The normalisation of political extremism
On the eve of Martin Luther King day in the USA, let’s see how politics and the public will get tangled up again. Will it become a flashpoint for (counter)racism, will it amp up the volume on #metoo political correctness, or will social media become the new battleground like below?
The title photo atop is a reminder of what extremism caused, not as an intangible notion of Jewish extermination — what does 6M mean if it is true, & how about 10M Russian casualties that same period? — but as the tangible tragedy on the banks of the Danube. If we swore “never again” in Europe, what about the recent alt.right demonstrations in America?
That is what I call the normalisation of extremism, when a) the law of the land does nothing to stop either White Supremacist marches or casual treatment of African Americans, and b) we are easily distracted by the topic du jour. Toward the end of the Roman Empire, emperors lavished “panem et circenses” (bread and games) on the populace, in order to distract them from the crumbling régime.
Sarah Kendzior is a journalist you want to watch — she covered both authoritarian regimes abroad and the Ferguson incident that helped launch #BLM #blacklivesmatter — in her latest piece in the Globe and Mail, Trump’s racism is more than rhetoric – it forms policy and ruins lives, she focusses on what really matters, the shift away from inclusivity toward demagoguery.
Isn’t it interesting that her outlets are mainly Twitter, her blog, US boutique web FastCompany, Canadian paper Globe and Mail, Dutch blog De Correspondant and earlier Al Jazeera — where are mainstream media, other than a few MSNBC interviews? — she is a harbinger that the politically incorrect and factually correct will find a voice!
Take for example the topic du jour: gender bias and violence against women are real, but they miss that against men and LGBT; and as the twitter pic shows above, it smacks of political correctness that distracts from threats to democracy.
My favourite saying is “it’s hard to be awake”, and the similar moniker woke has caught on in the alt.political circles, in what one may call convergent evolution. Back to the headline topic, we absolutely must cull our information sources and surround ourselves with allies — family, friends, activists and alt.media — that help us keep our heads clear in crazy-making: Won’t it just be amped up as we cross thresholds of our own self-contradictions if not self-destruction? Stay tuned…
For further reading, you may start with this Medium channel’s The end of party politics, more, the last diagram of which illustrates the last point, as well as European and American personal overviews.
