I'm really worried about extremism.
The kind that comes from painting ones political opponents as so extreme, that the extremes to oppose them seem totally justified.
Paint Jews as being demons who are a threat to your way of life, poison your culture and want to hoard all your wealth while watching you and your family starve, then becoming a Nazi - an ideology that resulted in the deaths of up to 20 million people - seems totally Justified.
Works both ways.
Paint your political opponents - middle of the road liberal as they can get - as an evil, nasty right wing extremist group then supporting a card carrying communist - an ideology that resulted in the deaths of 100 million people - in response, seems totally justified.
Look at the way Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders talks about the rich. Look at the way Donald Trump talks about Muslims. Look at the way Hitler spoke about the Jews, or Castro about Capitalists, or Bush and Obama about Terrorists. These powerful people have something in common. Their road to power was elevated on "us" vs "them". The "many" vs "the few".
This divisive, collectivist mentality breeds justification for all sorts of political violence. Fill that elusive '1%' category with whatever stereotype you want and you've got yourself a political carrot on a stick that people will follow into the most violent of battlefields. Like the war on 'Terror' or the 'Patriarchy'; modern identity politics is annihilating any minutia by creating phantoms and caricatures of their political opposition and assigning those parodies to whatever or whoever is politically convenient at the time.
It's the most effective method to hurt swathes people, as long as it's coupled with a healthy dose of propaganda and censorship.
How to commit genocide:
Step 1. Attribute problem demographic to singular group.
Step 2. Portray singular group as oppressors.
Step 3. Assign those who disagree with this narrative to said group.
Step 3. Justify support to punish said group.
Step 4. Social Justice achieved.
Identity politics is a fancy term for Collectivism; the biggest threat to individual free thought and liberty ever conceived. The minute you dismiss someone's argument or opinion, or attack them, on the basis of the group you've assigned them to based on arbitrary characteristics or ideas, you've just done the service of the hive mind and remained a loyal member of the herd. If we all were to maintain the freedom to have ideas in spite of what the hive mind or the collective might say, we all maintain a barrier to extremism.
Extremism cannot exist when individual thought and a free exchange of ideas is encouraged. If we look at each other beyond these collective nouns, perhaps we'll stop placing people on a scale of how acceptable it is to hate them and instead take them at face value as individuals. When you see someone as the person they are instead of the label you've assigned to them it becomes much more difficult to justify slaughtering or stealing from them.
