“Radicalized”

by Chaz Bufe, co-author of The Anarchist Cookbook

Of late, the corporate media routinely cite “radicalization” as the reason people seemingly turn on a dime into murderous pieces of human shit. But this “explanation” explains less than nothing.  It slaps a label on murder and the beliefs underlying it, while implying that there’s nothing wrong with those underlying beliefs–as long as those holding them aren’t “radicalized.”

No. How many atheists have become “radicalized” and then went on to commit mass murder in the name of religion? Zero. How many have committed mass murder in the name of atheism? Zero. (I’ll deal with the old “but what about?” canard regarding Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al. in another post very shortly — for now, suffice it to say that those pieces of human waste were also partisans of an authoritarian ideology that rationalized mass murder, and their “historically inevitable” role in carrying out that murder; the underlying rationale is virtually identical to that of Islamic and Christian terrorists.)

In recent decades religious believers have carried out  all of the systematic murder, be they Islamists or “pro-life” Christians.

But what about authoritarian beliefs makes them so toxic? It’s the belief of religious and political true believers that they’re receiving their marching orders from God (or, in the case of Marxists, from “history”), and that anything they do in carrying out those orders is justified–their orders come from God or “history,” after all.

Bill Maher recently said that the problem was not “radicalization,” but religion. He was right, but he didn’t go far enough. The problem is authoritarianism–the belief that you’re “God’s chosen people” or an agent of “historical inevitability,” and that because of it you’re justified in doing anything to other people.

Until “believers” abandon their underlying authoritarian beliefs, they’ll continue to murder people.

“Radicalization” isn’t the problem.

Religion and other authoritarian ideologies are.