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.
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.