RE: Far-Right Extremism Is a Global Problem
February 5, 2021 at 4:55 pm
(This post was last modified: February 5, 2021 at 5:26 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
It's full of whatever a country happens to be full of at the time.
As mistaken as their existential dread may be, in the case of white supremacists or islamic extremists, it's genuinely felt. The transformation of racial antipathy to racial apathy and finally, victimization propaganda in it's current form coincided with a massive amount of americans getting a better education by any number of metrics. In it's current form, it exploits the education and liberal indoctrination of it's targets as well as their belief that their intelligence or education somehow guards them (or prevents a smart propagandist) from being who and what they are - or even realizing it as is so often the case. It presents itself as skepticism. It presents itself as realism. It presents itself as science. It presents itself as an appeal to save a targeted minority, de jure or de facto.
We have many of the same cultural misapprehensions about domestic terrorists and their sympathizing demographic as we do about islamic extremists and theirs. In both cases, they are seeking a government or authority as an alternative to one which they believe has failed them, and failed them in specifically relevant and thematic ways. The list of those people is longer than the list of poor people, or uneducated people, or out and out racists. It's pretty good copy - and we can point to the rise of global extremism to establish that they've gotten slicker and expanded their targetable demos.
OTOH, in fairness to the conceptually or actually undereducated and poor - and as a way to open the door to correcting our misapprehension of the relationship between those things and extremism...lets recall that when we ultimately find ourselves beating back far right nonsense it is overwhelmingly the blood of the poor and uneducated which ends up getting spilt.
A particularly good example, I think, because it straddles the line between when our academic institutions were very much in the tank for things we think education solves today.
As mistaken as their existential dread may be, in the case of white supremacists or islamic extremists, it's genuinely felt. The transformation of racial antipathy to racial apathy and finally, victimization propaganda in it's current form coincided with a massive amount of americans getting a better education by any number of metrics. In it's current form, it exploits the education and liberal indoctrination of it's targets as well as their belief that their intelligence or education somehow guards them (or prevents a smart propagandist) from being who and what they are - or even realizing it as is so often the case. It presents itself as skepticism. It presents itself as realism. It presents itself as science. It presents itself as an appeal to save a targeted minority, de jure or de facto.
We have many of the same cultural misapprehensions about domestic terrorists and their sympathizing demographic as we do about islamic extremists and theirs. In both cases, they are seeking a government or authority as an alternative to one which they believe has failed them, and failed them in specifically relevant and thematic ways. The list of those people is longer than the list of poor people, or uneducated people, or out and out racists. It's pretty good copy - and we can point to the rise of global extremism to establish that they've gotten slicker and expanded their targetable demos.
OTOH, in fairness to the conceptually or actually undereducated and poor - and as a way to open the door to correcting our misapprehension of the relationship between those things and extremism...lets recall that when we ultimately find ourselves beating back far right nonsense it is overwhelmingly the blood of the poor and uneducated which ends up getting spilt.
(February 5, 2021 at 4:43 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote:(February 5, 2021 at 4:31 pm)SUNGULA Wrote: History is full of brilliant racists and that's sad
William Shockley for one.
A particularly good example, I think, because it straddles the line between when our academic institutions were very much in the tank for things we think education solves today.
Quote:Shockley was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 1982 United States Senate election in California. He ran on a single-issue platform of highlighting the "dysgenic threat" of some racial groups, including African-Americans, to American society.[46][47][48] He came in eighth place in the primary, receiving 8,308 votes and 0.37% of the vote.Plays better today.
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