why is there such a blindspot about Islamic extremism on the left? I feel like I understand a lot of their other blind spots but this one is a mystery to me. Why do they implicitly, often unconsciously, cover for an ideology that ought to be totally anathema to them?
The "fetishization of the marginalized" thing seems non-explanatory also. Islamic extremism is incredibly damaging to those same marginalized muslim communities in western countries. Do they think they're helping those communities out by being blind to the serious problems?
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I think that the counterculture of the 60s made a great deal of the importance of an outside to modern culture. The status quo was bad and the best way to destroy it was to unite those who were marginalized by it.
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So the marginal and transgressive were vaporized as being key to the overturning of the system. I think this played a role in how identity politics became the big thing on the left (that and the fact that it isn’t actually radical). Difference became a good in itself.
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Here we can see a parallel in how the third worldists view capitalism as only being conquerable by a non-capitalist outside to the capitalist system. Hence Foucault’s early support for Khomeini’s “revolution” and the support we still see for Iran from some.
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I always thought post-revolution Iran was very "second world". adjacent to soviet periphery, buying weapons from Russia, far more industrialized than the true third world and never colonized (not explicitly anyway).
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In the original conception I think first world was the western sphere, second the Soviets’, and third everyone else. For Foucault I just wanted to draw attention to the way he saw it originally as progressive in an anti-liberal and anti-capitalist way.
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His support suggested a longing for something novel without a great deal of concern for how it could be oppressive. The third worldism is a different tendency, but something that shares similarities to this view in its desire for the Other.
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fetishization is the right word. maybe should use a stronger term: xenophilia
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They probably think (and not entirely wrongly) that the backlash against the Muslims will be made worse by accepting the problem and that the problem is overblown. The best analogue here is to conservatives views on mass shootings and gun control.
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*conservatives’
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