Dealing with extremism by David Runciman
Professor David Runciman, University of Cambridge.
Many extremist ideologies rely heavily on conspiracy theories to explain how the world works and where power lies. This lecture explores what our understanding of conspiracy theories - where they come from, how they work, who believes in them - can tell us about dealing with extremism. The US presidential election campaign showed that conspiracy theories are increasingly becoming part of the currency of democratic politics. Is democracy itself becoming more extremist? Where do the boundaries lie between the contestation of democratic values and the repudiation of them? This lecture will examine the relationship between harmless conspiracy theories, dangerous extremism and the rise of ‘post-truth’ politics and it will ask how we can still draw the line between them.
Biography
David Runciman is Professor of Politics and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at Cambridge University. His books include Political Hypocrisy and The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis and he writes regularly about politics for the London Review of Books. He is one of the directors of a major Leverhulme-funded research project based in Cambridge on Conspiracy and Democracy, which explores the history and impact of conspiracy theories on democratic politics. (More details of the project can be found here: www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/) He is the host of the popular weekly podcast Talking Politics.
This talk is part of the Darwin College Lecture Series series.
Пікірлер: 12
I would find it interesting to know what the take on January 6th, 2021 in this context would look like. Clearly that was a violent rejection of democracy. Surely that is the prime example that would or should be used moving forward of what extreme conspiracy looks like.
This is right out of 1984.... the department of extremism.
Democracy is obsolete. We have to evolve into an Optocracy
He doesn't like Teresa May, despite que reached a top political position and he didn't.
"Because Runciman hasn’t read the JFK assassination literature, when he works in areas which would inform it he misses important details. For example he wrote a long, admiring review of the The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.12 Unaware of the JFK literature, he didn’t spot that Caro had entirely omitted the Billie Sol Estes story; and, given that the Estes story had been the front cover of Time magazine, the omission was deliberate. Why skip Estes? I suggested when the book was published13 that Caro had to omit Estes because Estes leads to LBJ’s role in the assassination of Kennedy.14 As an academic historian, Runciman isn’t going to take that next step and look at these questions: in his world this would take him into JFK nutter country. But in acknowledging that some conspiracy theories are ‘OK’ he has opened the door to deep politics and parapolitics. We shall see if he and/or his conspiracy and democracy project do anything with this insight. How successful was the CIA’s campaign to attach ‘conspiracy theorist’ to the critics of the Warren Commission? Fifty years after the event, Robert Caro, one of America’s leading historians of the period, is still afraid to approach the subject. This must be the most successful CIA psy-op." www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster71/lob71-oh-conspiracy.pdf#search=%22runciman%22
A couple of garden variety Trump fanboys trolling the comments.
How about extreme lefties
@louissteppenwolf3703
3 жыл бұрын
far less of them fella, be honest