Why the ‘Be Kind’ brigade are so horrible

The Green Party came to prominence earlier this year by forever 
promising ‘hope not hate’. Indeed, that dreamy yearning played a key 
part in securing an unprecedented mandate in the May local elections, 
when a callow cohort of progressive twenty-somethings, wooed by these 
nice-sounding words, helped to put the Greens into power in many 
inner-city councils. This is the same demographic who are also receptive 
to similar utopian platitudes about abolishing borders, housing 
immigrants, and free bus travel, free university education and free 
childcare. Free everything, if possible, courtesy of ‘the billionaires’, 
who in the Green Party’s ethereal vision will obligingly pay for it all.

Yet such charmingly naïve sentiments seems to jar with Green Party 
rhetoric in regard to Israel and the Jews. When it comes to this matter, 
their members are rather lacking in compassion, somewhat short on soppy 
inanities. On this subject, they are hate-mongers of the first order.

Some Green Party activists now speak of British Jews being a ‘weapon’ of 
Israel, describe hostility towards Jews as ‘understandable’, and talk of 
‘violent resistance’ and ‘armed struggle’ by Palestinians. Messages in a 
private WhatsApp group used by Green members also referred to ‘killing 
Zionists’. One participant in the group chat described the majority of 
Israeli Jews as ‘genociders’, another referred to Iran’s Islamic 
Revolutionary Guard Corps as ‘part of a national liberation movement’, 
while one Green Party parish councillor on the Isle of Wight, asked if 
their comment ‘Zionism has to go’ meant that they would like Israel 
‘wiped off the map, in essence?,’ replied: ‘Yes, I would like that.’

For a party that likes to preach pacifism, this is fighting talk indeed. 
Yet far from representing a contradiction or an aberration, such 
bellicose sentiment is wholly consistent with the worldview of the 
idealistic, progressive left.

 From the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks to the Khmer Rouge, those who have 
combined idealistic utopianism, unassailable righteousness, the pursuit 
of absolute egalitarianism, and a quasi-religious sense of mission have 
always spoken with belligerence – and usually acted upon it. The 
inevitable catastrophic and bloody fate of utopian movements partly 
stems from the necessary payoff between liberty and equality – you can 
have more of one only at the expense of having less of the other, so the 
pursuit of complete equality must entail the complete elimination of 
liberty – but it’s also the consequence of people being beholden to 
unshakeable convictions.

To paraphrase Yeats, those possessed with convictions and passionate 
intensity are the worst types. Those who present themselves as 
unquestionably caring and good and on the ‘right side of history’ always 
feel at licence to behave as they please, because they see their 
opponents as being on the side of evil.

This is why many will also recognise another related, longer-standing 
and similarly ostensible contradiction in politics: the propensity of 
those who profess to ‘Be Kind’ to act abhorrently online. They feel at 
liberty to be as vile and personal in their insults because all is 
forgiven if you have right on your side. In the minds of the elect, 
those who hold opposite opinions are already dehumanised.

What makes the self-righteous fury of the hard-left today all the more 
toxic is that it has been enabled by a culture that valorises victimhood 
and equates it with moral superiority. Those who present themselves as 
victims of political oppression, or ally themselves to others in that 
position (in this case, the Palestinians) are even more likely to have 
recourse to bellicose language. The wrath of ideologues with good on 
their side is even harder to gainsay when they add to their argument 
that they are victims, and that the pain they feel is your fault – as a 
straight white man, or as someone who is ‘right wing’, or as a Jew.

This noxious admixture of ideological certitude, victimhood and 
infantile sentimentality helps to explain the recent rise of ultra-left 
violence. The return to the headlines last week of Luigi Mangione is a 
reminder of how this combination works. It was not merely Mangione’s 
actions that are telling – he shot and killed the CEO of a private 
healthcare provider in December 2024 – but the manner in which he was 
subsequently feted by those who think some people deserve to die for 
being capitalists, for not being caring.

Mangione’s actions can be seen in context with the murder of Charlie 
Kirk, or in this country, the emergence of the militant transgender 
rights group Bash Back, and indeed Palestine Action, an outfit which 
also has no qualms about using violence if it’s for a ‘good cause’.

One can therefore be shocked, but not confused, at what we are hearing 
today from the mouths of some Greens. The boastfully compassionate, 
those brimming with convictions, are often those who are also full of hate.


Patrick West