More than 1/5 (22%) of your country’s population is considered extremist?
That's not quite what I said - I said they lie at the extreme ends of the spectrum. If there was a graph of people who like vanilla, chocolate, or a swirly mixture of both, the two "extreme" ends could be the pure vanilla on the one end and the pure chocolate on the other - i.e., "extreme" does not (always) imply a magnitude, only direction; whereas the word "extremist" does imply a very high magnitude.
That said however, many people in the USA do indicate that they would be okay to see violent overthrow and upheaval of the entire system of government. I do not know precisely how many, nor is there likely to be an accurate count b/c few may be willing to admit it in an official poll, unless it were anonymous and then people would abuse it (e.g. the same person could vote many times to inflate their particular viewpoint). It makes sense to me b/c:
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities
At some point, it becomes a moral imperative to act, and violent overthrow becomes the correct action, IF the facts in question were accurate, e.g. to prevent an even greater harm to innocents.
But mostly my point was that the matters involved are quite complex - including some outright Sophie's choice material. If someone handed you a gun and told you to shoot a random stranger with it, and meanwhile they had people pointing guns at both your wife & child and said that they would kill both if you did not pull the trigger, would you do it? The trolly problem through and through: do you act against your conscience to murder someone you do not know, in order to potentially save some people that you are very close to? I say potentially b/c in the calm of this theoretical discussion we both can realize that it might be unlikely that any of your loved ones and/or you would be allowed to remain alive - why leave witnesses that could potentially come back to harm you in some way? So really you are likely dead no matter what you do... and yet, can you take that chance!? There may be a slim possibility of hope that this is some kind of "power demonstration" where they decide to let you live as an example to others that they can do as they please, and your story would strengthen their position by generating fear. On the other hand, they could just be having fun the whole time, your gun isn't even loaded, and when you pull the trigger they'll just laugh... and then kill your whole family anyway, and then you too.
This is EXTREMELY sick stuff to contemplate, and yet... Russia shows no sign of leaving the Ukraine anytime soon, i.e. they offer the latter populace no chance to avoid thinking along these lines, nor Russian troops either who are just as caught up in this as are the innocent victims of Russia's neighboring country, EXCEPT that the troops on the front-lines are not entirely as innocent as are the infants & children being raped & slaughtered in Ukraine. Some might even go so far as to argue that by remaining in Russia, propping up its economy and such - e.g. making the food that soldiers will eat, clothing that soldiers will wear etc. - that normal Russian civilians are all but actively participating in the slaughter of innocent Ukrainian ones? That is undoubtedly true, and yet does that mean that counter-attacks upon Russian civilian infrastructure should be allowed? The Bible does say that justice should be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth... so wouldn't raping Russian 5-year-olds and razing entire cities to ashes be tit-for-tat? Or are there better ways of resolving conflicts, like at the very least Russia ceasing to actively conquer Ukraine, as well as beginning to make reparations to restore what was lost? But since that is not going to happen, what then will... or even should happen?
Anyway, how it relates to the USA (where I am from) is that one day very soon, we may have our second Civil War and face these issues inside of our own borders. In fact, that war has already started, though it is currently in its cold phase and has not yet erupted into a continuously blazing "hot" phase, except for the tragic (but blessedly brief) events on January 6, where one police officer was brutally crushed and others injured by the angry mob who were invited to storm the capital, after first being told to "prepare to fight like hell". The likelihood of the affairs in Ukraine and those in the USA being entirely unrelated seem about as likely as a prominent Russian official falling down a flight of stairs, and then shooting themselves in the back of the head, twice. And thus, they do not seem likely to merely go away with time, for at least as long as Putin remains alive, and likely much longer beyond that.
