The More They Care, The More They Hate

The unkind truth about the political uses of empathy

Across France, student rioters are bopping to a song that praises the Bataclan Massacre, in which Muslim terrorists massacred theatergoers, and Mohammed Merah, a terrorist who murdered Jewish children in a school playground, including 8-year-old Miriam, grabbing her by the hair, and shooting her in the head. What kind of people celebrate the murder of children?

Ask Yale, which some months before the Oct 7 attacks had invited a French Muslim DEI activist, Houria Bouteldja, to deliver a talk on ‘Decolonizing Europe’. Bouteldja had declared that, “Mohammed Merah is me” and claimed that, “like me, he has been subjected to the incredible Islamophobic political and media campaign that followed the attacks against the twin towers.”

The talk was sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: a prominent liberal foundation.

Radical politics demands empathy, but not only lacks empathy, it promotes the worst kinds of monstrous cruelty. Its claims to pain and suffering don’t sensitize it to the suffering of others, on the contrary, it feeds a narcissism that gives it a permission structure to hurt other people.

The more the radicals cry about the suffering of some, the worse will be the things they intend to do to you. The Communist pieties about the misery of the working class, the people whom Stalin called “the sons of want and struggle, the sons of incredible privation”, licensed the mass murder of countless millions in the USSR, China, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea and all over the world from Africa to Asia to the Middle East to Europe.

The Communists didn’t just emotionlessly kill: Stalin’s NKVD boss Beria was a pedophile who particularly enjoyed the rape and torture of little girls, Mao’s Cultural Revolution led to cannibal orgies in which body parts were cooked in a school kitchen, and in Cambodia, thousands were beaten to death with farm implements to save on bullets. All of this was done out of ‘empathy’.

The evil paradox of revolutionary empathy is that the more emotion a radical activist feels for the suffering of a particular group, the more hatred he develops for its supposed oppressors. Rather than becoming more human, he or she becomes more inhuman, planning out mass murder in the name of social justice, and dehumanizing millions of people as oppressors who need to die.

To be a truly good person, the radical activist is told that he or she must care and then hate.

Revolutionary empathy isn’t really empathy. Instead it encourages activists to take their petty grievances and transpose them to a less privileged group of people and then project their more privileged rage on them. Rather than understanding another group of people, they use them as vessels for their resentments and then make excuses for their violence because it’s really their own hatred and violence that they are making excuses for. That is the ugly truth behind all the pathological sensitivity of the bleeding hearts to the slightest human suffering.

The only pain they ever feel is their own. They claim to love only because it justifies their hate.

They invent atrocities to justify atrocities. The worse their victims suffer, the more they counter these real horrors by accusing them of new crimes. That is why both the 9/11 and Oct 7 attacks were met with a torrent of new accusations of war crimes. The particular horrors of the Hamas crimes of Oct 7 required them to resort to the genocide lie. After all what other than genocide can retroactively justify the crimes that their Hamas and PLO allies had committed on Oct 7?

That was also why as Stalin prepared to wipe out the Jews of the USSR, a Communist front group started a UN campaign charging the United States with genocide. The front man for that campaign, Paul Robeson, was well aware that not only Jews were being killed, but that most of his fellow black Communist defectors to the Soviet Union had also been imprisoned or killed.

So too, as Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution to kill millions in an orgy of horrifying violence that included the murder of children, Communist apologists convened the Russell Tribunal to put America on trial for genocide in Vietnam. Jean-Paul Sartre, a pedophilia apologist and Communist sympathizer, was appointed to head the tribunal, after covering up Soviet gulags, defending the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and arguing that the French Revolution’s terror regime “probably didn’t kill enough and thus unconsciously facilitated a return to order.”

Every accusation is really a confession.

There is no crime however horrific that the Left has not committed and has not accused its enemies of in the name of revolutionary empathy. It has no moral code, no mercy and no humanity. It tells itself that it loves people, but it only really loves monsters because only monsters allow it to unleash all its monstrous urges while still pretending to be virtuous.

That is why Hollywood exchanged Tibet for Hamas. It’s why earlier generations dumped Gandhi for African Marxist dictators who soaked the land with blood. Non-violence and pacifism are boring. They seem morally fulfilling, but what the movement craves isn’t inner peace, but blood. What use is moral superiority if it doesn’t allow them to vicariously take part in the killing?

What excites the Left isn’t innocence: it’s guilt. Terrorists and criminals move its members. It is drawn to violence because there it can escalate the conflict into a destructive spiral leading to a revolution and endless murder, or a defeat that will provide the narrative for its next revolution.

It isn’t the good who are drawn to this sort of thing, but the naive, the stupid and the evil. And there is a point at which even the naive and the stupid are forced to confront the character of the movement, and to either walk away or turn evil. Perhaps it’s the point at which hostage posters of children are torn down or where the murderer of an 8-year-old girl is cheered as a hero.

This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.