Was the storming of the US Capitol an act of political terrorism? How has democracy become so polarised between the left and right?
Despite living in a global age, the rise of political extremism reflects a world that has never been more divided – we only need to look at the storming of the US Capitol to see the great rift that exists between the ‘left’ and ‘right’. How did we get here, and where to next?
In this episode, Amelia is joined by Dr Ben Rich and Michael Wieteska from the Curtin School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. They unpack what makes someone a political extremist and explore the rising appeal of political extremist groups. They also discuss some of the defining characteristics of the left and right, and the problems that occur when we solely label ourselves as one or the other.
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au.
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Music: OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library
You can read the full transcript for the episode here.
Speaker 1:
00:00 This is the Future Of, where experts share their vision of the future and how their work is helping shape it for the better.
Amelia Searson:
00:09 I'm Amelia Searson. We live in a global age where cultures, religions, beliefs and identities cross and converge, and yet we have never been more divided, giving rise to people, groups and ideas that are extremely intolerant of difference. Political extremism is on the rise in countries around the world, perhaps most noticeably in the US. But what defines political extremism, and what's behind its increase? To discuss this topic with me today is Dr Ben Rich and Michael Wieteska. Ben and Michael are researchers with Curtin's School of Media, Culture, Creative Arts, and Social Inquiry, with expertise in international relations and the far right.
Amelia Searson:
00:47 Welcome, Ben and Michael.
Amelia Searson:
00:49 Ben, this is your second time on the podcast. Thanks so much for returning and sharing more of your expertise.
Dr Ben Rich:
00:52 No worries.
Amelia Searson:
00:54 Just to get us started, Ben, can you explain to me the difference between someone just having radical political views and being a political extremist?
Dr Ben Rich:
01:02 Well I think the key term there is the difference between someone with radical political views and someone willing to engage in violent extremism, because this is what we really are quite focused on these days. Having radical political views, in some circles, is obviously a very bad connotation. But for many, having radical political views is actually quite a positive thing. If we think back, for instance, to the American Civil War, anti-slave abolitionists were considered radical for their time, and many pursued that agenda through both violent and nonviolent means.
Dr Ben Rich:
01:41 What we think about though when we talk about extremism in this context today though, are people who are essentially willing to forgo the norms of what we think of as acceptable engagement in political activities. Maybe you have a progressive agenda or a conservative agenda that is considered outside of the norms, but you are willing to pursue that through means that society agrees upon are acceptable.
Dr Ben Rich:
02:08 A good example of this is the Islamic group in Australia... it's actually across the West now... Hizb ut-Tahrir. Now, Hizb ut-Tahrir are definitely what we would consider as political radicals. They are a group with the expressed objective of establishing a caliphate. They want to basically get us living under a religious theocracy. However, their activities have, by and large, been constrained through methods of persuasion, so things like going out, handing out pamphlets, political organisation, reading groups, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. While they are engaged in pursuing goals that are generally considered as anathema to a liberal democracy, they are not engaging in violent means of achieving that. You would then compare that to a political extremist group with a similar goal, like the Islamic State, who has quite similar goals to Hizb ut-Tahrir but is more than willing to use violence to achieve those goals. That's where we really differentiate between a radical and a violent extremist.
Amelia Searson:
03:14 Right, so violence is really the thing that underpins what determines a political extremist.
Dr Ben Rich:
03:20 Yeah.
Amelia Searson:
03:21 Right. Michael, can you explain to me, because I'm sure this is going to be coming up within our conversation, the difference between left and right wing views, and maybe if you had a global example of a group who leans either way, if you could share that?
Michael Wieteska:
03:35 Yeah, for sure. I think if you boil down the conventional left/right divide to its basic elements, I would say the difference is philosophical in nature, where, broadly and I'm generalising to some extent here, but broadly, we would say that the political left has its roots in what we'd call determinism, and the political right has some roots in what we'd call free will or individual agency centric approach to human behaviour.
Michael Wieteska:
04:06 Did you want me to elaborate on these a little bit?
Amelia Searson:
04:09 yeah, if you wouldn't mind.
