Kindle Notes & Highlights
one thing is clear: extremism can be, and often has been, lethal.
Extremism has never gone away since the end of the Second World War, and is once again on the rise in the world today, as a result of rising levels of political polarization.
Either way, both Breivik and KSM are positional extremists whose extremism is defined by their position on an ideological map. Groups and governments can also be extremists in this sense. Their extremism is positional or ideological extremism.
Another similarity between Breivik and KSM is that both were willing to use extreme methods to make a political point.
A third similarity between Breivik, KSM and many other extremists is psychological.
One common extremist preoccupation is with purity – religious, ideological or racial – and with anything that detracts from their supposed purity.
mindset extremists are also preoccupied with their own virtue, with the sense that they are only doing what is right to defend themselves and their fellows.
Hegel characterized fanaticism as ‘an enthusiasm for something abstract’.
Fanatics have unwarranted contempt for other people’s ideals and interests and are willing to trample on those ideals and interests in pursuit of their own ideals and interests. They will try to impose their ideals on others, by force, if necessary. They are unwilling or unable to think critically about their own ideals and do not suffer from self-doubt.
one can be an extremist without being a fanatic but not a fanatic without being an extremist.
One reason for questioning the usefulness of this label is the conviction that it does not pick out something real and only serves to delegitimize political outlooks that are at odds with mainstream thinking.
This is not to deny that this label, like the label ‘terrorist’, is often applied for political reasons, as a way to delegitimize opposition to the established order.
One’s ideology tells one what to do as well as what to think.
It is possible that fervent believers are unwilling to compromise because their beliefs are accompanied by strong feelings of conviction.
It might be, for example, that the belief is too important to be easily given up because giving it up would threaten the believer’s sense of self, or require too many adjustments elsewhere in their system of beliefs.
The issue is whether the principles about which one is uncompromising are ones about which one ought to be uncompromising. The answer to this question depends on what the principles are as well as on why one believes them.
His unwillingness to compromise says more about his own limitations than about the actual merits of the beliefs or principles to which he is committed.
There is what might be called a common extremist style, a way of thinking and acting that one finds in extremists with very different political agendas.
it is easier for a fanatic Communist to be converted to fascism, chauvinism or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal.
The clinical paranoid regards himself or herself as the victim of a hostile and conspiratorial world. For the political paranoid, it is his or her nation’s way of life or culture that is under threat. His or her feelings of righteous indignation give rise to a style that is ‘overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic’ (ibid.: 5).
Today extremists have different preoccupations, including two that Hofstadter associated with the clinical paranoid: conspiracy theories and the insistence that one’s in-group, one’s own people, have been, and continue to be, victims of persecution by a hostile out-group.13 In these respects, the extremist mindset and paranoid style are indistinguishable.
To talk about the common mindset of extremists with different ideological agendas is to talk about their characteristic preoccupations, attitudes, emotions, and ways of thinking.
another extremist preoccupation is with purity, that is, the dilution of the religious, ideological, or ethnic purity of one’s in-group by external forces.
Extremists also tend to be preoccupied by the vision of a mythical past, or of a mythical future, for which they see themselves as fighting.
Extremists believe uncompromisingly because they are averse to compromise. Compromise detracts from purity. In the extremist mindset, there is no place for doubt because doubt implies the possibility that one might be mistaken.
Since there are politically motivated and communicative acts of violence that instrumentalize their victims, it follows that terrorism is something real: there are acts of violence that meet the definition of terrorism.
On this account, there are degrees of violence and anyone who uses, or endorses, extreme violence as a political tool is almost certainly a methods extremist because extreme violence is almost certainly – though not always – disproportionate.
Geuss refers to the ideologies that everyone has as ideologies in the descriptive sense. Every human group has an ideology in this sense because ‘the agents of any group will have some psychological dispositions, use some concepts, and have some beliefs’ (1981: 5). A political ideology like fascism and communism is more specific.
One might say that extremist ideologies have, or promote, extremist world-views but what is an extremist world-view?
It follows that if an ideology counts as being further to the left on account of being unequivocal in its commitments, then this measure of ideological distance is psychological.
According to Scruton, ‘the right’ signifies ‘several connected and also conflicting ideas’ (2007: 601). These include conservative or authoritarian doctrines concerning the nature of civil society, theories of political obligation framed in terms of obedience, piety and legitimacy, reluctance to countenance too great a divorce between law and morality, cultural conservatism, respect for the hereditary principle, belief in private property, a belief in the value of the individual as against the collective, belief in free enterprise, and varying degrees of belief in human imperfectability.
the far right is defined not just by its anti-government and anti-democratic ideals and practices but also by its exclusionary beliefs, conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fantasies.
exclusionary, hierarchical, and dehumanizing ideals that seek to preserve the superiority and dominance of some groups over others’ (ibid.: 8). The far right embeds its dehumanizing ideologies ‘within a framework of existential threat to the dominant group’ (ibid.: 9), namely, white men.
Roger Eatwell argues that the fascist minimum has four key elements: (1) nationalism (the belief that the world is divided into nations); (2) holism (the insistence that the collective predominates over individual rights and interests); (3) radicalism (a rejection of the existing society and the power of establishment groups); and (4) a commitment to the so-called ‘Third Way’ (hostility to both capitalism and socialism combined with a willingness to draw on aspects of both).11
fascists are not just nationalists, they are ultra-nationalists and, in many cases, ethnonationalists who promote the interests of a particular ethnic group which they regard as superior to all others.
extremist ideologies are in favour of violence in a way that other ideologies are not.
Symbolic violence is linguistic. Thus, hate speech might be construed as symbolic violence. Finally, systemic violence is built into social relations of domination and exploitation.
These are questions about the ends or objectives of violence, its necessity, proportionality and targets.
it is possible to use violent methods without being a methods extremist.
The discussion will abide by the following terminological conventions: to be a methods extremist in the primary sense is to use extreme methods (violent or non-violent) in pursuit of one’s objectives.
The many ends or objectives of political violence include resistance to oppression and national liberation. One form of liberatory violence is anti-colonial violence.
One might be more understanding of extreme violence in a just cause or less inclined to condemn in such cases, but this does not alter the fact that even warriors for justice can be violent methods extremists.
Non-violent passive resistance ‘is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do. But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end’ (ibid.: 182–3).
Frantz Fanon asserts that colonialism is ‘violence in a natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence’ (2001: 48). How can he be sure? It is not true that violence was needed to end Britain’s colonial presence in India.
Fanon’s assumption that only violence can put an end to colonialism is itself a form of extremism.
This is unrealistic. The idea is to connect the necessity of violence with its being the last resort but how many other resorts are there and how can one be sure that all of them have been tried? This is what leads Walzer to object that it is not so easy to reach the last resort, which has only a ‘notional finality’ (2004b: 54).
The contrast with violent methods extremism could not be clearer. True violent methods extremists have no real interest in establishing that violence is necessary.
True violent methods extremists have no real interest in establishing that violence is necessary.
Just as pacifists misguidedly take the success of non-violence in very specific political, historical and geographical contexts as an indication that it is a viable strategy in other contexts, extremists misguidedly take the failure of non-violence in some contexts as an indication that violence is always necessary.
In other cases, however, the reason that methods extremists turn to violence is that they don’t have the popular support that would be needed to succeed without violence. In these cases, the need for violence reflects the extremists’ own weakness.
