Radicalization Quotes

“You are there and to their ears, being a Syrian sounds like you’re unclean, shameful, indecent; it’s like you owe the world an apology for your very existence.”
― Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria

“The blind faith in some half-assed conspiracy theories lines up with the logic of having to believe in something with no questions asked. It gives us peace and comfort. As simple as I was, I found that resorting to this absolute nonsense was the root of all our problems. It was a road of willingly-learned helplessness, for no action could make a difference, thereby no action was needed.”
― Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria

“I am not an atheist preacher. I am not an absolutist or chauvinist whose ways are immune to evolution. My core philosophy is that I might be wrong.”
― Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria

“The old law of an eye for an eye didn’t make them blind to the fact that another man’s terrorist wasn’t their freedom fighter.”
― Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria

“In light of my distanced telescopic exposure to the mayhem, I refused to plagiarise others’ personal tragedies as my own. There is an authorship in misery that costs more than empathy. Often I’d found myself dumbstruck in failed attempts to simulate that particular unfamiliar dolour. After all, no one takes pleasure in being possessed by a wailing father collecting the decapitated head of his innocent six year old. Even on the hinge of a willing attempt at full empathy with those cursed with such catastrophes, one had to have a superhuman emotional powers. I could not, in any way, claim the ability to relate to those who have been forced to swallow the never-ending bitter and poisonous pills of our inherited misfortune. Yet that excruciating pain in my chest seemed to elicit a state of agony in me, even from far behind the telescope. It could have been my tribal gene amplified by the ripple effect of the falling, moving in me what was left of my humanity.”
― Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria

“In the mantra of shared hatred and placing the blame on Israel, our cowardice to face the barbarity of our heads of states was replaced with a divine purpose. Contemplating the manifestation of the eradication of hatred I often concluded, the entirety of the Middle East’s theocracies and dictatorships would be replaced by total anarchy. We would be left with nothing, as our brotherhood of hatred was the only bond known to us. Enculturated in the malarkey of that demagoguery, forces beyond our control and comprehension seem to deceive us into a less harmful and satisfactory logic as opposed to placing some blame on ourselves and thus, having to act to reverse that state of affairs.”
― Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria

“I have to stress that my duties towards victims of all sorts, be it helping, taking their side, or caring, ends the moment their status becomes a bargaining chip. The moment the victim becomes a righteous sufferer. For in my short time on this planet, history and on-going affairs are full of those competing in victimhood.”
― Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria

“Radicalization follows fear and insecurity, and as dissatisfaction grew, fewer and fewer people were interested in my nuanced, chill takes.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Terrorism was like heroin – once a lonely, desperate soul was hooked on it, he or she became a fanatic – radicalized they call it – ready to die for a paradise in heaven that didn’t exist by helping to rain down a hell on earth for all who didn’t believe in it.”
― Kenneth Eade, Unwanted

“The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality.

The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“These groups and movements were also inspired by a conviction that democracy is worthless, that elections cannot bring real change, and that only the most extreme and desperate actions can stop the decline of a certain vision of America.

By 2016, some of the arguments of the old Marxist left--their hatred of ordinary, bourgeois politics and their longing for revolutionary change--met and mingled with the Christian right's despair about the future of American democracy. Together, they produced the restorative nostalgic campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“We must invent our enemy. If he doesn't exist, we must create him.'

'But that's crazy,' said Radius. 'It'd be like choosing to have hallucinations--seeing something that doesn't exist and saying that it does.'

'Comrade Radius,' said Flight, 'listen. There's no such thing as a perfect enemy. A real enemy is always imperfect: never perfectly evil and never perfectly invincible. He has mild, even gentle characteristics. He's vulnerable. The perfect enemy is the one you create yourself.'

'But why can't we have an imperfect enemy?' Radius persisted. 'If evil is imperfect, if it's so weak and helpless, why should we force things and give it a perfection it doesn't possess?'

'Because *we* have to be perfect,' said Flight.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale

“The nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along.”
― H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

“Eugene Debs entered jail a moderate Unionist and emerged a Socialist.”
― H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

“Ideology without grievances doesn't resonate. Grievances without ideology aren't acted upon.”
― Mubin Shaikh

“Extreme radicalization remains latent in all fascisms, but the circumstances of war, and particularly of victorious wars of conquest, gave it the fullest means of expression.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“Not unlike Mussolini in his early laissez-faire period with Alberto De Stefani, Hitler named as his first minister of finance the conservative Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk. For a time, the Führer left foreign policy in the hands of professional diplomats (with the aristocratic Constantin von Neurath as foreign minister) and the army in the hands of professional soldiers. But Hitler’s drive to shrink the normative state and expand the prerogative state was much more sustained than Mussolini’s. Total master of his party, Hitler exploited its radical impulses for his own aggrandizement against the old elites and rarely (after the exemplary bloodbath of June 1934) needed to rein it in. Another suggested key to radicalization is the chaotic nature of fascist rule. Contrary to wartime propaganda and to an enduring popular image, Nazi Germany was not a purring, well-oiled machine. Hitler allowed party agencies to compete with more traditional state offices, and he named loyal lieutenants to overlapping jobs that pitted them against each other. The ensuing “feudal” struggles for supremacy within and between party and state shocked those Germans proud of their country’s traditional superbly trained and independent civil service. Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg, a young Prussian official initially attracted to Nazism, lamented in 1937 that “the formerly unified State power has been split into a number of separate authorities; Party and professional organizations work in the same areas and overlap with no clear divisions of responsibility.” He feared “the end of a true Civil Service and the emergence of a subservient bureaucracy.”