Michael Wieteska:
04:10 For determinists, the idea of basically... I'm sorry to get very philosophical and very abstract... is that free will isn't real. It doesn't exist. You are born a blank slate. Through childhood and adolescence, you suck in information about the world around you, the people, the norms and the customs of that world. And based on that information, you're trapped or, I guess, limited in terms of your ability to make certain decisions.
Michael Wieteska:
04:36 For example, a child growing up on a farm in... and we're going to use the US example because it's topical... rural Alabama probably doesn't have very much of a drive to study for the Harvard entrance exam, right? They weren't necessarily born into a setting where expectations about the importance of attending an Ivy League school were drilled into them from an early age. Their expectations about their future wellbeing probably aren't going to be tied to whether or not they graduate Summa Cum Laude, again, from one of those Ivy League universities. Then also by virtue of the wealth of their family, the education they received growing up might not be adequate to prepare them for that pathway. If we compare that to a kid raised in an affluent part of Chicago, who's raised around certain markers of wealth, taught to idolise intellectualism and, as a result, whose self-worth and prospects for the future are tied to the idea of graduating from Harvard, while both kids might have the potential, theoretically, to go to Harvard and graduate, only one is really born into the circumstances where pursuing it is both taught to be desirable, and actually materially achievable.
Michael Wieteska:
05:47 The way that this determinist position manifests in policy is like a straightforward follow on from here. Determinists basically look for instances in the world where people are inhibited or occluded as a result of the circumstances they're born into from pursuing certain opportunities or standards of living, and then finding ways to alleviate those conditions. This is where we get your socialism, your communism and all these kind of ideologies from. They will stem from this, I guess, generalised desire to provide as many people as possible with the material circumstances to achieve their full potential to sort it out. This is where we get the term progressive from, this idea that the human experience is something that can be improved upon and changed.
Michael Wieteska:
06:35 That's determinism on the left. Conversely, the right generally emphasise the perspective grounded on assumptions about individual agency, and the importance and the sanctity of your individual agency and your freewill. Everyone is a free agent, and we should really orient our societies towards enabling types of behaviors and attitudes that seem to result in success or successful individuals. If we adopt this perspective, we'd look around us at the things that seem to be working. We're sitting in a nice air conditioned studio, we've got iPhones or smartphones strapped to our thighs. We've got all this nice stuff. It's all good, so how can we preserve or further empower the actors or the systems that make these things possible, right? If my car, being cheap and effective, is the result of an unregulated or slightly less regulated than usual market, then, hey, let's deregulate the market even more. If the company that made that car was founded by an entrepreneur, let's support entrepreneurs, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Michael Wieteska:
07:38 From this perspective, the solution to emerging problems in society generally involves looking backwards rather than forwards. After all, it was society changing that created many of the problems that we're going to be talking about today in the first place, right? If change has created problems, we look to the past and we look for things about society that were different in the past that we can revert back to to alleviate some of these social pressures. So particularly when we're talking about the far right, the analysis becomes what has changed in the last 50 or 100 years that might have contributed to the issues we're dealing with now, and how can we revert back to that mode of being?
Michael Wieteska:
08:19 Now, I'm confident and, Ben, you're welcome to correct me on this, that pretty much any major social economic dispute between the left and the right can be boiled down to this perspective. But I'll give you a little bit of a clear example of how this manifests in political dispute.
Michael Wieteska:
08:35 Criminal justice is a really good example. The left, determinists, would view criminals primarily as victims of circumstance, people born into social and economic circumstances that make a pathway towards some kind of criminal act, almost an inevitability, rather, victims of circumstance, again. The right, advocates of free will, would view criminals as fundamentally evil or lazy and as individuals who, despite knowing all the risks, willingly chose to break the law. The left's response would therefore be what is termed generally rehabilitative justice or restorative justice - investing time money into understanding the circumstances that led to the criminal act and providing the sort of support to the individual to set them back on track and also to prevent other people from falling down that same line. Conversely, the right's response falls, not all the time, but generally into what we would call punitive justice. You... sorry, not to point at you, you, as an individual, committed a crime, therefore, you as an individual ought to be punished. This is where we get some of the prison systems we've seen dominating the US and Australia. So, determinists vs free will, very philosophical, but I think that any other explanation whether we talk about a communal versus individual perspective is going to stem from that philosophical difference.
