There’s a question which I keep asking these days. Maybe you do, too. It’s simple enough, and yet it’s surprisingly complicated, strange, and…ugly. Why do they hate us?

You know what I mean already. Just think of the state of the nation or the world. It’s being rocked by fascist tides again. Who’s under attack in America these days? Who’s not? Women, kids, the LGBTQ, teachers, trans kids, their parents. It’s a long, long list — and it’s expanding at light-speed as they come for everyone. To take their basic rights and fundamental freedoms away. Not in metaphorical ways, but in real ones — freedoms of expression, association, privacy, movement. Women given the death penalty for marriages. Teachers turned into felons for saying the wrong word. Kids who can’t change their names.

Why do they hate us?

Hate is a strong claim, and yet it’s easy enough to see, or at least it should be, that in the manifold attacks on basic freedoms above, isn’t just the subtext of hate… But the real thing. Open calls for “eradication,” speaking about those of who are just pleading for decency as if we’re a “virus.” If all this isn’t hate, then what is? Surely hate doesn’t have only to be the next step, which is genuine material annihilation. It begins here.

So. Again. Why? Why do they hate us so much?

I’d like to begin with an observation. A telling one, at least to me. They don’t hate us because we actually threaten them. We don’t. I’ve used many examples recently, some funny, some absurd, some just ludicrous. We’re not out there trying to ban…Ron DeSantis’s new book…even while he’s banning plenty of others…because only in America can you ban books and publish one of your own. We’re not out there trying to stop anyone going to the church of their choice — go right ahead, it’s a fine thing — or join the GOP or teach their kids whatever they like or read books they want or name themselves whatever they want. We are not interfering with their lives. We have no interest in that. In any way, shape, or form.

Here’s the telling part. It’s so true, so factual, so clear that we’re not interfering with their lives — that we don’t threaten them — that they have to make up crazy, completely ludicrous fictions about us. In order to portray us as threats. They have to make up tall tales about us. They have to turn us into monsters in order to feel threatened.

So teachers and gay people become “groomers.” Parents of trans kids become perverts. Liberals are part of a pedophilic Satanic conspiracy, where the blood of innocent kids — pure and true ones — is ritually drunk for eternal life’s sake, the potion of immortality. Or that we’re out to “replace” them, put microchips in them, and put them all in camps, in a plot driven by the UN.

The lies get more and more absurd and ridiculous. And yet every lie contains a truth, too. The truth in this one isn’t that we’re a threat to them. It’s that we’re not. It’s that they have to make up these insane, bizarre stories, myths, tell these lies, in order to portray us as monsters. That is how actually unthreatening we really are, because if you’re really genuinely materially threatened by someone, well, you hardly have to make up tall tales about them, do you? If someone’s really threatening you — taking something away from you, hurting you, harming you — you don’t have to resort to bizarro fictions, like, hey, they’re drinking my kids’ blood! They’re going to molest me! They’re going to put me in a camp! They have to make up these stories about us because the truth is that we’re…peaceful, harmless, people, fundamentally nonthreatening to them.

The Big Lies contain the truth, that we’re not threatening them in any way whatsoever, because, well, you don’t need to lie otherwise. If we were really threatening them, then surely some actual factual example could be pointed out, and not just some isolated one, but on a systemic level. But there isn’t one.

Because, like I said, we’re not after any of their rights, from religion to association to expression to privacy to movement. We are interested, on our side, in the expansion of everyone’s rights. Whether that means something like universal healthcare, or just kids who want to express themselves in a different way, or people loving however they choose. They have to lie about us precisely because the truth about us is…peaceful.

In other words, they are inventing, forging, counterfeiting pretexts — and subtexts — to demonize us. Now, that’s often said, but I want you to think about it in the way above, so that you really understand it. Demonization isn’t just “exaggeration.” It’s much more than that. It’s the process above: I’m going to create a whole series of bizarre, absurd lies, to justify my hate for you, even if you’re a peaceful, nonthreatening person.

