Watching Hate in Its Ugly Forms : Television: Two very different programs depict the chilling and destructive effects of hatred on society.

Hello, hate.

We see you daily. We see you night after night. We see you everywhere. We see you in the video of Rodney G. King being savagely beaten by Los Angeles police officers. We see you in footage of rioters going berserk in a Latino neighborhood of Washington.

We see you in a Bill Moyers documentary arriving Monday night on PBS, and in a movie airing Sunday night on NBC.

Titled “Beyond Hate,” the documentary lets us chew on the words of a gang member in South-Central Los Angeles. Cooly and resolutely, he explains:

“When you control hate and turn it on and off like a faucet . . . that’s a beautiful thing.”

The movie is “In the Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas,” an account of the flight and pursuit of Gordon Kahl, who died in a shootout with police in 1983. Airing at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39, it depicts Kahl not only as a mad ideologue and member of the militant anti-tax group Posse Comitatus, but also as a “dangerous religious zealot,” murderer and white supremacist.

Kahl was a 63-year-old farmer and ex-con when he and some of his buddies got involved in an earlier shootout with authorities in Medina, N.D., that left two U.S. marshals dead. The movie shows Kahl (Rod Steiger) murdering one of them with a rifle blast as the marshal lay wounded and helpless on the ground, then almost immediately becoming the target of an extensive manhunt that ended four months later when he was gunned down in Arkansas.

As entertainment, “Manhunt in the Dakotas” is a nice little chase movie that’s tautly and suspensefully directed by Dick Lowry. He turns the initial rural shootout, for example, into something chillingly reminiscent of the bloody finale of John Sayles’ “Matewan,” in which would-be peacemakers become victims.

What the movie addresses too briefly, though, are the economic hard times and other frustrations that drive these South Dakota farmers to the hostile fringes of society as members of the Posse. Then, too, Michael Petryni’s teleplay takes significant liberties, structuring the manhunt around a composite or fictional hard-boiled FBI agent (Michael Gross) and appearing to rewrite history in scenes--including the final shootout--that clash with press accounts.

There are also other accounts that conflict with the movie’s depiction of Kahl as a flat-out metaphor for evil. If Kahl was indeed this heinous, however, then Steiger has caught him in a perfect freeze frame. It’s an impeccable performance, with Steiger the picture of steely menace as the bloodless protagonist, his stolid face hardening into a rigid mask of malevolence. Beneath the exterior, Kahl is boiling, quick to explode.

The Gordon Kahl of “Manhunt in the Dakotas” is the face of hate, a character easily transportable to Monday’s PBS program “Beyond Hate,” airing at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15. It’s the first of three programs on hate planned by Moyers.

With Catherine Tatge and Dominique Lasseur as producer/directors, the program roams what executive editor Moyers calls the “emotional landscape of hate,” traveling from South-Central L.A. to Jerusalem to last year’s Anatomy of Hate conference in Oslo, where Elie Wiesel, Nelson Mandela and others reflect thoughtfully about their own victimization.

Although history’s epic symbol of hate remains the Nazi Holocaust, civilized society continues to be terrorized by goose-stepping storm troopers of the mind.

We’re reminded Monday that haters--from Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s to today’s violent gangs--have a shared self-vision of moral omnipotence, an absolute certainty that their cause is just and that God is their ally. A gang member: “What drives me is the logic that I’m right.” And, moreover, the belief that the target of his wrath is wrong and so contemptable as to be subhuman.

“To divorce people from their humanity is not so easy,” Moyers says. “The victim must first be imagined as dangerous, a destroyer, or best of all, vermin, a source of contagion to be stamped out.”

Again, the gang member: “We deface the enemy (so that) he’s not even human.”

This dehumanization of the enemy is what links haters everywhere. No wonder, then, that in Sunday’s NBC movie we hear Gordon Kahl tell a black prison guard that what he learned behind bars was that “a nigger with a badge is still just a nigger.”

No wonder, too, that that many U.S. troops in Vietnam referred to the enemy as gooks , that black racists call whites honkies , that white racists like Kahl have always used epithets to denigrate blacks. No wonder that homophobes see gays as queers .

Political leaders have been known to use these hate/dehumanizing tactics as a means of swaying public opinion. We recall that to build enmity toward Saddam Hussein, President Bush described him as “another Hitler,” just as the Iraqi dictator himself has consistently demonized those opposing him. And just as anti-Semites call Jews kikes, Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir has equated Palestinians with grasshoppers.

Not humans with faces, but insects available to be stomped upon.

What the Moyers program mostly excludes are those cynical entrepreneurs of hate who nourish it by exploiting haters for personal gain.

It was President Bush himself who campaigned on that racist Willie Horton commercial. It’s former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson who has promoted his rematch with Razor Ruddock by again vowing to “kill” Ruddock in the ring.

It’s the widely televised World Wrestling Federation that, in the heat of the Persian Gulf War, cast the comic Sgt. Slaughter and his purportedly Iraqi sidekick (formerly seen playing an Iranian cutthroat) as archvillains who ridicule Old Glory and American values.

And then there’s “Geraldo.” Scheduled for Thursday afternoon in KCBS Channel 2’s “Best of Geraldo” slot was Rivera’s infamous chair-throwing episode that gushered into a near race riot, pitting blacks against skinheads and other thug supporters of the White Aryan Resistance.

Yes, what great television it was.

The rerun was heavily promoted by Channel 2, the idea being that violence--whether hockey players creaming each other on the ice or racial animosities exploding in a TV studio--pays at the box office.

“When language fails, violence becomes the language,” Elie Wiesel says Monday. In this case, however, the language is money.

Hello, hate. Hello, profits.