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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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In general I have a very low opinion of any piece of commentary that consists of "look at how much they hate you/us". You see it in a much more mainstream way on the US left re. certain recent SCOTUS decisions too. It's an embarrassing way to act, a facile way of trying to drum up rage and aggression and to radicalize your side. Hatred is not uncommon in politics, but it seems to me that it is often less of a motivation than the opposing faction expects.

I once had an internet argument with someone who argued that Mugabe's land expropriation had been motivated by a hatred of whites. I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country. White farm owners were targeted because they were a small minority that owned a lot of land the government wanted to redistribute to veteran soldiers to try to avoid a civil war; whites were the unfortunate victims of that policy. I don't think most ordinary Germans hated Jews in 1939, even though my grandmother and her parents fled the Holocaust and many members of my extended family died in it; in her mid-90s today, she doesn't have any hatred for Germans and enjoyed speaking German on her many vacations there and to Switzerland.

'They hate us, so I will hate them' is the eternally flawed flipside to the 'mistake theory' fallacy, where everyone in the world is just a temporarily embarrassed western liberal with the same ideals but different views on execution. In truth, they usually don't hate you, they're just different to you. And they'll screw you over to save themselves, which is unfortunately true of almost all people, individually and in groups.

I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country.

...and did they counter-argue the pretty obvious selection bias given your context and who you were working with specifically, i.e. the surviving winners and those who had monetary incentives to put you at ease?

I don't think your argument supports what you think it does. The point of 'the collective hates [X]' isn't that every member of the collective shares the same vibe of the group, an objection which itself would be a form of fallacy, but that the group effects is dominated by those who do. Most ordinary Germans may well not have hated Jews in 1939, but they were also onboard with a regime that absolutely did, hence why so much of German post-war political identity had to confront the 'I wasn't directly involved, and thus not my issue' collective identify in order to rehabilite a collective German political identity.

Likewise, the successful surviving white business men you met who were willing to work amiably with you may not have had significant expeirences with those who shared a regime stance... but the white businessmen were, by definition, the survivors who made accommodations and allies and friendships with/within the regime to protect themselves. The ones who didn't- the ones who would have been dispossesed out of spite- wouldn't still be in business for you to deal with.

The point is that Mugabe was more like Carl Schmitt than he was like Hitler. Many whites, including an extremely racist Australian I know who met him and knew him quite well, think he didn’t hate white people. Mugabe did not act against whites for the entire first 20 years of his presidency. And I think, by the way, that my theory is borne out in practice. The far right, as linked by OP, believe American blacks - by and large - have a deep and unrelenting hatred for American whites. Do you agree? I don’t. I don’t think most black Americans care much at all about American whites. That, and nothing more, was my point.

What in your estimation is the percent of black Americans have white people?