That gets us a little closer to answering the question: why do they hate us? Well, they have to lie about us. But why would you have to lie about someone in order to turn them into a monster? If you’re not actually threatened by them, then why would you have to invent a reason? Because you need to justify your hate. You may not be materially — or even politically, as in this case — threatened by someone. But if you really hate someone, well, then you invent some kind of political or material reason — because you feel threatened at an even deeper level.

What deep level do they hate us on, then? Well, I think that it’s the deepest one of all. We don’t threaten them socially, politically, economically — not in any way whatsoever, and again, let me stress: we’re not taking away their rights to go to church, join a political party, vote, express themselves, teach their kids what they like. The deepest level of all. We threaten their cosmology, teleology, and eschatology. Big words. Let me simplify.

We threaten their imagined universe.

They don’t want us to exist in the way we are. That’s what hate means. Not wanting someone to exist. What’s that about, really? Even if they’re just…peacefully doing their thing, whatever that might be? Loving, learning, growing, growing up, relating, associating, expressing themselves…and not harming a soul? Why wouldn’t you want that person to exist?

Well, because they threaten your imagined universe. Your place in it. They threaten your salvation, your destiny, and your rightful place in existence. They threaten, in other words, a little thing called your moral order.

Moral order. What’s that? Well, here’s mine. I think of us all as walking besides each other. Something like pilgrims in the desert, on our way home. We have this gift called life. And what are we to do with it? We lift each other up when we fall. We give one another water to drink when we’re parched. We stumble and fall. We will. This is a desert, and it’s a long, dusty road home. All of us, by the way. Human, animal. The ghosts of our ancestors walk beside us, and our future children beckon us on. That’s how I see life, anyways. You might see it another way — perfectly fine.

My moral order, in other words, is a kind of fellowship among all God’s creatures. It’s a circle, not a hierarchy.

But the moral order of the fascists is very different. It is a hierarchy. And in that hierarchy, well, you know how it goes by now. The pure and true — men — are at the top. Beneath them, women. And then come all the various forms of subhumans — minorities, the LGBTQ, their kids, all those liberals who’ve succumbed to the “woke mind virus.”

These people are “unworthy of living.” Who said that? It could have been almost anyone at CPAC, but in fact, it was…a guy called Adolf Hitler. The Nazis expressed this moral order and turned it into a sociopolitical order. They began with hated groups like the disabled and the LGBTQ, and then annihilated the Jews. But why? Hate, sure, but what does that really mean?

The idea was that there was a rightful moral order to the cosmos. To existence. To being itself. And that moral order went like this. The strong survived, and the weak perished. The strong were superhuman, and they proved that by annihilating the weak. The weak poisoned the strong, their blood, their faith, their soil. Took their rightful belongings — not just money, not just women, not just homes. But their rightful place in the universe, in being, in existence.

The subhumans had only one rightful place in morally ordered cosmos. They didn’t belong in it at all. For a time, perhaps, it was alright to use them as slave labour — as the Nazis did with those they hated. But in the end? For the universe to be a just, righteous place, for moral order to be restored, the subhumans had to be annihilated. All of them.

The Nazis were on a crusade to restore order to the universe. For them, the project was eternal. Remember, they were building a “thousand year Reich.” They adopted symbology from my culture — South Asia — precisely because the project was supernatural. Mystical. Shrouded in a sense of magic. I don’t mean supernatural as in paranormal horror movies. I mean it in the literal sense of the word. They saw themselves as superhumans.

For them, hate was what nature was. What existence and being were. And what destiny demanded. The Nazis were big fans of good old Fred Nietzsche, whose Big Idea was all this dreck about strong over weak, “master morality” dominating “slave morality,” power as the sole end of existence, all existence. Inspired by him, for the Nazis, perpetual conflict was all there was. Until, at last, the cosmos reached it’s telos. Purification. Then, the superhumans would reign supreme.