Amelia Searson:
09:59 Michael, you mentioned education. I think that is a really, really interesting concept, especially since it's often used in history. If you look at Soviet Russia, it was used as a tool to suppress opposition and to control or indoctrinate people really. Do you think education is still a measure that's being used to facilitate these sorts of extremist views?
Michael Wieteska:
10:26 Yes, in the sense that education standards in West, specifically, have declined over the last two decades; in Australia, quite sharply. In the sense that children are being imbued with less critical thinking skills, certainly, there's a pathway towards the option of more radical viewpoints from that perspective.
Amelia Searson:
10:48 I remember watching a documentary about neo-Nazis in America. They were saying that the Holocaust was actually a vacation spot, and there were swimming pools. It was a really, really incredible experience, and it's just sort of, "Where did you read that?"
Michael Wieteska:
11:04 Yeah, very classic.
Dr Ben Rich:
11:05 Well, a really good example is we could see, actually, in modern Germany and the way in which education can either facilitate or stymie political extremism. One of things that's really interesting about looking at modern Germany is you have the unification between the East and the West that happens after the Cold War. In the West, under the Western Allies occupation, there was what was termed as the Denazification program. This was a national effort imposed on the German people by the Allies as they're occupied. Ignoring some of the more 'soft stuff' they did with, for instance, getting German rocket scientists who were very much affiliated with the Nazi Party and putting guys in the Bundeswehr who perhaps were a bit suss. But there was a broader effort to essentially make the population of Germany confront the horrors that it had inflicted on its own minority populations, Jews, gypsies, probably not the LGBT [community] at the time, but certainly ethnic and religious minorities.
Dr Ben Rich:
12:08 What this meant was that the appeal of neo-Nazidom and white supremacy has always, since the end of the Cold War in the west of Germany, not had a great deal of traction, not had a great deal of resurgence. At the other end of the spectrum, however, you had Eastern Germany, and the way in which the Eastern Germans under the occupation by the Soviets were forced to deal with the horrors of the Holocaust was essentially they were told they weren't responsible. They said they were essentially led astray, and that society itself didn't hold any real culpability for that, essentially telling the society 'You get a free pass on this, it wasn't your fault'. What we've seen interestingly enough, with the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany is that territories in the east have had a much greater problem with neo-Nazis and white nationalists coming out of those areas than territories in the west with these very two different education systems and how they confronted that national history. Now, certainly, we can talk about that in the case of Australia and our own sordid past with Indigenous minorities, how we treated them, and some of the white nationalist, white supremacy narratives that we see today that we are still contending with.
Amelia Searson:
13:39 I'd like to hear both of your opinions on this because, obviously, it's extremely, extremely topical. In terms of the recent riots in Washington [DC], some people are calling them an act of domestic terrorism. Would you agree with this definition? What are your general thoughts on what's currently happening in the Capitol?
Dr Ben Rich:
13:59 Well I think this comes back to something that we confront in our own unit on terrorism, if anyone's interested. It's in second semester of every year - terrorism insurgency. You can go look it up if you have an elective open. Terrorism itself as a concept is what we term in the field an essentially contested one. It's a concept that it's very hard to get a clear working definition of and, indeed, there are entire journal articles out there that look at the hundreds of definitions of law enforcement agencies, different states, academics, think tanks of how they define terrorism. However, I think in the case of when we talk about the recent incident of the Capitol, it's probably the best way to call it, perhaps we have to break it down into component parts. I think on the one hand, there was spontaneous outbreak of violence. And that is something that we would probably generally attribute to something more along the lines of a riot. I think for many people who were engaging in that, it perhaps wasn't really a premeditated thing. It was something that happened on the spot. People were fired up, they got in. You saw this with some of the reports on the ground. People, they broke into the Capitol, and then they were just milling about not really knowing what to do. It's like the dog that catches its own tail, like, 'What do I do with this?'
