Daniel Little
The sickening tragedy of Buffalo yesterday -- the racist attack on a group of African-American shoppers and workers by an 18-year-old white supremacist man in body armor, carrying a military-style weapon -- is simply too much to absorb. This is indisputably an act of domestic terrorism; and yet our police and federal counter-terrorism agencies are …
Continue reading "Incitement of violence by far-right media networks"
image: Joseph de Maistre The ideologies of the far right have a particularly strong grip on a segment of democratic society in the current epoch. This is evident in the extremism of the current leadership of the GOP, and it is evident as well in the growth of hate-based groups in the United States (link). …
Image: Holocaust memorial at Camp Westerbork, The Netherlands Each of the great evils of the twentieth century -- the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Gulag -- was shrouded in silence and concealment for decades after information became available to the world. In the case of the Gulag, the Soviet government exercised great effort to keep the …
graphic: White supremacist podcast network (SPLC link) The surge of right-wing extremism has been evident in the United States for the past five years, including the spread of white supremacist language and activism, armed demonstrations by right-wing militia organizations, violent threats against public officials in health and education agencies, and -- of course -- the violent …
Continue reading "Online mobilization strategies by right-wing extremists"
In July 1941 a terrible massacre of Jews took place in Jedwabne, a town in eastern Poland. The town consisted of some 3,000 residents, about half of whom were Jewish. On July 10, 1941, weeks after the German army took control of the town from the Soviet Red Army (according to the terms of the …
photo: execution site at Babi Yar, Kiev, Ukraine, September 1941 It is challenging to form a mental picture of the significance and reality of the events and enormity of the Holocaust. Many of the summary facts that we "know" about the Nazi plan for extermination of the Jewish people are both inadequate to capture the …
A key problem faced today by liberal democracies throughout the world is the fact that millions of citizens in those democracies seem to support parties and candidates who are fundamentally anti-democratic. The authoritarian tendencies of Prime Minister Modi of India, President Erdoğan of Turkey, and President Trump of the United States are evident in their …
The occurrence of anti-Muslim violence, arson, and murder in New Delhi last month is sometimes looked at a simply an unpredictable episode provoked by protest against the citizenship legislation enacted by the BJP and Prime Minister Modi. (See Jeffrey Gettleman and Maria Abi-Habib's New York Times article for a thoughtful and detailed account of the riots in …
I am teaching a brand new honors course at my university called “Democracy and the politics of division and hate”. The course focuses on the question of the relationship between democracy and intolerance. As any reader of the world's news outlets knows, intolerance and bigotry have become ever-more prominent themes in the politics of Western …
We know what is meant by saying that a physical system is resilient: for a given range of shocks, the system has the ability to recover its structural integrity. This does not mean that a resilient system is impervious to shocks, but rather that it is capable of recovery from a given range of shocks …
Understanding Society 