CMV: Without being rooted in a critique of MAGA and Zionism, any attempt to understand radicalisation or extremism is bankrupt.

The Labor government in Australia recently announced a Royal Commission into the causes of the Bondi massacre, and the terms of reference centre “ideologically and religiously motivated extremism and radicalisation”. This comes off endless discourse across liberal democracies, particularly the UK and Australia, on preventing extremism and radicalisation from taking hold, as if it were an exceptional pathology on the social order. Personally, I think the most productive position is to abandon these terms altogether, but for the purpose of engaging with the discourse, I can accept some official version of the definition insofar as it helps us deal with violence. The problem is that every official version seems to veer pretty quickly towards social fringe groups such as violent branches of Islamic ideology as the paradigmatic example, while missing the fact that the much more dangerous versions have arisen from the centre of liberal society. This opens the door to fascism while mystifying violence in a way that perpetuates racism against marginalised groups.

So let’s take the main elements of official definitions:

• UNESCO: “The individual person's search for fundamental meaning, origin and return to a root ideology.” MAGA speaks for itself. It indoctrinates those who feel lost into rooting for an imagined, unifying idea of American might. Zionism grounds itself in ancient roots.
• UNESCO: “The polarization of the social space and the collective construction of a threatened ideal 'us' against 'them,' where the others are dehumanized by a process of scapegoating.” MAGA scapegoats migrants and the “woke”, Zionism is grounded in the idea of mid-century Palestine as being empty and a constant depiction of Arab and Islamic groups as a threat to civilisation.
• UK Gov: “an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others or undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights.” MAGA is obsessed with a Caesarist version of government that disenfranchises those who are not white and conservative. Zionism has built an apartheid state that dehumanises Palestinians and makes their inclusion within any democratic government impossible. Furthermore, the foreign violence wielded by both the US and Israel is increasingly being wielded internally against political enemies.
• OECD: “Promoting views which foment and incite violence in furtherance of particular beliefs, and foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence.” MAGA has driven a large increase in violence and forced disappearance done by state enforcement personnel and given people permission to target certain communities (such as Latin American and Somalian people). Zionism has justified the genocide being committeed by the IDF.

There’s a lot of mentions of terrorism as well, but to treat that concept as separate or more fundamental than these would lead to circularity, so I will discuss it in the same breath.

Now many of these definitions can apply to violent branches of Islamic ideology, but to focus on them misses the point for the following reasons:

1. Radicalisation and extremism gone mainstream is far, far more dangerous than what exists at the fringes, and focusing on the fringes is a distraction. Firstly because MAGA and Zionism have co-opted liberal institutions and corrupted them, and secondly because, being mainstream, they are simply much more powerful in their ability to wield violence and destroy society. In fact, the original definition of terrorism was grounded in how different iterations of the French state used targeted violence against citizens to achieve political aims. This argument reflects my fundamental belief in how this discourse should be oriented- the way we talk about violence writ large is only productive when it is focussed on the relationship to power of those wielding violence. 2.Part of the reason why violent Islamic ideology takes root is precisely because liberal ideology has proven itself impotent to tackle Zionism and MAGA, and disillusionment and moral failures give way to hatred and resentment by marginalised people regarding how they are treated by the mainstream, which leads to explosions of violence. Not only that, seeing violence on our screens every day without liberal institutions taking adequate action gives people with violent tendencies permission to commit violence themselves.
2. A focus on the fringes has a tendency to silence dissenting speech, which I take to be equivalent to freedom of speech. It also invokes top-down concepts to understand sociocultural phenomena that are often beyond the reach of mainstream knowledge, effectively pathologising anyone who is different. In essence, the Royal Commission has a bias against marginalised groups written into it as it lumps together groups that threaten social cohesion alongside violent groups, and so it gives permission to conservatives to indulge racist fantasies against the marginalised while delivering nothing of substance. Whereas a focus on what is growing at the heart of society takes a critical look at structures that have successfully perpetuated themselves within our social conditions, and in pushing against them, opens the door for a disruption, rather than a perpetuation, of the violent status quo. A focus on the mainstream threat gives us the tools to counter the threat of totalitarian violence, rather than taking those tools away.

Given these issues with the discourse, I believe that complete silence on extremism and radicalisation is better than a discourse that takes “radical Islam” as its paradigmatic example.

Is there a healthy version of this discourse that can avoid focusing entirely on any of these ideologies while pointing to something essential and dangerous about the process of radicalisation? I don't think so. CMV.