Dr Ben Rich:
15:32 However, the other thing we know is that there were definitely people who were planning this premeditatively online. There were people who were planning to engage in acts of political violence, who had sketched out plans, perhaps, to kidnap or even execute congress men and women with the expressed intention of generating fear and propaganda. Now, that is pretty much a textbook case of terrorism. It's something that, I think, a lot of people aren't comfortable with because, perhaps, our familiarity with terrorism over the last 20 years has been one associated with racial characteristics. And so when we confront it being done by a bunch of middle and low class people of Caucasian backgrounds, it doesn't feel right. However, I think if we are adhering to consistent applications of the concept, it's very difficult to make the argument that they weren't people who were either engaging in terrorism on that day or intending to engage in premeditated acts of terrorism.
Amelia Searson:
16:38 And they were just making those posts publicly on, like, Facebook or...
Michael Wieteska:
16:43 Yeah, and there are also people that were photographed in the actual building with zip cuffs or zip ties and hostage-taking kits, so, yeah, between the two...
Michael Wieteska:
16:53 I think another important thing when we talk... like take a step back and look at how terrorism is used by states, because of the last 20 or so years of conflicts that we've experienced, we've seen the spread of the surveillance state, and all of this has been justified under the umbrella of protecting us from terrorism.
Michael Wieteska:
17:15 Now, there are two problems with this. One is that Democrat or Republican... again, we're going to focus on the US here, using terrorism or the threat of terrorism to expand and cramp down civil rights is a bipartisan thing. I like to use the example that Obama 'loved his ears' - he punished more whistleblowers than all of his predecessors combined. Right? So the state as this entity that has a monopoly on violence is always going to look for opportunities to control, monitor the population. It makes sense from the perspective of the state, but there's a fine balance to be struck there. On the one hand, there's the issue associated with expanding or creating new legislation to deal with the people that storm the Capitol as terrorists is problematic. On the other hand, and this is something we're going to probably get to again later, is that, historically, when you treat social problems as policing issues, as certain Muslim communities in Australia have experienced the last decade or two, it often has a counterproductive effect, where if you identify a particular community and you send men with guns once or twice a year to check on them, arrest them, and things like that, and that group of people's perspective is that the state is legitimate and the state is out to get them, you tend to confirm that perspective and you tend to actually, in some cases, radicalise people further, incite more violence.
Michael Wieteska:
18:42 So from the perspective of the right in the US, they're being called terrorists. In many cases, like if we look at the QAnoners, they believe that the US government is controlled by a shadowy cabal of, I think, Jewish elites that engage in pedophilia and child sex trafficking. If all of a sudden that state now starts coming for them kicking down doors, arresting people under the framework of a threat of terror, that can...may very well likely have the opposite effect. We'll probably get to this a little bit later, but there's a problem with using this hard terrorist rhetoric to deal with a problem when in fact, overwhelmingly, it seems to be more of a social problem.
Dr Ben Rich:
19:21 A really good, another very topical example of this outside of the United States about the problem of using...classifying politically an organisation as a terrorist one can actually be found in Yemen. Mike Pompeo, the rather morally repulsive current Secretary of State under Trump, on his way out has been doing as much damage as possible to basically sabotage the Biden administration's efficacy in its foreign policy. One of the things that he has done is classified the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a terrorist organisation. Now, we think why does this matter? This is a conflict that's yonks away, it's in the backwater of the Middle East, why should we care about it? Well, the problem is that when you politically classify an organisation, the State Department designates an organisation as a terrorist organisation, a bunch of legal restrictions come into play in terms of things like how can you engage? What are actual ways you can engage with this entity? How can you open dialogue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It makes it much more difficult to engage with that.
Dr Ben Rich:
20:33 Now, what we've seen is that, at the same time that this has happened, the Saudis who have been fighting a bloody war inside that country for the last five years, it's been designated by numerous observers including the UN, I believe, as the worst humanitarian crisis of our time, are finally getting the hint that this is not a sustainable war, and that they need to find a way out. Well, the only way you find ways out of conflicts like that is by engaging and finding peace dialogues, and coming to some arrangement with it. Now, the dominant actor that the Saudis and the South Yemeni government are going to have to deal with are the Houthis because, regardless of whether you like them or not, they are in a rather intractable position in the country's north. They are not going to be defeated militarily, so there has to be a dialogue, there has to be peace negotiations. There has to be a move towards conflict resolution with them that accepts the reality of who they are.
