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Even moreso than most people not being on our side, if we were to truly act in defense of our landbases, of our bodies, we would quickly find ourselves hated by the exploiters (of course), the fence-sitters, mainstream Americans, mainstream liberal activists. (My goodness, if mainstream social justice activists assault people, hold them for cops to arrest, and chant complaints about having their demos ruined just because some people break a few windows, imagine what these same activists would do if people began to strike more than symbolic blows against this death culture?) We would find ourselves hated by everyone who identifies more closely with civilization than with their landbase.

In The Culture of Make Believe I was attempting among other things to understand the relationship between exploitation, contempt, a sense of entitlement, threats to that entitlement, and hatred. I had learned that after the American Civil War the number of lynchings in the American South increased by at least a couple orders of magnitude. I wanted to know why. My understanding came when I happened across a line by Nietzsche, “One does not hate when one can despise.” I suddenly understood that perceived entitlement is key to nearly all atrocities, and that any threat to perceived entitlement will provoke hatred.

Here’s what I wrote:

“Europeans felt that they were (and are) entitled to the land of North and South America. Slave owners clearly felt they were entitled to the labor (and the lives) of their slaves, not only in partial payment for protecting slaves from their own idleness, but also simply as a return on their capital investment. Owners of nonhuman capital today feel they, too, are entitled to the ‘surplus return on labor,’ as economists put it, as part of their reward for furnishing jobs, and to provide a return on their investment in capital. Rapists act on the belief that they are entitled to their victims’ bodies. Americans act as though we are entitled to consume the majority of the world’s resources, and to change the world’s climate. All industrialized humans act like we’re entitled to anything we want on this planet.”326

I then wrote:

“From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along with—and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with—the perceived entitlement. That’s where Nietzsche’s statement comes in, and that’s where hatred of the sort I’m trying to get at in this book becomes manifest. Several times in this book I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, ‘normal,’ chronic state—where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised—to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized. Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force—and hatred—waits in the wings, ready to explode.”327

The point as it relates to the current book is that if you think the exploiters responded with fury and great violence when capitalists were merely disallowed from owning human beings328—when that particular perceived entitlement was thwarted—just imagine the backlash when civilized humans are stopped from perpetrating the routine exploitation that characterizes, makes possible, forms the basis of, and is the essence of their way of life.

The next few pages of The Culture of Make Believe continue to elaborate on this idea and I’d like to quote them now at length:

“Pretend that you were raised to believe that blacks—niggers would be more precise in this formulation—really are like children, but strong. And pretend that