Angry Planet - ICYMI: The Roots of Political Violence

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

This one is a blast from the past. Jason is on Vacation and Matthew is going in for a minor surgery so we're resurrecting some old episodes. Here's what we said five years ago when this first aired:"Antifa and white nationalists clash in the streets. Students on college campuses patrol the sidewalks armed with bats. A man in Portland stabbed several people on a bus and another in Virginia opened fire on Republican legislators on a baseball field. This week on War College, Joe Young – college professor and contributing editor at Political Violence @ a Glance – walks us through what does and doesn’t scare him about the new rash of political violence in America. For Young, the times may be scary but they’re a far cry from the radical sixties and seventies when groups such as the Weather Underground bombed government buildings."My how things have changed in just five years.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello out there, Angry Planet. Listeners, this is Matthew. Jason is on vacation. I'm going in for some minor surgery early next week. So maybe a week or two of reruns here at Angry Planet. We thank you for sticking with us. So had one already picked out, but then, as I'm sure everyone is aware, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinso Abe was assassinated. And I thought, maybe we should go back into the archives, go way, way, very deep into the Angry Planet Archives, back to a time when we were called War College and we were operated by a little news outlet called Reuters. I don't know if any of you have been around listening that long, but that's how much things have changed around here. So I dug up one that we have about political violence that I think is from five years ago,

and is very just interesting to listen to now in light of how things have evolved in recent years. And I just wanted to share that with you and let you all know that it's going to be a little bit rough here in July, but that we will be back cooking on all cylinders, cooking on all cylinders, firing on all cylinders. firing on all cylinders. I'll try to stop mixing metaphors shortly. Thank you all for sticking around. Without further ado, here's

what we used to sound like. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. But I think people can find this in almost any religious or secular belief system. You know, and we have examples

of people who've used terrorism and violence from Buddhists to Christians, from environmentalists to anti-abortion activists. We as human beings are pretty good at demonizing the other and viewing them as subhuman and then using violence against them. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With me today is Joseph Young. Young is a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor at the website, political violence at a glance. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Matthew. All right, so we're currently living in an era of renewed political violence, especially in America. Left-wing Antifa groups set fires and smash windows while right-wing militias plan to blow up apartment

buildings. And on both sides, disaffected men turned to violence to solve problems. Joe, that's kind of why I wanted to have you on the show. And my first question is, do you think political violence is on the rise in America, or are people just paying attention to it more? Yeah, so I think the first thing we have to take apart is that if we look at this differently between kind of long-term violence versus short-term violence, and in the long-term, if we were looking at, you know, 100 years, violence has definitely been on the decline. There's no question about that. And there's a really great book by a guy named Stephen Pinker called The Better Angels of Art Nature, which shows in all these different ways, all the different kinds of violence,

we're talking homicides, interstate war, civil war, that violence is pretty much on this long-term decline. But I think we have seen a smaller upward blip recently. And I don't know we have a good handle on an answer to why we have these two empirical facts, kind of a long-term decline, as well as this short-term upward blip. So I think, I mean, my own view is that I think recently why we're seeing this rise is that we have a lot of political polarization, obviously. And we have some, I think, more vigorous mobilization than I've ever seen in my lifetime. And I think that combination is destined for some uptick in violence. You know, and if we've looked at GTD data, which is the global terrorism data, and we compare the 1960s and 70s to today, I mean, we see a heck of a lot less violence, but we are trending in that direction. What do you mean by vigorous mobilization?

I mean, we're seeing a lot of, you know, and I'm on a college campus where we have really politically active students. students, but we're seeing a lot more students protesting, arguing about, even amongst themselves, about events that they're unhappy with after the election. For example, we had people burning the U.S. flag out in front of our campus. We had students fighting in ways that were much more intense than I've seen. So what's the difference between now in the 1970s in terms of the violence? If this trend continues to rise, at what point do we meet that level? Oh, it would be, we're far away from that. And I think one of the reasons we're far away from that is, you know, in the, one of the big events, obviously, was the Vietnam War.

And one of the things that happened in the, was the secret bombing of Cambodia that really radicalized a whole lot of people in the U.S. and shut down a whole bunch of college campuses. We're not seeing something like that where hundreds of college campuses are going to close down and cities are going to be burned and we'll see that kind of thing. but, you know, any sort of uptick in violence is troubling as someone who's not very excited about violence. But, yeah, I think we're pretty far from that. But, you know, even – and if you talk to people who grew up in that era, they'll say there are shades of today that feel somewhat similar, but we're not even close to that. And to give some of our younger listeners some contrast and kind of an idea of what that looked like, can you tell us a little bit more about some of the groups from the 70s and what set that era apart in terms of. of political violence in America?

Yeah, I mean, this is something I was thinking a lot about recently, but I think one of the big difference is was the draft when people could potentially be drafted into war. It made a lot of people on the left who were not excited about the war and then might have to actually fight it, do pretty extreme measures to avoid it. And so we saw groups like the Weather Underground, you know, Sinbanese Liberation Army, lots of other violent leftist movements who wanted change in society, which we many other groups still want, but they had this real impulse or quick desire because they felt, you know, also under threat. And, you know, that, that era produced so many groups. And we really

saw a decline in groups after 1975, you know, after the war ended. So there's some evidence in support of that. You really put it down to the draft, though, because we've got, you know, to someone, somewhat argue, far more wars raging in America right now. Is it just because people aren't being called against their will to fight in them? Yeah, I mean, we haven't in both sets of wars, well, you know, we want to talk about Iraq and Afghanistan. You know, no one's been drafted in Afghanistan was an extremely popular war in the U.S., right, for a very long time. It's only been recently that's been less popular. But I think because most Americans aren't directly affected by it, I mean, we're not, our kids aren't being sent there to fight it.

there's a lot less interest in both how it's fought and whether we should stay engaged in it. I think people have war fatigue, but that's a lot different than how people felt in the 70s about the Vietnam War. All right. So why do people in general turn to violence as a solution to political problems? So I imagine in your podcast you talk a lot about Klausowitz and, you know, as being kind of the father of war studies, you know, his most famous line is at war is just the continuation of politics by other means. And so, I mean, just from a sort of straightforward approach is that war is often and violence is often just the outcome of some political disagreement that you couldn't resolve in other ways. But like I was saying before, we have these pretty politically engaged group of people right now. And they don't feel like being involved in the system is getting them the things that they want. And so they're turning to other ways to try and get those needs met. And violence is just one of those tools. But, you know, there's also, there's other non-systemic, nonviolent ways groups go about that. We also see an uptick, I think, in nonviolent resistance, right? We've seen a lot of mobilization against a Trump administration with the Women's March and the Science March

and sort of these other pretty large-scale non-violent movements. So there's a lot of, you know, what we academics call mobilization potential, I think, right now in the United States. And hopefully more of that's geared toward the nonviolent type and not the violent type. So it almost sounds as if Americans in general are becoming more political. And with an uptick in Americans becoming more engaged, some of them are going to engage violently. Yeah. And a very, you know, kind of if we're just thinking of you have more people, you have more likelihood of violence, right? Big countries are going to have more violence.

So just from a straightforward, you have more people mobilized. There's going to be some portion of them that are going to want to use violence. And specifically in most movements, and even in the, To go back to the 60s, you had a nonviolent student nonviolent organizations that were trying to fight against the Vietnam War and were arguing in favor of more Marxist principles. But there were groups within those nonviolent groups that became disaffected and decided that violence was the way to enact change and the talking and the nonviolence wasn't working. So there's a potential, even in these nonviolent movements that we're seeing, of folks coming to a similar conclusion that they're not making progress and that this is another alternative. Well, I'll ask you this. You're on a college campus. Do you see that kind of thing happening? I know that it feels just as even for casual watchers of the news that the college campuses seem like odd places right now, right? Yeah. So what are you seeing as somebody that's kind of on the front line of that? I mean, one of the, I guess, exciting and difficult things about right now, I mean, getting more voices involved in politics and having people mobilized.

in a lot of ways is a wonderful thing. It's kind of a foundation of America thing. And so, you know, that is a great thing to have young people wanting to be engaged in the process, and we're seeing, and our campus is probably more intense than a lot of other ones, and that almost every student on this campus wants to be politically engaged. And so I think, kind of as a blanket statement, that's a positive thing, that people aren't going to just accept how things are and they want to challenge the powers that be. But I do worry because of the intensity of feelings that those are the same processes that lead people to get frustrated and eventually want to use another tool because their mobilization isn't working.

What role do you think the Internet plays in leading people to violence? I'm sort of a skeptic in this. I mean, there are some other folks who are much more who think it plays a pretty important role, but I see Internet and cyber as just different means to mobilize folks, but not necessarily all that different. I mean, I remember, I grew up in the South, and, you know, I remember seeing zines that were kind of KKK-oriented magazines that people just handed out. And so there was still this tool that was being used to try and recruit folks. It was just low-tech.

And so we're seeing a higher-tech version of that, and it probably can, you know, touch more people more quickly, but it still requires to get involved in a group, some face-to-face contact and some personal interactions. One of the cases recently that I think was really fascinating and really sheds a light on some of the lone wolf types is this Devin Arthur's case. Can you tell our audience about that and kind of explain why it's important? Sure, absolutely. I mean, the Devin Arthur's case is a pretty interesting one.

And, you know, he's this kid who grows up in Kent, Tampa, and he's posting kind of hateful, far-right things and hanging out with neo-Nazi types. And he then decides who he converts to Islam, and he's still living with these fellows, and one of them or a couple of them, you know, sort of say things that are not appropriate to him or not what he felt were insulting, and so he shot and killed two of them. And I think this case is pretty interesting for a couple of reasons. One, this is a young kid who's searching for identity and trying to explore and ultimately politically act. But also I think that the second important thing is that extremism tends to breed counter extremism. And so, you know, you get

this kid who's toying around a neo-Nazi beliefs and then suddenly kind of becomes much more radical on the other side. And we can see an example of that too with Anders Breivik, the guy in Norway who used violence against, you know, the kids at a camp and an Oslo. and that was in response to what he saw as brutal jihadi violence. So it's this, you know, we're seeing an uptick in kind of the far right, especially in Europe, in response to some of the jihadi violence we're seeing. And I think this is a good example in the U.S. of a similar process. As someone that studies this stuff for a living, what aspects of it frighten you?

What keeps you up at night? You know, it's interesting. The first part that frightens me is I think that, The most terrifying thing is an unrestrained government. I mean, governments are much more efficient and effective at killing and creating violence. And so, you know, if we're talking about Stalin or Hitler or Mao, or even Pol Pot, who is responsible probably for killing about a quarter of Cambodia, those are really kind of worst case scenarios and the sorts of things that really scare me. I mean, if we're, you know, I'm watching the Syrian government barrel bomb their citizens and used chemical weapons, Russian state violence in Chechnya or Niu. Ukraine, Saudis bombing Yemen. I mean, those kinds of violence are on an order of magnitude much

more intense. And because they have legitimacy of the state behind them, we tend to talk about them less. So the non-state actor violence that we're kind of talking about, I should just put my cards on the table and say, I'm against violence, period. I'm not a big fan. I'm not a pacifist, but I think there's almost always a better way. But states are much better at it than non-state actors. Why are we so much more afraid of these small non-state actors then? I think that we feel like the state's job is to protect us from these things, and it seems like they're not able to, and the whole point of terrorism especially is to create that feeling that it could be you at any time. And, you know, we probably, many of us have stories about people

we knew who died in the 9-11 attacks, but your likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack is so small, right? You have a higher likelihood of dying in a lightning strike or in a car accident and all kinds of various ways, but that seems like something that should be preventable and seems like our state should be able to protect us from it, and yet we all feel like it could happen to us. All right, Anger Planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break. We will be right back after this. Thank you for sticking around, Angry Planet listeners. This is Matthew. We are back on with a conversation from five years ago about the roots of political violence.

So, Joe, just before the break, we were starting to get into one of the things that I think is a really interesting aspect of this stuff, and that's ideology. You're talking about Breivik and Arthur. How important do you think ideology is in these events? You know, I look at the Portland attacker, Jeremy Joseph Christian, and depending on, which people in the media you're listening to, he was a leftist or he was right wing. Like, what's going on? How important is this stuff? I do think people need an ideology that supports dehumanizing another person to actually kill them because killing someone is a pretty complicated, difficult act. So you need a foundation or you need a reason to do it. But I think people can

find this in almost any religious or secular belief system. You know, and we have examples of people who views terrorism and violence from Buddhists to Christians, from environmentalists to anti-abortion activists. We as human beings are pretty good at demonizing the other and viewing them as subhuman and then using violence against them. So I think ideology is important, but not a single ideology. You know, right now we're kind of fixated on Islam, but, you know, the far right in our country has also been engaged in so that we saw Dylan Roof. And I would definitely list Christian in that category. We had a recent attack of a University of Maryland student under similar circumstances.

We would attribute those the far right, but any of these categories are kind of clunky because they don't, most of these ideologies are fairly complicated and not consistent from one person to the other. So, you know, there's probably a better way of saying what he is one way or the other. Do you think that it is something that these people reach out for to use to justify actions they wanted to take anyway? Yes, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, one thing that criminologists are absolutely sure of, right, is that young men are the causes of most crime. And, you know, if you want to find out the reasons people are likely to steal things or kill

things or whatever, it tends to be young men. Now, women, of course, can be involved in this, too, although in organizations that we look at, they often take on different roles, maybe more support roles or marrying people or facilitating the violence in some way, but they can do it as well. But by and large, this is a young man issue, and that's a hard thing to totally understand the exact why, but empirically it's probably accurate. Let's try to figure out why, because I think you're right. I think that for whatever reason, most of the time, it's a young guy that is, seems like they're kind of lonely. There may be underlying mental health issues and then something happens and they start reaching for some meaning.

I'm not sure about the mental health component. You know, and one challenge of even trying to take that apart is kind of how we define what mental illness is and, you know, are we talking about depression? Are we talking about schizophrenia, those sorts of things? I mean, by and large, like if we study most people who've been involved in terrorism events, they don't qualify in the kind of conventional. I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist, so I can't make that exact determination. But generally, they don't seem to fall under those rubrics.

Now, other kinds of violence, right, might be related to mental illness. But I think there's something about being a young person and wanting change and wanting change to happen more quickly and violence being a way to kind of solve that. We've seen, and I don't know what the exact stats on this are, but even the biggest cause of death, that's a violent death in the U.S., for example, suicide, right? And so, you know, that's another facet of this trying to figure out if those are also related or those different causes. Another question I had for you is what do you see is the primary difference other than

the size of the groups between these lone wolf, you know, these single actors and these organized groups, like the right-wing militias, like the Bundys, and now kind of the Antifa. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the big differences is that most of the lone wolves are pretty bad at it because they don't have training and they don't really have people to connect with. The lone wolves are the ones who tend to fail or not to be very successful in doing what they want to do. Now, along with that, they're also the most difficult to actually disrupt. If you're an angry guy that wants to place a bomb in a, you know, in a temple, it's really hard for our law enforcement and other folks to intervene. But the good news is you probably stink at it, where when, you know,

the groups that we've seen develop in the U.S. and abroad, they're much more organized. They do a better job training. They produce better bombs, but we are much better at getting inside their organization and understanding what their plots are and trying to disrupt them before they occur. Right, because a secret gets harder to keep, the more people you let in on it. Absolutely. And the bigger you get, the more likely we're inside the organization. So people like Breivik, who was, I think, by his own definition, wildly successful, are atypical. They are. And this is something that Americans don't want to hear. and law enforcement doesn't want to hear, but it might be the price of operating in a free and open

society. I'm not sure there's a way to ever get rid of the Breviks of the world. Getting rid of the groups is much, I think, more straightforward. But an individual who wants to commit violence and isn't really talking to other folks about it and just planning on their own, I don't, short of, you know, being a Saudi Arabia like police state, I don't see how we effectively end that 100% of the time. All right. Are you following? what's happening at Evergreen College in Washington? A little bit. What do you think of these student groups patrolling campus with bats?

Yeah, I'm not a fan of vigilanteism for lots of reasons. We actually saw this in Maryland too, and a thousand. A group of white students were patrolling looking to protect other white students. And, you know, that is just a recipe for violence. And again, going back to the point. about this counter extremism, Oregon has been one of the hotbeds of far-right activity. And so, you know, this in conjunction potentially with more radicalized leftist groups is, I think, a dangerous mix. You think there's going to be maybe not at Evergreen College, but some kind of showdown?

I don't know, but I do see the likelihood that we'll see violence from each side. And I think it, especially Oregon may be a good place to talk about this a little bit, which is, you know, we as a society need to be really supportive of having differing views and debating things and even allowing unpopular views and uncomfortable conversations. What we can't accept is violence. And so, you know, some of the things that have gone on on the kind of pretty far left campuses where they've, you know, shut down discussions, I'm really quite scared about because I think when you shove those conversations underground, they just fester.

and those we need to have much more open dialogue even on among unpopular views. Right. Those things boil to the surface. Yeah. What effect, if any, do you think U.S. President Donald Trump has had on the way we're conducting political conversations in this country? And is any of the violence not, he's not responsible for it, but has he kind of cleared a path? Does that make sense? the people on the left would say he's had a ton of an impact. We've seen rises and hate crimes and, you know, we see all this sort of hateful speech. And the people on the right would say he's not, he has no impact on these things. It's totally unrelated. And I guess I would say somewhere in between, but more, you know, I think the president represents in some ways some of the repression, I think, of some of these unpopular views. And now they're coming to the four. And so there have been. been several cases right in the U.S. where people have been involved in, you know, antagonism,

hate crime, whatever, who say, hey, now this is Donald Trump's American, I can do these things. You know, in my own research, we look at why some people support torture in the U.S. And what the factors that lead them to be more supportive or less supportive of torture. And one of the things we found, we showed them different violent ways that one might reduce the likelihood of torture and whether violence was successful at reducing terrorism. It was successful at reducing terrorism. And we found that however we depicted violence, it always tended to make people want to respond with violence.

And so I think when the president or when anyone else talks about there is a violent event, we have these radical jihadis, I think what it does for people is it primes them that the proper response is some kind of violent action. And there was actually research that, Google did internally, which the President Obama tried to figure out post these kinds of terrorist attacks, what's the way that we can kind of reduce violence and counter violence? And one of the things they found, which I think is consistent with some of the research we did,

is that him just bringing up the attack or talking about, you know, how this is an awful thing, it actually increased, and the way Google does it is look at Google searches. but it increased Google searches on sort of hateful things related to Muslims. The thing that they found actually worked was when he portrayed Muslims as normal Americans, doctors, firefighters, that sort of took people away from thinking about violence and then linking that to these groups. And so I think, you know, ultimately it would be amazing if we had a smarter response to this. We don't, you know, if we weren't tweeting, hey, this is the kind of violence I'm talking about, but rather sort of discussed how we as America have a kind of problem with this.

And all of us are decent folks. Let's think about ways we can respond to this in smarter, safe ways. Joe Young, thank you so much for joining us on War College. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It's created by myself from Jason Fields a long, long time ago. If you like us, please kick us $9 a month.

It helps keep the show going. Get commercial-free up versions of the mainline episodes and also bonus episodes. I just posted another bonus episode today. It's about Biden's Saudi Arabia trip and what America pays for oil, even when it's not actually paying. If you'd like to hear that, go to angryplanet.com or angryplanetpod.com. kick us $9 a month. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict

on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until then.