“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die," Elon Musk told the large crowds at Saturday’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally.
More than 100,000 people descended on Britain’s capital on Saturday for one of the country’s largest far-right rallies in decades.
The “Unite the Kingdom” rally was organized by Tommy Robinson, a convicted fraudster with a violent criminal record, and attended by billionaire Elon Musk via video link. Amid a sea of flag-waving and soccer-style chanting from large crowds that exceeded expectations, violent clashes with police led to dozens of arrests.
It came amid a surge of nationalism in the U.K., with a far-right party topping the polls, and the murder of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk — an assassination Robinson used to mobilize support in the run-up to the event.
This is not a chicken and egg problem. Extremists are a result of society’s ailments, not the other way around. . I’ll give you a few examples from the 20th century.
The Taliban came long after Al-Qaida and had very similar ideology. They were organised and funded by the Pakistani security service, the IIS. The original Taliban groups were Pakistani seminary students harassing the less backward elements of Pakistani society. The movement was later spread to Afghanistan. And the Taliban were allied with Al-Qaida, never attempted to suppress them. Some other Middle Eastern governments tried to suppress them (Saddam’s Iraq, successfully; Egypt’s corrupt military junta, far less so). The Taliban hosted Al-Qaida fighters and training camps, and elements of the Pakistani military provided Bin Laden with safe haven on a military base.
Al-Qaida started as a Wahhabi-based xenophobic movement to purge Saudi Arabia of Western influence. The Wahhabi movement itself was a fanatical Sunni movement founded over 200 years ago with the intent to exterminate non-Sunni Muslims and non-Muslims. The Saudi and Qatari royal families are Wahhabi. The former from a more virulent faction than the latter.
Anyway, that’s just one of your bullet points dismantled. In general, the idea that every group of extremists was somehow inevitably caused by some kind of social upheaval or injustice is simplistic and has no predictive value.
Furthermore, while not every extremist group formed because of society ailments it is** a well known factor recognised by scholars*.
Sorry the inclusion of Taliban was a mistake, was typing too quickly. What I meant to say was the Afghan Marxist government .
Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan?
There you go.
Sure, but the ailment of our time is not immigrants. It’s wealth inequality, it’s 1% enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, it’s unchecked self-destructive capitalism.
Rich people are the problem, not immigrants. And it’s lie and propaganda that drove people to believe otherwise.
That is true about the state of capitalism today. However, you choose not to see the relationship between the inherent nature of human tribalism, which is as old as humanity itself, and seeing a large influx of aliens in your tribe, as part of that same tribal nature. If you want to change the human nature, you will require a long time, if it’s at all possible. The left, just like the right, gets caught up in the cycle of “we have power, we can do everything we want, and we want do it now” when these deep societal changes require very long time to be implemented peacefully, perhaps the length of a life time.