Dr Ben Rich:
21:31 So by designating them a terrorist organisation, Pompeo is essentially throwing a big spanner in this process because how can you engage with an organisation that is a terrorist? By classifying them as terrorist you're essentially saying it's impossible to talk as them. They can't be dealt with like a legitimate political actor. This will likely have significant impacts in that peace process down the line, which is already very fraught from the outset.
Amelia Searson:
21:57 Michael, there's a documentary filmmaker who I'm obsessed with, Louis Theroux. I don't know if... you've probably heard.
Michael Wieteska:
22:03 He's amazing.
Amelia Searson:
22:03 Yes, he's incredible! He has made many documentaries, interviewing neo-Nazis, just many, many different political extremists. Last year, he made a comment, I think he was being interviewed by The Guardian, and he said that far right groups are becoming more insidious than ridiculous, and that was frightening him. What are your thoughts on this?
Michael Wieteska:
22:28 There's a lot to be said for the rise of the far right and the growing prevalence of it. It's 2021 now, wow. Either two or three years ago, now, Blair Cottrell was on Sky News. This is a guy who has spoken about, publicly stated that all schools in Australia should have a framed photo of Adolf Hitler in every classroom and Mein Kampf should be a mandatory reading. This is a guy who says or has said that the best way to control a woman is to give her a little bit of a slap every now and again. This is a neo-Nazi who's been given prime airtime, right? I would say 10 years ago, something like that would be unimaginable. I think Louis' comment would, in part, be influenced by the sudden prevalence of figures like this in the mainstream political discourse.
Michael Wieteska:
23:19 Now, there are innumerable interconnected, very, very complex reasons for why the right has risen in public discourse. I think one central one is that... and we will be going back to some of the things we mentioned earlier... a lot of the narratives that the right espouses are simple. When times are tough, and currently in COVID times, things certainly seem very, very uncertain - the future is uncertain; simple narratives are a lot more palatable and easy to digest than complex narratives.
Michael Wieteska:
23:52 Very, very simple and stereotypical example, if a neighbourhood primarily inhabited by one particular ethnic minority has a high crime rate than neighbouring white neighbourhoods, it's incredibly easy to attribute that crime rate to the culture or ethnicity of the population there, right? When in reality, the crime rate could be the result of all sorts of factors: intergenerational wealth, systemic racism, redlining. This abstract, dense, boring historical stuff that requires hundreds of hours of reading, really boring economics textbooks, boring historical stuff that it can be a nightmare to actually explain the origins of certain social problems where, in reality, going back to what I was saying before about social change, historically, this has been a white area, we've seen a preponderance of immigrants and now things are bad. Why? It's because of the immigrants, right? These very, very simple narratives are very, very palatable. So that's one problem.
Michael Wieteska:
24:46 The second problem, we've already spoken briefly about education. So if we look at declining standards in primary and secondary education, not only abroad but focusing on Australia, specifically within Australia, that makes it very, very difficult for people entering adulthood to have the necessary skills to actually critically analyse the information that they are presented with.
Michael Wieteska:
25:08 And that ties into a third major factor, which I'm sure it was going to be raised at some point as well, which is social media. The algorithmic journalism whereby things that generate clicks, things that generate time spent on screen are going to be increasingly served to you. So simple narratives that are shocking and help explain and alleviate uncertainty, a lack of education leading to inability, or a less of an ability ,to critically analyse information. And then simple narratives being drawing your attention and being fed to you over and over and over again leads to the situation that we're at now.
Dr Ben Rich:
25:45 Importantly, also, the narratives on the right have one advantage in particular over the narratives on the left, which is that they draw on a past that is imagined, that is we remember a time when things were not this way, even if it's imagined. There was a time that we can return to. You see this with the messaging of someone like Trump. What was his message? Make America Great Again. You see this with figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. They all have some variant of this message of restorative, getting back to the roots of society, and particularly in a real historical moment that we're in with COVID, where there's so much uncertainty in terms of economics... am I going to have my job next year... in terms of health, in terms of all the transformations that are going on that are being used by this crisis by companies, things like automation.
Dr Ben Rich:
26:46 nature of society, the fabric of society itself is in this state of flux, and people find that very dislocatative in a psychological sense. So it is natural for people to want to call on to and hold on to something that seems more real, tangible and known. In that context, yes, certainly, you can come to someone with a left wing or a Marxist analysis and say this is why this is happening. But as Michael points out, the ability to really engage with and internalise those narratives requires a great degree, in many cases, of proactive learning on the part of the individual, whereas, in the case of the narratives put forward by the right, oftentimes, these things are things that can be easily slotted into.
Dr Ben Rich:
27:37 I would also just add that if we look at the history of far right groups in places like Australia and America, this is a learned behaviour, the idea of essentially putting all the blame for society's ill is on external ethnicities. In Australia, obviously before, we had the perception of Muslim communities as a threat, it was Asian communities and before that it was Mediterranean communities. This is something that happens in waves. The focus of the particular groups changes as certain groups come and are more normalised in the public consciousness, but the same sort of reflexive behaviour comes over and over again.
Amelia Searson:
28:21 Would you say that it's a form of fearmongering?
Michael Wieteska:
28:25 That's definitely an integral part to any political extremism. One of the main factors driving radicalisation to the point of violence is the unconscious process whereby the group of radicals comes to separate themselves morally or disengage morally from the society that they're part of, right? You have a group of people, whatever their ideological affiliation is, that say they have a particular political grievance. They try handing out flyers. They try protesting. They don't get anywhere. They're really, really pissed off about their cause; they don't get anywhere. They get to a little bit of a punch up with the police, something like that. They start to, morally over time, come to view the state and all the institutions and all the people that support that state as actually not just different, not just having different opinions, but as morally either nothing or even lesser than, right?
Michael Wieteska:
29:22 This isn't something that is exclusive to the right. We saw it in the Soviet Union with the emergence of hatred for bourgeoisie. There's in-group and an out-group. This is something that's integral to any political extremism. Fear and uncertainty are really, really fertile grounds for people to latch on to these kinds of narratives. It almost happens naturally in some senses where these broader social economic forces a play create uncertainty, and then certain figures, either knowingly or unknowingly (I'm still on the fence about that. I'm optimistic that it's unknowingly and these are just unfortunately skilled individuals, I guess, but obviously, there's a lot of cynicism out there as well) that they seize on this fear and uncertainty and they give it a shape and a direction. Very, very clear example with, again, the Make America Great narrative. The reason the people in the south of America are so poorly off is because of the immigrants coming and taking jobs. The solution to that is going to be build a border, yada yada, yada. Everywhere you look again, across time and space, whether we're talking about right wing political groups or left wing political groups, it's almost a cyclical process.
Amelia Searson:
30:35 It was revealed today that 20,000 armed National Guards have been deployed in the Capitol very close to Biden's inauguration. With what's going on in Washington DC, do you think extremist groups are only going to become more active post Trump, I suppose?
Dr Ben Rich:
30:51 I think the impact of the Capitol storming is it's going to be felt for many years to come as a symbol of propaganda or as what can be achieved. I think what we're seeing now with this historical deployment... as far as I'm aware, even during the Civil War, we never had a deployment of this scale to the Capitol. so obviously the government is taking it very seriously. But I think that, as we move forward, we will probably see more fragmentation in American society. I just don't see the coming together right now of that population. I think it's far too fractured. I think that the panacea to those divisions is not immediately evident and it's going to take years, if not decades, of work to start to really reconcile. I think in the interim, what we'll see is a continual growth of terrorist groups, let's, quite frankly, call a spade for a spade, willing to engage in acts of performative symbolic violence against the state as an act of resistance.
