Summary
Bishop Garrison, a former Pentagon official who led a 2021 investigation into military extremism, warns that recent New Year’s Day attacks by military personnel highlight the ongoing threat of radicalization and distress in the armed forces.
Despite a report recommending counter-extremism measures, its policies were never implemented, facing backlash from right-wing figures, including Trump’s defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth.
As Hegseth aims to dismantle counter-extremism programs, Garrison stresses the risks of neglecting the issue, citing cultural and mental health challenges within the military.
Forgive me for the misunderstanding 🙏. I thought it was fairly obvious what i was referring to.
here’s the kicker: you’re still wrong even with your clarification.
Left wing extremists are the likes of anarchists and Black Panthers, people fighting for equality and justice for all. Authoritarianism is a different and separate axis from the social and economic axes.
Let wing extremism is self organization and community building, left wing extremism is protecting marginalized groups.
I already said I’m not here to educate you so I’ll leave it at that, but clearly you’re trying to give yourself a pass here. You weren’t misunderstood, you’re just still wrong.
Oh i think i understand what you’re getting at now and i think we might end up being on the same page. I also prefer to use the political compass model. I was using the typical left-right spectrum as only a matter of simplicity, which is why i said left wing extremism can also be authoritarianism and not is always authoritarianism.
This isn’t to say that communism is always authoritarian, but it depends on the ideology of the individual and how it’s implemented.
I guess it would be better to say some authoritarian extreme left-wing ideologies are Stalinism and Maoism.
I am willing to meet in the middle and leave it at that with the principle of charity in mind. My passion comes from how broken the overton window is right now and how people conflate “liberal” and “left-wing” as being one and the same. In some contexts that’s true, but as someone who generally dislikes liberals just as much as the average conservative, I find it offensive.
This is made worse by how conservative and far-right people are often responding to real problems with liberalism (and I’m including capitalism as a liberal ideology) but end up in emotional and reactionary right-populist positions because of leftist erasure.
Editing to add: the above isn’t meant to suggest you did that, I’d categorize it as conflating authoritarianism and communism instead, but that whole political context I’m describing applies: saying leftists are the same as fascists is erasure and ignorance at best and propaganda at worst. It enables people to think that liberals are the only alternative to fascists.
This was a good conversation. I’m glad we could agree on something!
I do still encourage you to reflect on the definitions and histories of some of these ideas, capitalism vs. markets vs. money vs. trade, communism vs. socialism vs. anarchism vs. liberalism, and so forth. No longer to suggest that you’re willfully ignorant, but just because even as someone who has done a lot to wrap my head around these I still have a ways to go and so maybe you do too.
Communism and socialism aren’t bad words and their true meanings should be respected and communicated in these politically charged times, and we must fight disinformation that benefits the two currently ruling ideologies of neoliberalism and fascism.
Yes, i will admit I’m still an amateur when it comes to this stuff. The numerous terminologies and jargon don’t do much to make the process easier. Can you recommend any resources that helped you wrap your head around this stuff?
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works helped me to conceptualize what anarchism looks like, and what other non-market economies like gift economies really mean in practice.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread.pdf really lays out the ideals of anarchism and how they compare to other communist and socialist thinking. Interestingly it’s written before the Russian Revolution and predicts it in some ways.
https://youtu.be/P-Ibq-9wulQ is a bite-sized and politically neutral (Sci Show Crash Course series) description of anarchism.
I haven’t read Marx as a primary source yet, but the Communist Manifesto and Capital are hugely influential works and you can find summaries of them in video form or from publicly available University readings.
If you’re earlier in your academic career or not comfortable with dense reading (I don’t blame you one bit, I’m the same) I’ve honestly found Wikipedia articles on these topics to be very informative too and they likely even exist on Simple English Wikipedia.
“Second Thought” is a socialist YouTube channel that does a good job discussing events and topics from a socialist perspective, and although it argues more along the lines of state-based socialism, I find it to be useful for challenging implicit liberal and conservative biases I had as a person growing up in Canada.
My honest advice would be to start with Wikipedia and term definitions. Really tease out where these things overlap and where they don’t. Capitalists love it when we think we can’t have trade or money or work without capitalism. At the end of the day Socialism is just about giving people equal control over the economy in the same way democracy is (supposed to be) about giving people equal control over laws and government. Anarchism goes further and demands even greater fairness and equality. Communism is an ideal future state essentially the same as anarchism that is a goal some have claimed to work towards via the state apparatus, but nobody has reached.
There can be authoritarian socialism or democratic socialism or anarchist socialism, we’ve seen all kinds at different scales and at different times, but only the worst examples are paraded around by our culture. If we judged capitalism only by its worst examples, nobody would ever want it either.
I very much agree with your last point about picking and choosing bad examples to discredit whole theories. Thanks for taking the time to compile all this. I’ll check em all out.