Hate’s still free to fester

IN the broad freedoms granted by the wisdom and goodwill of America’s founders, everyone has the right to hate.

We can hate government, politics, the media, religion, cops, Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, rich, poor, other countries and each other generally.

There is no limit to hatred. The wind, the rain, the ocean, the very air we breathe and the land we occupy have all heard our displeasure, if not our curses.

Hatred exists with both laughter and tears. It crosses the boundaries of relationships and respects no age limits. Children die in clouds of hatred, and so do the elderly, victims of someone’s blind and raging antipathy.

We’ve all witnessed instances of hatred, however small and passing they might have seemed at the time. Road rage is a form of hatred. And so are anonymous letters to high-profile African Americans or guys like me with Latino bylines.

I’ve lost count of the amount of unsigned letters that attack “people like you” for sneaking across the nation’s southern borders and mucking up America, even though I’ve never sneaked across a border and do my best to keep America tidy.

Hatred doesn’t need a reason and defies logic. Truth is rarely a factor. One can hate without regard to any kind of a solid basis and gather around him or her those of similar feelings, to feed one another’s fires of loathing.

What draws me to the subject today are two events, one rooted in ignorance, the other in terror, that have occurred in recent weeks.

The first was that Nazi costume worn to a party by Prince Harry, the younger son of Prince Charles, who out of stupidity or insensitivity failed to realize what impact the donning of such a uniform might have on the millions who survived the Hitler era.

There were apologies, regrets and royal dismay in Britain, and the callow prince was ordered to visit the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz to help him realize, where the study of history had apparently failed, what horrors were committed by those who wore the swastika.

The second incident involved suspicions that a white supremacy group may have been involved in the murder of the husband and elderly mother of U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow in Chicago two weeks ago.

The shootings at Lefkow’s home came a month before white supremacist Matthew Hale was to be sentenced by another judge for trying to have Lefkow killed. She had ordered Hale to change the name of his extremist group in a trademark dispute.

Because of the volatile nature of hate groups, suspicions arose that followers of Hale and his World Church of the Creator may have been responsible for the double murders. The killer instead turned out to be a man who was out to murder Lefkow because she had ruled against him in an unrelated civil case.

While hatred, under the name of vengeance, remains an underlying factor in the murder of two innocents, it is almost a relief to learn that the killings were not committed by white supremacists. I know that the revelation offers little comfort to those who are touched by the horror, but in the wider arena of hatred, it at least has a limiting effect.

The very nature of freedom allows to exist those individuals and groups whose aim is to foster varying degrees of hostility toward people like me and people like you. The American Civil Liberties Union has more than once risen to the defense of organizations its members might personally despise, because to deny the civil liberties of one is to deny them to all, and the ACLU knows that.

Because I have occasionally been a victim of their vitriol, I have made it a point over the years to track the supremacists, back to the origin of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and up through the resurgences of various offshoots of the Ku Klux Klan. They existed in the backwoods of Dixie until slick, media-hip Klansman David Duke brought a form of legitimacy to white supremacy by winning a seat in the Louisiana Legislature in the 1980s. He was released from federal prison last May after serving time for mail and tax fraud.

I spent time with Duke in New Orleans and later with Frank Collin in Chicago, when he was head of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Party. A witless, tongue-tied man who hid behind a red door in a downtrodden neighborhood, the bumbling “American Fuhrer” did time for child molestation. Released from prison, he is said to have changed his name and continued in other areas of race hatred.

Today’s extremists have discovered the far reach of the Internet and through various websites are able to join those of similar misanthropic feelings. It’s their right to do so, to attempt to persuade the vulnerable, the angry, the alone and the dispossessed that other races or other ethnic groups or other religions are responsible for their loneliness or failure.

To deny them that right would be to create a danger even greater than the one they currently pose, but not to be aware of their existence would be the greatest danger of all.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@ latimes.com.