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you're thinking about political action as if it were a criminal thing, comrade.
what that lets you assume is that the institutional situation is somehow neutral, so motivation comes down to pressures placed on an isolated individual or discrete network.
the problem with that is simple enough: it makes no sense to assume up front that the institutional/political situation is neutral.
so political action is not a form of deviant behavior.
it may well be---and in a colonial situation typically is the case--that most everything about the dominant apparatus would be understood as deviant-to-unacceptable in a non-colonial situation. and the prerogative of domination is that you (vague...were you in that situation of dominance) get to define the rules.
rules are not neutral simply because they're rules.
this isn't to say that there's not a wingnut factor--but the wingnut factor is evenly distributed it seems--there's tons of wingnuts in legit society whose attachment to the trappings and "causes" of "legitimate" society is every bit as pathological as are those of anyone who chooses for whatever reason to engage in another type of action.
going back--assume for a minute that you're in a palestinian refugee camp where your family has been since the late 40s. you can't move around the west bank because of all the "security" in place to protect the (illegal) settlements. there's very little in the way of economic activity and less in the way of prospects for the future and you are as you've always been entirely cut out of anything remotely like a conventional political process, so even if you were to organize others and attempt to pressure the state or authorities to address problems---deep structural problems that impact on you every day---there's no-one to talk to.
year after year the same.
no prospect of an end in sight.
it would seem to me that this situation would define your options in a pretty stark way and that thinking about and responding to your world---even at the level of trying to imagine it otherwise (which can be a source of consolation as much as a political mobilizer) leads you to no alternatives but "extreme"----violent maybe nihilist action.
the problem lay in the colonial situation itself, really. *that's* what defines the range of alternatives. you want to address "extremism" in a case like that, the key lay in, o i dunno, the dismantling of the settlements and everything that attends them and recognition of a viable palestine, yes?
or it lay in pathologizing dissent in order to make violence directed against it easy to carry out.
which is what treating it as a criminal action does.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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