Dictionaries define “hate” as “intense or passionate dislike for someone or something.” When hate is intensified to a point where it defies death, yours or someone else’s, we might add, it becomes “pure hate.”

And the world is full of it. Consider how many Indians and Pakistanis hate each other in pure intensity; as do Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; as do Germans and Slavs; as do Arabs and Jews; as do Koreans and Japanese; as do Serbians and Kosovars, and so on. Virtually every nation has an archenemy that it wishes dead, like a Serbian mother who scolds her whimpering son: “If you are such a crybaby, how can you grow up strong and kill all the Kosovars!”

Blessedly insulated from such a world of conflict and hate, Americans have always been known as one exceptional people who have no natural enemy to hate, much less with such intensity in their hearts. The lore has it that Americans would war against a country and, after winning, would spend their own money to rebuild the conquered nation and become friends.

The nations that hate each other in pure passion always looked to the U.S. as a fair and neutral arbitrator and effective peacemaker for their disputes. George Mitchell, a longtime senator from Maine and the finest representative of this American affability, brought the incorrigible Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland to a peace settlement in 1998 that is still holding against all expectations.

“There is no such thing,” Mitchell confidently declared and America wholeheartedly agreed, “as a conflict that can’t be ended — no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful.”

Then, inexplicably, Donald Trump came and cruelly ripped this mask of neutrality off the face of Americans, revealing a strain of “pure hate” at the core of white America. Like the unforgiving nations with the purest burning hate against their sworn enemies, America’s race hatred toward Black people made a mockery of this hitherto blessed nation of amiability. Its famous creed of goodwill toward all and malice toward none turned into a crumbling facade of fakery.

Under Trump’s skillful goading, these white Americans are now no less intense and unforgiving with their racism than the warring nations with their ancient hatred. We come to racism as Trump’s chain with his followers by the simple process of elimination. We ask what other “issues” or “policies” (farm issues? NATO policy?) would hold them so tightly together.

The intensity of their bond jars many thinking minds. To prove it, Trump infamously declared: “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” and he was right. Racism makes Trump immune to all human weaknesses and character flaws. Bonded in pure racial hate, Trump’s popularity among American whites is assuredly greater than God’s.

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Today in America, it’s impossible to mention “white America” without thinking of “Black America” and the racial hatred that fills the space between “white” and “black.” You cannot be a white person in America without bearing this burden of race hate: Your very “whiteness” is defined by “blackness” and your own identity as “white” is a consequence of that very racism, well beyond current politics and long before Trump. That very word “white” is born of the longstanding American racist system from which no white person can escape unscathed. Simply, there is no innocence in being white.

Once afflicted, racism is an eternal virus of damnation that nullifies every act of love or kindness you have ever felt in your life as a human being. Once you are a Black-hating white man, you will die with that hate in your heart. In all the witness of American character and history, there is nothing more intense and more irreversible than white men’s loathing of Black men. In a nation where things change all the time, racist hate — hidden deep and not open to reason or argument — never changes.

Pure hate goes with “pure white” or “all white,” such as all-white churches, all-white police officers, all-white political rallies, or all-white neighborhoods. All-white in society is like all-white in a movie where all characters are white, like the black-and-white movies on TCM made before Technicolor. To be sure, these all-white scenes (even in our neighborhoods today) are pretty, pure and, in a sense, reminiscent of a bygone era when America was mythically innocent and safe.

But, in truth, these all-white scenes hide the ugly reality of racism, injustice and fakery, created and maintained by a horrid social arrangement of institutionalized power. “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the all-time favorite movie of white America, for example, is an all-white movie about love and community eventually overcoming money and selfishness. But even in such a wonderful story of love and community, it’s love among white people who live in an all-white community. The white-picket fence of Hollywood covers up the black shacks across the track. Even today, so few of us recognize such sweet but insidious fakeries, bleached white.

We Americans are pragmatic people and willing to compromise with any policies or issues. We can compromise with Putin, socialism, or even with the devil, but never with racial hate. It is so pure, so American, in its white core, that it must remain pure and American — no compromise.

Nobody realizes this better than one Donald Trump.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.