Origins of Political Extremism

Thus far, I have examined the incidence of violent extremism stemming from organized political movements of the extreme left and right, secular and sacred, and forms of extreme nationalism. Yet there are types of sociopolitical organization that can yield mass murder on a scale equaling, even surpassing many of the movements already considered. Without an extremist ideology or even a political program that they can call uniquely their own, military organizations have killed large numbers of innocent civilians, usually in time of interstate or civil war (sometimes both taking place simultaneously).

Three cases in point are Japan, Pakistan, and Indonesia. In his analyses of mass killing, the former two are treated by Rudolph Rummel in separate chapters, thereby indicating their importance. Japan and Pakistan developed different political cultures and traditions; their religious heritages also differ sharply. Whereas the Japanese religious tradition most relevant to politics, including a form of emperor worship – Shintoism – was essentially reinvented after the Meiji Restoration of the late nineteenth century, political Islam in Pakistan emerged from a much older tradition and one that was only obliquely relevant to the 1971 massacres in East Pakistan, today Bangladesh. More than anything else, religion provided a vehicle for emphasizing ethnic difference that justified the killing of one group of Muslims by another, as well as Hindu citizens of East Pakistan. Both the massacres initiated by the Japanese and Pakistani militaries will be found to conform to the model put forward in Chapter 1.