Dr Ben Rich:
32:16 I could be wrong, but I'm not of the view that we are on the fringe of a new American Civil War. I just don't think American society, as fragmented as it is, has the capacity to sustain something like that at home. What I do think is we will see a significant uptick of political violence, particularly coming from the right over the years. There is there will still be certainly manifestations of left wing violence, although to a much smaller degree. There will still be manifestations of Islamist political violence but again, to a much smaller degree, but I think the unfortunate reality is that the right and particularly far right extremism has very deep roots in American society in a way that is far more organic and has far more potential to grow to large scales than the left or those subscribing to Islamist ideals.
Dr Ben Rich:
33:16 I think that breaking down this alternative narrative that a significant part of the American population lives in, which has been there in some way, shape or form far prior to Donald Trump... Remember, the United States has always been an area in which conspiracy theories run rampant, in which things like evangelicalism and what we would consider here in Australia as quite radical religious movements that often pride themselves on their disconnect from reality. It's no coincidence that you see a lot of these people who, for instance, adhere to QAnon, have also come from highly religious backgrounds. There are similar properties in how you see the world and your ability to suspend the reliance on material observation. Breaking that down, I think, is going to be really a defining part of our generation and figuring out ways to reestablish a sense of consistent civic nationalism, a consistent understanding of the American project and what it is to be American that can reach across the aisle.
Dr Ben Rich:
34:37 That's going to come from both the elites, the political players, the fact that we continually see, although there is some signs that this is starting to break down a little bit, votes are almost always along partisan lines. Democrats vote one way, Republicans vote the other and there's very little intersection. It's also going to have to come from the grassroots, people getting out there rebuilding these communities and, frankly, stepping away from the toxic cesspool that is the internet and having that as your primary sense of social identity because, I think unfortunately, I'm very much a techno-pessimist when it comes to the internet, I think it tends to bring out the worst in people. I think that, fundamentally, it can be a useful tool but it does not replace good old fashioned human interaction. I think that's something that is going to have to be reckoned with. The people who really put forward this techno-optimist vision, utopia back in the early 2000s and 2010s, I think their vision has really been proven quite the lie.
Amelia Searson:
35:47 I just have one last question for you both. It's very simple, don't worry. What's the future of political extremism? I lied, it's not really that simple!
Michael Wieteska:
35:57 We've touched upon some of that. I think the trend for the 21st century kicked off with religious extremism. I say kicked off, it was very, very relevant in the Middle East; it was very, very relevant in Europe; wasn't particularly massively felt here or in the US aside from, obviously, 911. We have a unit on terrorism and insurgency as a result of that. But when you look at the threat terrorism poses in Australia, historically, you're far more likely to be killed by a shark or a kangaroo than you are a terrorist, statistically speaking. The fallout from that has driven the emergence of this discipline. I'm digressing slightly.
Michael Wieteska:
36:42 Islamic extremism was never really, I would say, much of a threat here. The trend is going to be towards the right, whether that is the QAnon type conspiracy theorists, whether that is the incels and the Men Going Their Own Way Movement, these people who feel particularly victimised by a very artificial gender stratification that they've created in society. That seems to be the trend for political extremism, just in the West. I'm not speaking for the rest of the world.
Dr Ben Rich:
37:10 I'll finish this with two points. There's a very famous scholar of political violence by the name of David Rapoport. He proposed a model to account for what he termed as the waves of terrorism in the 20th century. Essentially, he said, there were four waves. He wasn't saying that all terrorism committed during these periods was this one type, but this was the dominant type of terrorism that was committed. So first wave was the anarchist nihilists wave, this was the early 20th century. This is when you have anarchist groups and stuff resisting the old imperial states, particularly Russia. Obviously, there's the 'very famous' assassination Tsar Alexander by an anarchist. It was William McKinley in the United States was assassinated by an anarchist and a lot of terrorist attacks, basically, individuals or groups who felt that the state overreached and that they were trying to throw off the shackles to create more local governance and less tyrannical imposition.
Dr Ben Rich:
38:17 After that, you had what was termed as the anti-colonial wave. This was the wave that manifested in many parts of the developing world as the empires of old ground to a halt. Some people would, for instance, classify some of the activities in the lead up to the Armenian genocide as these types of activities, using terrorism against the Turks by Armenians who felt that they were essentially subjugated under the Ottoman Empire, which then used this as an excuse to engage in the Armenian genocide. Certainly by no means giving the Turks a free pass on this, just that that they use these types of incidents as a means to engage in activities of systemic massacring and forced displacement, et cetera. In other parts of the world, obviously, you had groups like Irgun in what was to become Israel, zionist nationalists, who were essentially targeting both the Palestinians but, more importantly, the British to try to basically push them out of this, and similar groups in other parts of the Middle East, Africa.
