty years Martin Luther King’s words in the epigraph that heads this essay: “I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” While the Bible advises us to abhor what is evil, it warns against harboring hatred in one’s heart. It tells us to hold fast to what is good. Two and a half years ago I wrote an essay titled, “Hatred and the Curse of Identity Politics: “Man is perhaps the only species that kills and destroys its own kind out of pure hatred.” Man is also the only creature capable of reason and love, so perhaps there is hope.

 

The goal of ‘institutional’ hatred is power, to be rid of those who stand in their way. The consequences are alienation, division, distrust and polarization. As humans, we have been endowed with emotions and with the ability to reason. In our polarized environment, we run the risk that the emotional response of ‘institutional’ hatred supersedes our willingness to listen, to debate – to reason. We must not let that happen.

"Taking Manhattan," Russell Shorto

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Taking Manhattan, Russell Shorto

August 2, 2025

 

“New York came into being not organically, but through a purposeful act,

which involved the stitching together of two cultures and traditions into something new.”

                                                                                                                                                Russell Shorto (1959-)

                                                                                                                                                Taking Manhattan, 2025

 

Empires come and go. In 1600 the Spanish and Ottoman Empires were Europe’s strongest. But early in the 17^th Century the Dutch Empire, as a maritime and economic force, achieved its “Golden Age.” And Britain was on the cusp of becoming the world’s largest empire.

 

In 1624, Cornelis Jacobsz May led the first settlers to what would become New Amsterdam. Twenty-three years later, in 1647, Peter Stuyvesant was appointed Director-General of New Netherland, a sizable chunk of coastal North America, with New Amsterdam as its principal city. In mid 17^th Century, New Amsterdam had a population of about 1,000. Despite its small size, its location – near the mouth of the Hudson River and with both inner and outer harbors providing protection – made it a central trading post: furs from the interior, tobacco from Maryland, and slaves from Africa. In 1664, three British warships, captained by Richard Nicolls, sailed into New Amsterdam’s outer harbor. A few months later, without a shot being fired, a transfer-of-power document was signed. What made this remarkable was that between 1652 and 1674 England and the Netherlands were involved in the Anglo-Dutch Wars, consisting largely of naval battles fought in the English Channel, with both sides vying for control of colonial possessions and trade routes. We learn this history through Russell Shorto’s captivating book, Taking Manhattan.

 

As well as explaining the founding of Manhattan and placing that founding in the context of forces then at work in Europe and in North America, this is a story of two men: Richard Nicolls and Peter Stuyvesant. Though not of the nobility, Nicolls was well-connected. “From the cradle (born in 1625), he was intimately connected to the Stuarts.” That was especially true of his relationship to the future James II. During Cromwell’s Protectorate (1653-1658), Richard Nicolls was a confirmed Royalist.    

 

While Peter Stuyvesant (born about 1612) was duty-bound to serve both the Dutch Republic and the Dutch West India Company, he felt a loyalty to the people of New Netherlands and, especially those on the island of Manhattan. Mr. Shorto writes: “Here in the New World, where people were just a bit freer and less encumbered by tradition than in the homeland, that combination of forces had fashioned a different kind of system and settlement. This wasn’t the Dutch Republic. It was unlike Winthrop’s Connecticut. It was a far cry from Boston or Plymouth...If this paradoxical kind of city, with its mishmash of peoples, faiths, and languages and its remarkably efficient approach to business could somehow be preserved...might that be a kind of victory?”

 

In Taking Manhattan, we learn that what mattered most to New Amsterdam’s inhabitants was that they be allowed to keep their property and businesses. And that is what Nicolls wanted as well. Mr. Shorto writes: “He wanted not only the territory but the society they had developed there. He wanted the secret sauce, and they knew the recipe.” Today, New York City, with immigrants from all over the world, is the most assimilated city in the world and the one with the largest economy. Its origins make for fascinating history.