So one thing I’m not seeing mentioned much but that I think is really important to acknowledge is: not every member of a hate group is equally radicalized.
See, a lot of our rhetoric re: dealing with them assumes that every member is a hardened lifetimer. But there are always many, many lackeys to every kingpin. Not every terrorist sympathizer is Osama bin Laden. Cultlike movements are largely composed of people who are isolated or gullible or otherwise vulnerable. Their leaders know this. They capitalize on an underlying dysfunction and turn it into something monstrous. In any such movement, there will be people who have doubts but fear being crushed for their dissent. And those are the people it’s critically important to reach out to.
I think a lot of people assume that compassionate outreach is about, like, nicely asking hardened leaders to stop. It’s not! I frankly resent seeing pacifism strawmanned so badly. It’s about undermining those leaders’ bases. It’s about getting through to people who aren’t yet in too deep. When we write them off as exactly as bad as the people recruiting and manipulating them, we’re implicitly yielding ground. We’re ceding a huge number of potential allies to hateful causes, and I am not willing to do that. I want as many people on the side of good as possible. To do that, we have to be willing to get in and help deradicalize.
It’s laughable to expect that someone like S p e n c e r will just wake up one day and realize he’s wrong. It’s not impossible, but it’s not worth banking on. But what about an eighteen-year-old flirting with dangerous ideologies? Isn’t giving up on him implicitly ceding him to S p e n c e r ‘ s side? Do not conflate the psychological profile of someone who’s just beginning to become radicalized with that of someone who’s been entrenched for decades. That difference matters.
This is… my own position as well, honestly. I’m seeing an absolutely terrifying lack of nuance on here and more than a few times I’ve felt the blood run cold in my veins. Radicalization and edging toward extreme views and measures aren’t something that solely the people who dwell to the right of the center had and have a monopoly on. I’ve got half a murdered family for political reasons as testament enough to that!
Deradicalization is as much of a key-word as resistance and direct action and at this point, I feel that none of these can properly work without the other two in play. I worked for years as a journalist and an adviser for one of the MPs in my country and one of the side-projects I dedicated my time to was compiling data and resources on burgeoning anti-radicalization and deradicalization programs here in Europe, aimed at at-risk youth, particularly those who had joined Daesh, then returned to their homes, for whatever reason. I also wrote news-stories on these programs, in order to help spread knowledge and awareness of them. Programs such as the one spearheaded by the Danish authorities in 2015, aimed at working with former Daesh fighters, some of whom could have done unspeakable things while in Syria or Irak.
This ties in to the rise of various populist and far-right groups both here and in the US and the way in which an entire generation of youths is being radicalized by members of these groups, through the Internet. I’d always known there was a connection, but it became clear in my mind when a researcher studying the phenomenon wrote that when we speak about radicalization through the World-Wide-Web, we mustn’t speak only of actions taken by groups such as Daesh. We need to also look at the users of forums like Stormfront, who disseminated their ideas like viruses through subreddits and gaming forums, drawing in a dangerously high number of youths, preying on their uncertainties, their biases, lying to them and stoking their fears and their bigotries, encouraging ‘us versus them’ polarized thinking and creating what this researcher outright called ‘a radicalized generation, taught to lie to their own families about their extremist sympathies.’
I want to be clear, because sometimes I feel that people on here read posts while wearing Misunderstanding Goggles. I’m not saying ‘poor widdle baby bigots who need butt-patts’. I’m saying that a society where a significant proportion of youth ends up radicalized is a society that is, frankly, FUCKED and that’s something we need to handle and we need to fix, with pragmatism as much as with passion and a commitment to resisting extremist policies and extremist thought at every opportunity. I’ve dedicated years of my life and will dedicate many more to supporting and promoting deradicalization for people who ended up in nightmares like Daesh and who have a chance, however small, of getting out and fighting against extremism. I’d be one hell of a hypocrite if I didn’t do the same in other cases as well.
Keep in mind always that the son of the guy who runs The D/aily S/tormer left white nationalism because an Orthodox Jewish classmate in college started inviting him to Shabbat dinner.
No, really. This is true. Look it up.
There are a lot of ways to get this job done.
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