How it works...

 

THIS is how it works.

You can hate a foreign government without this hatred taking over your entire political personality. 

You can hate a foreign government without hating the people ruled by that government, by consent or otherwise, but if you consistently apply different standards to the behaviour of that government than others, you will inevitably reveal something which deserves a probing searchlight: is your hatred fundamentally discriminatory and in a sense fundamentalist?

You may believe that you can hate or demonise virtuously. This may be possible. 

But whether you think you can unfailingly separate good and bad hatred personally is not the issue (nor does it matter at all if you can find a few members of the foreign nation in question who seem to hate in the same way that you do.) 

For the key questions are these:

— Of all the people worldwide (there have to be millions) whose political personality has been overrun by this particular hatred, how many of them are truly hateful in the old school, deeper, highly toxic way? (I would suggest that the majority would fail the simplest of purity tests. Check the comments of a post like this.) 

— Does your version of this hatred, however ‘above board’ it might seem according to your self-examination, inevitably feed into a dogmatic discourse that actively foments twisted ethnic animosity and sporadic acts of violence, much of which is only tenuously linked to the matters which have driven you to hate the foreign government?