The Guardian has identified a trainee nurse and reported US air force reservist called Bailey Ross as the proprietor of a white nationalist publisher in South Dakota.
Ross was also a paid-up member of a white nationalist organization that marched at Charlottesville while enlisted in the United States Coast Guard.
Ross’s company, Agartha Publishing, is part of a wave of extremist publishers using mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Amazon to sell lavishly repackaged fascist and anti-communist books.
This is a very, very troubling stance. Imagine, for a moment, that some unnamed, but generally orange-hued person was president and the law of the land was that fascists and fascist sympathizers were not afforded any rights under the law. Holy hell.
Do you really hold this view, or are you just being dramatic?
I actually hold this view. Time and again fascists have infected societies the world over and because capitalism thrives on oppressing some people (usually minorities and immigrants), fascists have been happy to have capitalists simply point a finger to the soon to be opressed, and the military and police, themselves beneficiaries of capitalism, are incentivized to go along.
Oh, I see now. Capitalism.
Do you consider yourself an extremist?
I think the general society I live in today would consider my viewpoints extreme, but I would not label myself an extremist, no. I don’t think most people think their own ideologies as being extreme.
Isn’t society in general the best judge of what is or is not extreme, considering that, as you say, it’s a relative description?
That depends on whether “best” is moral, which are often conflated as being the same thing. Antifascists were considered extremists in Nazi Germany and Italy by the general society, but for hopefully obvious reasons, you can see that Antifascism was a moral and logical response rooted in the survival of those they were persecuting.
I don’t recall bringing up morality at all. My question still stands.
My apologies, my previous statement was an implication and was not explicit.
I think that any form of thought or activity that lies outside of the acceptable norms of a society can be painted as extremism by the majority with disastrous results, and thusly the results are so abhorrent to conclude that society is NOT the best judge of what is extremist or not because calling something extremism or someone extremist often connotates moral judgment on said actions or persons.
I would dispute that you can’t disect moral judgent from the invocation of the term extremism.
Btw, if I were you, I would next point out that if my claim that society is not the best judgement of extremism, then ask then who or what is?
To which I would respond that we should throw out the term as it actually just refers to those who want changes to society that upset the paradigm under which it is founded.
My opinion is that a society that is based on inclusivity as its core value is probably better than the one we have right now. With the following caveats:
Said society would need to have an addendum that it need exclude those who would tout exclusivity and violently express the necessity of exclusivity in preferential treatment of one group over another. This society would have to fundamentally acknowledge that speech, left unchecked, can be violent even by inference.
I genuinely await your rebuttal.
What are your thoughts on capitalism in your utopian society? Are they allowed?