C. A. Davids

“Yet, I’d say that when one can no longer evaluate ideas with objectivity, or when a movement one belongs to restricts wider political engagement via censorship and self-censorship—and these might be so insidious as to be almost invisible (for example, we don’t read those papers, we don’t talk to those people even when there is common political cause)—then yes, I think there is a form of radicalisation going on. I get that this kind of mindset is a tool of war, but it also apprehends empathy, and while the former may be important to the project of war, it is dangerous to the act of being human.”

“We don’t often evaluate South Africa’s liberatory movements with the idea that there was radicalisation, perhaps because the moral imperative was so clear in South Africa—apartheid was an atrocity, and the need for freedom so fundamental. There is no question for me that the Struggle was important and often, but not always, heroic.”

“It’s very interesting that you reference Shamima Begum. She, along with her bright school friends, were radicalised, leading the girls to flee the UK to join Islamic State. I was fascinated and heartbroken by that story; I still am because it is ongoing (her British citizenship has been revoked and she remains in a prison camp in Syria, I believe, and cannot make amends for the past or move forward). But she was a child when she made these astonishing, fateful, life decisions.”