We saw in the previous chapter how the self-indulgently bohemian Hitler spent as little time as possible on the labors of government, at least until the war. He proclaimed his visions and hatreds in speeches and ceremonies, and allowed his ambitious underlings to search for the most radical way to fulfill them in a Darwinian competition for attention and reward. His lieutenants, fully aware of his fanatical views, “worked toward the Führer,” who needed mainly to arbitrate among them. Mussolini, quite unlike Hitler in his commitment to the drudgery of government, refused to delegate and remained suspicious of competent associates—a governing style that produced more inertia than radicalization.

War provided fascism’s clearest radicalizing impulse. It would be more accurate to say that war played a circular role in fascist regimes. Early fascist movements were rooted in an exaltation of violence sharpened by World War I, and war making proved essential to the cohesion, discipline, and explosive energy of fascist regimes. Once undertaken, war generated both the need for more extreme measures, and popular acceptance of them. It seems a general rule that war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone (and, in the cases we know, the occasion for its demise).

It seems clear that both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes. They wanted to use war to harden internal society as well as to conquer vital space. Hitler told Goebbels, “the war . . . made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism’s conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction.

Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917–18 and in Franco’s Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party’s parallel organizations. Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler—and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted.

Here we enter a realm where the calculations of interest that arguably governed the behavior of both the Nazis and their allies under more ordinary circumstances in the exercise of power no longer determined policy. At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience.

Liberation from constraints permitted a hard core of the movement’s fanatics to regain the upper hand over their bourgeois allies and carry out some of the initial radical projects. At the outposts of empire, fascism recovered the face-to-face violence of the early days of squadrismo and SA street brawling. One must resist the temptation at this final stage to revert to a highly personalized way of looking at the exercise of power in fascist regimes, with its discredited notions of hoodlums kidnapping the state. The Nazi regime was able to pursue the war with ever mounting intensity only with the continued complicity of the state services and large sectors of the socially powerful.

Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a rational way to persuade a people to give their all to a war effort. It led Nazi Germany into a runaway spiral that ultimately prevented rational war making, as vital resources were diverted from military operations to the murder of the Jews. Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism’s heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat.

Prolonged fascist radicalization over a very long period has never been witnessed. It is even hard to imagine. Can one suppose that even Hitler could keep up the tension into old age? Arranging the succession to a senescent fascist leader is another intriguing but, so far, hypothetical problem. The more normal form of succession to a fascist regime is likely to be decay into a traditional authoritarianism. At that point, there can be progressive liberalization as in post-Franco Spain or perhaps revolution (as in post-Salazar Portugal). But orderly succession is clearly far more of a problem with fascism than with other forms of rule, even communism. Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing. In the long run, therefore, it was not really a solution to the problems of frightened conservatives or liberals.

The final outcome was that the Italian and German fascist regimes drove themselves off a cliff in their quest for ever headier successes. The fascisms we know seem doomed to destroy themselves in their headlong, obsessive rush to fulfill the “privileged relation with history” they promised their people.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“Violence is a self-perpetuating rabbit hole that exaggerates problems and rarely solves them. It is a reaction to a situation and not a thought process. You and your supposed enemy may wash in each other's blood, but once the bloodlust passes, all that remains is a determination to prevent the next generation from inheriting the sins of their fathers. Then the search for peace finally begins.”
― Stewart Stafford

“. . . his innate repulsiveness, his constant and total marginality, prevented us, without our realizing it, from mobbing and destroying him in that way. Like when a pack of animals isolated a dying member yet respects him: it isolates him because he's dying, but respects him because, by the very act of dying, he's a millimeter away from discovery.”
― Giorgo Vasta

“. . . his innate repulsiveness, his constant and total marginality, prevented us, without our realizing it, from mobbing and destroying him in that way. Like when a pack of animals isolated a dying member yet respects him: it isolates him because he's dying, but respects him because, by the very act of dying, he's a millimeter away from discovery.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale

“Who were we fighting, and who was fighting us? Like Flight, I felt a need to be persecuted, and yearned for a constant and devoted--yes, devoted--enemy who would satisfy my needs by persecuting me. But I didn't have such an enemy. Nobody was persecuting me.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale

“And yet for the three of us, who could perceive it, there was a ferment, an excitement, a need to be ravenous, for something to pick us up and sweep us along, for something to concentrate on. The struggle, for example. Because that was the heart of it. The word struggle contained sex, anger, and dream. We tried to say it under our breath, brazenly, and link it to an action. But at that point opaqueness resumed--the frosting that separated purpose from its fulfillment.”
― Giorgio Vasta, Il tempo materiale

“Be careful if you find yourself in a place where only acceptable truths are allowed. Taboos are a sign of insecurity. Only fragile castles need to be protected by the highest of walls. The best answers are discovered not by eliminating competing answers, but by engaging with them. And engagement happens in groups built, not on taboos and dogma, but on a foundation that celebrates diverse thinking.”
― Ozan Varol, Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary