I'm interested in understanding more about extreme political, social and religious idealogies, however I am more interested in the objective viewpoint or at the very least the viewpoint from those that believe in these systems however write in a way not to sway the reader to their side, or hopefully someone can help me in ways to not be easily convinced by text.
Hi there, my main area of focus is the Weimar Republic and some of the various extremist groups therein.
I think the first thing that we need to address here is that anything can be covered in an "objective" way in the first place. Everyone, intentionally or not, conveys an opinion about something in everything that they write, record, or document and that absolutely needs to be taken into account when evaluating a text (movie, document, etc.). For instance, a government census, a seemingly "objective" or empirical survey asks for very specific information because the writers of that form think that the information provided by the respondents will be useful for whatever the state's purposes are, otherwise why would they ask extraneous questions? This may be part of the motivation behind the recent hubbub around the recently proposed question about immigration status being included on the census. We need to ask ourselves why such a question would be added to the census and what the state hopes to accomplish by asking such a question. If there was not a purpose to it, there would not be a reason to include it in the first place.
With this in mind, we need to carry this over to our reading of other texts as well. We need to ask ourselves what an author is hoping to accomplish by including certain things in what they produce. What purpose does a text serve (i.e. what is its thesis)? What are the logical consequences of the author's prescriptions? What assumptions is an author explicitly or tacitly making? What evidence does the author use to back up their claims and how strong is that evidence? (remember, statistics can be spun in a way to support awful positions) Who wrote the text in the first place and what positions did they advocate at various points in their life? Asking these and other questions help us more adequately evaluate texts of all types and allow us to temper our expectations of the contents of a piece and (hopefully) not be persuaded by abysmal extremist ideologies. If you find yourself being convinced by every piece of literature that you read, you may do well to improve your critical reading skills more generally. This isn't to say that you can't change your mind (in fact, it would be weird if you didn't), but that you should not allow yourself to be won over by everything you read.
I hope this helps :)