The kind reader may have heard of a thing called Horseshoe Theory. According to this idea, the extreme points of the political spectrum — the members of the most radical groups of the right and the left, let’s say — would have very similar ideas of jerico and reprehensible behavior.
Nazism and communism were just sides of the same coin, and so on. It turns out that, at least with regard to the political violence practiced around the world in the last 50 years, this idea does not correspond to the facts. The far right has clearly been more aggressive and lethal.
This is one of the main conclusions of a study that has just appeared in the specialized journal PNAS, linked to the US National Academy of Sciences. In their analysis, the authors of the study also included data on acts of violence practiced by Islamic extremists, concluding that, in American territory, the extreme right ties with them in this aspect. Globally, Muslim extremist organizations have been most lethal, with right-wing radicals in second place.
Before anyone goes around cursing the “communist scientists” authors of the study, it’s good to remember that these results didn’t come out of nowhere. As the study team, which includes Katarzyna Jasko of the Jagiellonian University in Poland and Gary LaFree of the University of Maryland’s Department of Criminology (USA) recalls, there is already considerable debate in the scientific literature about different psychological and behavioral predispositions. of people who adhere to the right and to the left.
On average, those who sympathize with more radical right-wing ideologies show more dogmatism, more support for the idea that certain groups are socially dominant, and more hostility to those who violate norms, factors that can lead to violent behavior.
Not all studies, however, show these associations. So Jasko, LaFree and their colleagues decided to analyze two large databases. The first, exclusive to the US, cataloged 1,563 individuals linked to ideologically motivated crimes (both violent and non-violent) in American territory between 1948 and 2018.
Almost 90% of the “registers” are men; 59% are linked to right-wing groups, 23% to left-wing groups and 18% to Islamic groups. When compared to militants on the left, those on the right were 70% more likely to be involved in violent crime. The comparison between ultra-rightists and Islamic radicals showed that this probability is similar for both groups.
In the next step of the study, the team analyzed data from the GTD (Global Terrorism Database), which cataloged 182,000 attacks around the world between 1970 and 2017, of which 55% had the responsible group identified. In the case of GTD, although the frequency is reversed, with attacks by left-wing and Islamic groups more frequent than by right-wing groups, the lethality of far-right attacks is considerably higher. Deaths occur in terrorist actions by right-wing radicals in 35% of cases, against 23% by left-wing extremists and 55% by Islamic groups.
There are no acceptable forms of political violence, whatever ideology its perpetrators defend. But it’s ironic that the extreme right’s paranoia about Islamic terrorism stems from the fact that, deep down, they are the same thing. It is urgent to understand the social and historical reasons behind this and find smarter — and less violent — ways to defuse these two global time bombs.
