to “exterminate” the Palestinians. The term is also used by those who wish to pro-voke a reexamination of their own nation’s wartime policy before extermination becomes a real threat, as in antiwar pediatrician Benjamin Spock’s warning that
“To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation” (Spock and Zimmerman 1968).
Often accompanying the threat to exterminate is a prejudicial assumption of the victim’s impurity, evil, or inferiority and an awareness of the exterminating group’s potential realization of glory, power, or salvation through the act of total killing.
Nationalism, tribalism, and colonialism, and their wars and terrors, often bring with them a single-minded allegiance to a cause, secular or religious, framed in terms of absolute righteousness or legitimacy (the exterminatory operation might even be called a “peace mission” or “civilizing mission”; see CIVILIZATION) and closed off to consideration of the others’ perspectives—indeed, to their humanity. Kurtz, the violent European imperialist in the Belgian Congo depicted in British writer Jo-seph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ended his high-minded report “The Suppression of Savage Customs” with the postscript, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The preju-dice and fanaticism can also shut off consideration of utilitarian concerns. In Nazi Germany, for example, the fanatical antisemitism and policy behind extermination (expressed variously as “removal” or “expulsion” and more euphemistically as “set-tling of accounts” and “resettlement”) flew in the face of the needs of the war ef-fort itself and became self-destructive.
Liquidationis a more general, sometimes less harmful term than extermination, meaning either killing people or disposing of them, or eliminating or shutting some-thing down. Arabs defined the early goal of Israel as one of liquidating the Arab character of Palestine as well as its Arab peoples; they have also spoken of the liq-uidation of alleged Israeli imperialism and of Israel itself. See also ENEMY;ETHNIC
CLEANSING;EVIL;FANATIC;GENOCIDE; HOLOCAUST;MASSACRE;MURDER.
Extremist
Someone who advocates measures near the poles of the political spectrum (Latin extremus).
With U.S. political history in mind, political sociologists Lipset and Raab (1970, 4) noted that the term extremist is often self-serving: it may mean going to the limit, which can be justified; or reaching beyond the limit, “which by self-defi-nition is never justified.” They found extremism used in two widely known senses:
“as a generalized measure of deviance from the political norm,” and “as a specific tendency to violate democratic procedures.” They illustrate the former with political repression in a society whose traditions include political repression, which would not, in this particular society, be regarded as extremist. The latter might be, for example, socialist programs in a society that promotes “free enterprise.” Extrem-ism viewed as an absolute political evil—fascExtrem-ism, for example—is a matter of the suppression of procedural norms, such as the exercise of free expression or voting rights.
Extremist
According to Lipset and Raab, extremism is intolerant of difference and dissent.
It is not well-intentioned or legitimate error, which the democratic system leaves free to sort out. It’s error that is deliberately conceived with evil and intent to de-stroy the “open market place of ideas.” Still, however, one might argue that even intolerant extremism may, in some forms, have something to offer reason, though not the intended fruit of the extremist belief. We might infer, for example, how the economic conditions in rural America affect far-right rural working people if we pay attention to their beliefs.
As with radical and fanatic, the common use of the term extremist is often more impressionistic and pejorative than objective. However, it is less judgmental than terrorist,which it sometimes replaces in the media, apparently to promote a less dangerous image of the proponent of the point of view in question.
Extremist,however, can be effective in dismissing a person’s thought as danger-ous to the status quo, as was done to Barry Goldwater in his 1964 bid for the presi-dency when he made his much-castigated “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” speech. In the United States, the label is also useful in marginalizing move-ments, often on the Right and authoritarian, excluding them from the exercise of broad political power. Among the several movements in American politics that have been labeled “extremist” have been the Know-Nothings, who appeared in the 1820s advocating the exclusion of immigrants from political participation (mem-bers were told to say they “knew nothing” about actions taken against foreigners);
and the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, founded in 1958.
Today in the U.S. context, the term is reserved largely for movements that are defiant of government authority and sometimes violent, including animal rights and antiabortion movements, and for white supremacist groups such as the Aryan Nation and skinheads. In the media, members of all these movements, regardless of large differences in ideology between some of them, may also be lumped together, sometimes appropriately, sometimes not, as fanatics and terrorists.
