LEARNING FROM HATE GROUPS

Anytime you join an organization based on race, religion, or nationality, it's easy to target people outside your organization as enemies. What an insider might call "a patriot," an outsider might call "a hate monger." Hatred can come in all colors, religions, and nationalities, so rather than blindly condemn entire groups of people, ask yourself what you really fear or what you're angry about, and then decide if the destruction of an entire group of people will really help you solve your problem.

After browsing through various hate group websites, you may notice a common denominator: Hate groups want the freedom to prevent others from exercising the same rights that they enjoy. If you look beyond the surface distinctions (skin color, national citizenship, religious affiliation, etc.) that hate groups use to identify their members, you'll see that hate groups are often more similar to each other than they are to the people they're trying to recruit.

While people like to believe that hate groups only represent the extreme fringe elements of society, every individual or group is susceptible to prejudice and revisionism. Many churches hold the unspoken belief that other religions are blasphemous, and national governments regularly extol their innocence while carefully shunting aside any mention of atrocities they may have committed in the past.

To learn what other governments want to hide, look in the history textbooks that they give to their school children. Japanese history books portray Japan as a victim of World War Two, culminating with the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (while avoiding any mention about the Bataan Death March that killed 10,000 American and Filipino soldiers, or the fact that Japan was also trying to develop an atom bomb as well). American history books gloss over the fact that they consistently broke treaties with the Native Americans and deliberately gave them small pox–infected blankets in an effort to wipe them out.

So the next time you pledge allegiance to any group, organization, or nation, take some time to think. While you may be pledging allegiance to some noble idea, don't let that blind you to the fact that your cherished group, organization, or country may also have a questionable and immoral history as well. If you blindly support any cause using any means necessary to advance it, other people may see you as part of a hate group, and you won't even know it.