Dr Ben Rich:
39:27 That was the anti-colonial wave. After that, you had what was termed as the new left. This was the 1960s and '70s groups like Baader-Meinhof, the Japanese Red Army, groups that were motivated by Marxist ideation in some way, shape or form trying to establish left wing governments, Marxist-Leninist governments.
Dr Ben Rich:
39:48 Finally, you had from 1979 onwards what was termed as the religious wave. This was kicked off by the attack I actually mentioned earlier, the Grand Mosque siege, but groups like Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and closer to today, ISIS, groups motivated by religious ideology, not just Islamic. There were plenty of anti-abortion terrorists and stuff in the United States. I think what we are... this is kind of what I've assessed for a couple years now as we're starting to enter what I would term as the 'ideation wave'. This is the wave that is based on identity and the defense of identity, whether it is a conservative identity that wants to make America great again or whether it's identities based around race, gender, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think we're going to see a growth of these types of things in the coming years, as you know, new consensus is reached, particularly through the internet.
Dr Ben Rich:
40:51 Again, the internet allows you to have a set of extremist views that traditionally, in the West, if you had these views, you would probably be pretty isolated from society. It would be difficult for you to find people. Now, it's very easy for you to find people that have like-minded. You can talk, you can create a more sophisticated identity. Like for instance, if we look at the incel movement, and people who have used terrorism justified through incel lens. Incels are really interesting in the fact that they have actually quite a sophisticated ideology of the way sexual dynamics work, and the way certain members of society who are 'genetically blessed' to have granted all sorts of privileges, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that created this real quite, consistent, albeit most people probably say insane world view, but it is one that comes out of a community that is able to talk about these things, debate these things, and it had reached a level of sophistication and accessibility that can pull more and more people into it.
Dr Ben Rich:
41:54 So you have that. The other thing we have that we haven't talked at all is the use of political extremists and violent extremists by states as a form of warfare. We've seen these kind of, in recent conflicts like in eastern Ukraine with the split between eastern nationalists who adhere to what they would see as a Slavic world view and Western nationalists to adhere to a more Western world view with the Russian state in particular supporting these guys and really emphasising and telling them this is the right world view to achieve their own national interest. Basically, the Russians can achieve their objectives without necessarily having to directly fight a war. I think that's going to be another big factor.
Dr Ben Rich:
42:44 If you really want to read about this kind of stuff and particularly in the context of the increasing growth of urbanisation, I highly recommend David Kilcullen's 2014 Out of The Mountains, where he kind of sketches out what he sees as the conflict environment of the 21st century with the big emphasis on non-state actors like that.
Amelia Searson:
43:03 Awesome. Well thank you both so much for such incredible answers. I've absolutely loved learning about this topic and all the subtopics and how things are connected. It's all very complex but it's really, really, really interesting to learn about. If our listeners want to find out more about you or your research or get... I'm sure they'll have lots of questions, we just have definitely run out of time, where can they contact you or how can they contact you?
Dr Ben Rich:
43:28 I'm easy to reach. I'm just ben.rich@curtin.edu.au.
Michael Wieteska:
43:35 Similarly, michael-dot, and I'll spell it out because it's a nightmare, W-I-E-T-E-S-K-A at curtin.edu.au. That's where you can contact me if you ever have questions.
Amelia Searson:
43:46 Thank you both so much for joining.
Michael Wieteska:
43:47 Thanks.
Dr Ben Rich:
43:47 Thank you.
Amelia Searson:
43:48 You've been listening to the Future Of, a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you'd like to share your thoughts on today's episode about political extremism or have any questions, please send us an email at the futureof@curtin.edu.au. If you like what you've heard, please subscribe to our podcast and share this episode with your friends and family.
Amelia Searson:
44:07 Thanks for listening.