The U.S. government and media rely on extremist as part of their stock vocabu-lary to refer to and stigmatize those regimes, groups, sects, or individuals viewed as threatening to a status quo touted as mutually beneficial for everyone. At the same time, however, the same government, buttressed by the media’s output of platitudes about defending democracy, has backed extremist groups, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan when they were challenging the Soviet Union in the 1980s. It has also engaged in countless extremist acts itself, such as assisting with the infamous 1980s Battalion 316 intelligence project in Honduras, involving the kidnapping, torture, and murder of hundreds of citizens suspected of leftist activity. Whitewash-ing the atrocities, the Reagan administration awarded the director of the battalion the Legion of Merit “for encouraging the success of democratic processes in Hon-duras” (Blum 2000, 55). See also ANARCHISM; BOLSHEVIK;COMMUNIST; CRACKPOT;
FANATIC;FUNDAMENTALIST;LUNATIC FRINGE;MADMAN;MILITANT;RACIST;RADICAL;REVO
-LUTION;SUBVERSIVE;TERRORISM;TRAITOR;ZEALOT. Extremist
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F
Fanatic
An extremist, especially someone with strong, irrational religious or political feel-ings. The Latin fanaticus means “frenzied, inspired by a god.”
Men and women often express strong, irrational enthusiasms for matters of reli-gion or politics. Whether these enthusiasms are labeled “fanatic” has much to do with where the name-caller stands. In one’s own camp, those in opposition are fanatics—mad, cult-brainwashed, passionate over doctrine, uncompromising, and often violent—but those in the opposition’s camp see themselves as loyalists in quest of a legitimate cause, comrades in arms, or even prophets crying in the wilderness.
In historical retrospect, what were once real nightmares disrupting our rest may turn out to be, at worst, harmless apparitions. At best, some “fanatics”—abolitionists or suffragists, for example—are now remembered for their contributions to society.
“Every emancipator serve[s] his apprenticeship as a crank,” wrote American jour-nalist Heywood Broun (Jay 2001). “A fanatic is a great leader who is just entering the room.”
Of course, fanatics with guns in their hands—the image of terrorists—are a dif-ferent matter. Their eagerness and intolerance become deadly. Voltaire, the eigh-teenth-century French philosopher who decried fanaticism, saw its connection to violence. According to Laqueur (1999, 98), Voltaire’s classification of fanaticism into that which wishes only to pray and die (violence against oneself) and that which seeks to dominate and kill (violence against others) is helpful in understand-ing violence today. Fanaticism turned inward is seen, for example, in the Shiite
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Muslim’s asceticism and self-flagellation. The more common, outward manifesta-tion is represented in such activities as the use of bombs by the Unabomber, abor-tion clinic terrorists, or some so-called ecoterrorists.
Hannah Arendt’s (1963a) concept of the banality of evil is also relevant here.
Are all people involved in what most see as fanatical activity actually fanatics? In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt described the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as an unfanatical bureaucrat who, except for his devotion to Hitler and his ambi-tion, was lacking in passion. He was undistinguishable in many ways; in spite of his extraordinary efficiency in exterminating Jews, as a person he was quite ordi-nary—not the fanatical antisemite that Hitler was, not the “monster” or “perverted sadist” the Israeli prosecutor made him out to be.
The reluctance among some scholars to accept Arendt’s thesis that a Nazi di-recting the operations of the Final Solution was little more than an ordinary bureaucrat is understandable. Nevertheless, Arendt’s view has some value in un-derstanding not only Nazism but also today’s terrorists. People are often misled by the mass media’s (especially fiction) stereotypical characterizations of terrorists as being superfanatics, perverts, and evil monsters. Not only does this crude demonization tend to dehumanize those involved, it trivializes any atrocities ter-rorists commit and does not facilitate understanding of the terter-rorists (which is not to apologize for their actions but to put them in context). Whether working for the state or in a machinery of interconnected bands, terrorists typically require electronic communication; intensive coursework in everything from forgery to fundraising; and careful planning, not just of attacks but of finding sanctuary and appealing to a constituency. The dutiful attention, skills, and conformity to norms required of often mundane operations make for work that is frequently more rou-tine than monstrous.
In spite of terrorists’ wrongdoing, the circumstances they find themselves in usu-ally account better than personality for any diabolical passion they may have, or lack thereof. Of course, terrorists may be more vehemently committed to a political cause than most people (but not all—compare the vehemence of some Democrats and Republicans); more absolutist in their thinking, refusing to see anything but sharp blacks and whites (though this is not unlike how many middle class law-abiding Americans think); and certainly more given to committing acts of violence through hatred, desperation, or extreme loyalty. Yet Rubenstein (1987, 5) could write of terrorists that they “are no more or less fanatical than the young men who charged into Union cannonfire at Gettysburg or those who parachuted behind German lines into France.”
Although the fanatic label can serve as a warning of real danger, in balance, it is largely a tool applied to dismiss the others’ cause and disparage their struggle. It can also be used to take the pressure off adherents of supposedly more reasonable or centrist views. Many Americans, for example, have probably defined instances of others’ antisemitism or antigovernment paranoia as fanatical, allowing these Americans to express similar sentiments made to look reasonable only by escap-ing labelescap-ing. In any case, the meanescap-ing of the term fanatic is subjective, often linked Fanatic
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