With all due respect to Graham Nash, the various Occupy Movements, The World Social Forum,
the New Left, and, what the hell, most Left and Left-ish movements back
to the Bolsheviks, and most Right-Wing movements, too — compared and
contrasted with ISIS and other religious fanatics, you guys are pikers.
The more extreme fringes of the US radical Right, now including a fair number of pundits and elected officials, are trying to roll back the New Deal and even the Progressive Era. In the past, some Americans who went so far Left they met the Right-wing coming around wanted to roll back much of Western capitalism and industrialism. The Jihadists and Crusaders, though — the extreme Salafis and Wahhabis in Islam and the Dominionists et al. in the US: These folks would roll back modernity back to the Enlightenment, and then roll back the Enlightenment and continue rolling over the progressive/liberal/scientific/free-thinking aspects of the European Renaissance and Reformation, and the glory-years of the Islamic empires.
Giving the devils their due more literally than usual, one useful service of ISIS and other theocrats is teaching modern Westerners how much most of us agree on and how little, relatively speaking, most of our traditional radicals really want to change.
The more extreme fringes of the US radical Right, now including a fair number of pundits and elected officials, are trying to roll back the New Deal and even the Progressive Era. In the past, some Americans who went so far Left they met the Right-wing coming around wanted to roll back much of Western capitalism and industrialism. The Jihadists and Crusaders, though — the extreme Salafis and Wahhabis in Islam and the Dominionists et al. in the US: These folks would roll back modernity back to the Enlightenment, and then roll back the Enlightenment and continue rolling over the progressive/liberal/scientific/free-thinking aspects of the European Renaissance and Reformation, and the glory-years of the Islamic empires.
Giving the devils their due more literally than usual, one useful service of ISIS and other theocrats is teaching modern Westerners how much most of us agree on and how little, relatively speaking, most of our traditional radicals really want to change.
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