1. An interesting (academic) area to study would be the memory of extremist movements, either to look at the memory of a particular movement or to compare two or more (though this would require a lot of expertise). From examining a number of movements over many years, I have
2. observed that, while many movements seem to have a reasonable memory over time of external happenings that impinge on their ideology or movement (like the memory of Waco for anti-gov't extremists), movements seem to vary widely, even wildly, in their memory/knowledge of the
3. history of their own movements (I don't mean *objective* knowledge; that is too much to ask; I mean even skewed knowledge). Left wing movements in general seem to have a better knowledge of their own history when compared to right-wing movements. Among right-wing movements
4. there seems to be tremendous variety. The white supremacist movement--in *general*--has a fair amount of historical self-awareness (again, not *objective* awareness). In contrast, I would argue that the militia movement is very ignorant of its own history. In part this may be
5. due to the fact that the steep decline in the militia movement after 1999, followed by a resurgence in 2008 with tons of new members, meant that there was a lack of continuity and a huge loss of movement memory. But I find the question of how much fringe movements know about
6. their own histories and what sort of things they choose to remember to be a very interesting question. That's probably only me, though.
