Such narratives work by generating a subject that is under threat by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth and so on), but to take the place of the subject. In other words, the presence of this other is imagined as a threat to the object of love. This narrative involves a re-writing of history, in which the labour of others (slaves, migrants) is concealed in a fantasy that it is the white subject who ‘built this land.' The white subjects claim the place of hosts (‘our shores'), at the same time as they claim the place of the victim, as those who are damaged by an ‘unmerciful government'. The narrative hence suggests that it is love for the nation that makes the white Aryan's hate others, who are taking away the nation, and hence their imagined place in its history, as well as their future.
This narrative, I would suggest, is far from extraordinary. Indeed, what it shows us is the production of the ordinary. The ordinary is here fantastic. The ordinary white subject is a fantasy that comes into being through the mobilisation of hate, as a passionate attachment closely tied to love. The emotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that fantasy to life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordinary person as the real victim. The ordinary becomes that which is already under threat by the imagined others whose proximity becomes a crime against person as well as place. The ordinary subject is reproduced as the injured party: the one that is ‘hurt' or even damaged by the ‘invasion' of others. The bodies of others are hence transformed into ‘the hated' through a discourse of pain. They are assumed to cause injury to the ordinary white subject, such that their proximity is read as the origin of bad feeling: indeed, the implication here is that the white subject's good feelings (love) have being ‘taken' away by the abuse of such feelings by others.