Teleology. Where are things supposed to end? Eschatology. How do they get there? Cosmology. What’s the rightful order of the universe? To the fascist mind, the answer go like this. Things end in purification. They get there through annihilation. That is how the rightful moral order of the universe is restored — and along with it, the imagined destiny of the fascist, which is to rise supreme above all, uber alles. In a supernatural way. To become a superhuman, at the end of the universe, basically, is what all this is about.

Now. That might all not be known or felt consciously. It doesn’t matter so much, because now we’re talking about veiled, hidden texts, weaving in and out of Big Lies, the threads which bind all those lies together, the secret book that they reveal. It’s about what kind of universe we live in, and what it’s rightful order is.

This is why they hate us. We imagined their imagined moral order…of existence itself. Not just of their existence, but of existence. It’s not that we threaten them — we don’t, which is why they have to make up crazy lies to pretend we do. We threaten something bigger — their idea of the universe, what it is, what it’s for, what it’s about, what their place is in it.

To them, we’re not allowed to exist, because our existence itself is something that’s an affront to the universe. To being, to time, to destiny. It’s a sin. We’re a disease. We’re a virus, a pathology. We’re going to infect their kids and take their wives and steal their land and homes. We’re going to contaminate their bloodlines. Our very existence is a tear in the fabric of the universe. One that they must try to repair. They see their great obligation as ending our existences because that is how justice is restored to the universe, to being and time itself. Then things are right again. Only then is freedom possible, through purity, which leads to salvation’s and if all that demands a little “eradication,” well, so what? That’s how they prove they’re worthy of life, and we’re not in the first place. That’s how they prove they’re superhuman, and we’re subhuman.

Note the levels of crazy we’ve arrived at. This is literal magical thinking. All fascism is, and we should begin to understand it that way. We all know it’s not rational — who can debate facts with these clowns and fools, we cry, baffled. But the reason you can’t reason factually with the fascists is that they literally believe in the supernatural, which is what all this is really about. They’re the ones who are going to save the universe, being, time, restore justice and order to it, by becoming superhuman, and “eradicating” anyone who isn’t. This is the telos, the endpoint, the Alpha and Omega, of existence itself. This is the eschatology — a Great Purification, which frees the universe. From what? From who? From us.

The people who should never have existed in the first place.

Let me say that again, because this is the answer to the question. It seems obvious, at first, but then? Then, if you think about it, it becomes more and more disturbing. And if you keep thinking about, it becomes striking complex, because it cuts deep to the heart of human folly, ignorance, conflict, brutality, ruin.

They hate us because we are the people who never should have existed in the first place. Not as moral agents — we’re subhumans, after all, and don’t deserve our own morality. Not as social agents — we don’t deserve a place in society, because we contaminate the destiny of the pure. Not as political ones — we don’t deserve rights, because freedom, true freedom, for the universe itself, is being purified of…us.

We should never have existed in the first place. Not as people. Maybe as something else. Something lesser. Who knows? Slaves? Animals? Chattel? Just ashes? The fascists like to debate that point, like it’s a great intellectual quandary.

We should never have existed in the first place. The universe is only free, restored to order, justice, purified, when it’s free of us. But — as the saying goes — we have always existed. Way back home in South Asia? Trans people have existed a long, long time. They make a living dancing at weddings and live in little communities. It’s not a great existence, by any means, but it’s one that proves the point that all kinds of people have always existed, and in different ways.

We should never have existed in the first place. We have always existed. These are the lines. They’re existential. Because they’re about what the fascists imagine existence, being, destiny, the universe to be for. About. Who they belong to. Where they end, lead, finish, what they culminate in.

Why do they hate us so much? Remember my question? Now you know my answer. It’s a disturbing one, but it should be, because this much is disturbing. It’s upsetting, grotesque, obscene, and doubly so, when, like I said, we’re not doing anything to them. We’re living our lives, peacefully, honorably, truthfully, doing the hard work of trying to better people each and every day. They don’t hate us for that. They hate us, this much, this violently, for a much simpler, much darker reason. Because we are the people who never should have existed at all.

Umair
March 2023