Writing about the responses from world leaders to his stabbing in 2022, Salman Rushdie points out that while some expressed their condolences and support others rejoiced in the fact that an assailant attacked him on stage at Chautauqua. Referencing the fatwa that Ruhollah Khomeini issued on him following the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989, Rushdie points out that once “you are turned into an object of hate, there will be people who hate you.” When you become an “object of hate,” not even an “enemy” but a mere “object,” devoid of any semblance of humanity in the eyes of those who hate you, it becomes easy for others to “hate you.” This was Rushdie’s attacker who only read a couple of pages of Rushdie’s work and watched a YouTube video before attacking him.

Hate spreads, no matter how much we try to curtail it or squash it. Once one perpetrator of hate exits the stage, another pops up, and another. It’s a multi-headed hydra that replicates its heads when some get lopped off. It’s also a root system, an ever-extending root system that reaches out underneath the surface to spread its message across the land. When the trunk and branches fall, the roots remain, communicating with other trees and plants through mycorrhizal networks. Thus, the idea remains, multiplying and traversing the globe. So, even though Khomeini deemed Rushdie “an object of hate” in 1989 and lifted the fatwa a decade later, the assailant, who was not even alive in 1989, imbibed Rushdie as “an object of hate” and attacked him. Rushdie, for the attacker, became an object, not a person, not a human, not a fellow traveler through time and space but merely an object of derision that must be silenced.

I’ve been thinking, a lot, over the past few years about how the transmission of hate and virulent ideologies occur. We know they get passed down from parents to children within the home and through communities. The image of a toddler at a Klan rally in Georgia in 1992 serves as a prime example of this. We see the toddler, in full Klan regalia, standing in front of a Georgia State Patrol officer, looking at their reflection in the officer’s riot shield. We don’t know what happened to the child after the photographer snapped the picture because the mother swopped in and removed the toddler from the scene. Did the toddler grow up adhereing to the Klan’s ideologies? Did the child rebel? What happened? We don’t know. We do know, though, that the parent, by the mere fact of bringing the child to the rally, worked to inculcate the child into hateful ideology, turning fellow humans beings into objects of hate, stripping them of their very being.

As I read Ram V’s recent run on The Swamp Thing, the ways that virulent ideologies travel underneath the surface comes up, specifically in issue #5 when Levi Kamei gets pulled, through the Green, to London to extract an unexploded bomb that the Nazis dropped during the Battle of Britain. The ordinance buried itself under the streets of London, remaining untouched for decades until the ideology it represents reached its tendrils into the psyche of individuals on the surface. The issue opens with images of a rainy London as the narrator intones, “There are great unseen lines that meet beneath the city. Veins under calloused, gray skin. Carrying its lifeblood, information, memory . . . Magic. Whatever you want to call it.” These veins, as John McRead depicts at various points with panels showing a satellite view of London, meet underneath the surface of, deep beneath the Thames, Big Ben, and Downing Street.

Fascists march in the street, and Sierra calls John Constantine to London to help fight them back. When Swamp Thing arrives, he tells Constantine that he has found “[a] heavy thing with a body and iron and idea full of hate” underneath the city. He points out that ideas don’t die, and that the one buried deep under soil and concrete “has crept through the ground and infected all that was built above it.” To eradicate the infection, Swamp Thing must extricate the bomb and dispose of it because it has infected Nigel and seeks to spark off an explosion of hate and virulent ideologies, essentially, as Sierra points out, “turning people into fascists.”

Swamp Thing, thus, must reach deep into the earth to remove the lit bomb. In a four-panel sequence, McRead shows Swamp Thing reaching beneath the surface, going down into the earth towards the bomb and grabbing it. The narration highlights the mycorrhizal network that contain the memories underneath our fit. The narrator says, “Through concrete, stone, and steel, the Swamp Thing reaches. He is aware now of the power he wields. Moss and grass and root whisper to him, their eternal memory of this place. He knows where the bomb fell and he reaches until his fingers coil around its metal corpse and touch the idea within.” Even though Swamp Thing removes the bomb to a deserted location so he can dispose of it, he does not rid the world of the fascist thought it contains.

The final panel of this sequence returns to a satellite view of London, this time in read with what appear to be flowers sprouting from various spots on the surface. The narrator states, “As he pulls it away from that place through lines beneath London, he senses something familiar. The sickly flavor of the contagion within the green.” Even though the object is gone, the idea has spread through the mycorrhizal networks, stretching outwards and continuing to infect individuals who come into contact with it. Ideas travel. They don’t succumb to physical death. They propagate, and we must continually be prepared to prune them back, working with all of our might to remove the taproot and dismantle the mycorrhizal networks.

That pruning requires constant vigilance, constant knowledge and understanding of the past. It requires us to engage, not cower behind closed doors. It requires us to work and be engaged. While the ideas may remain, we must constantly be working to move forward, leaving less and less of the ideas underneath the soil to sprout up and break the surface. Unless we do this, we will succumb to the ideologies that will lead us to ruin and destroy us. Another way to think about this is that the ideologies are a disease. We can cure and individual but the disease remains. We can say that the disease has been eradicated, but infected individuals can infect other individuals, so it is never truly eradicated. Thus, we must prune and cure. We must maintain the garden and replace the virulent mycorrhizal networks with ones that move us forward.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.