Björn Ihler knows all too well the danger posed by neo-Nazis. On July 22, 2011, one murdered his friends – then, coldly, turned the gun on him.
Ihler was at the Norwegian Labour party’s annual youth camp on Utøya island when news broke of a terrorist attack in nearby Oslo. Many of the young people wanted to go home. But the camp’s leaders assured them they were in the safest place.
The first sign of trouble was a popping noise from the direction of the dock. Then a man wearing police uniform and a dark bulletproof vest walked over the hill towards the camp. It was 32-year-old Anders Breivik, who’d sailed from Oslo by ferry, listening as he went to reports of the havoc caused by his homemade bomb at the prime minister’s office. Seeing him, some of the group ran in his direction. Breivik raised his rifle and shot them in the chest. Over the next hour he killed 69 and injured more than 300.
Breivik, who has never shown any remorse, is now serving a 21-year prison sentence. But as Ihler watched white supremacists march with torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, he had the sense that he was seeing the mass-murderer walk free. “The ideology is the same, the hate is the same, the fear is the same, and to a larger and larger extent the actions and visuals are starting to look the same,” he says. “However in the US it's attracting people at a much larger scale. There are some differences in ideological flavour between Breivik and the American far right, but at the end of the day it boils down to the same thing, it is the same thing. It is fear, hate and violence.”
On the day of Breivik’s attack, Ihler, who is now 26, ran from the killer into the lake. His thick woollen jumper dragged him down and he began to sink. Desperately tugging the garment over his head, he risked a glance back at the island. There he saw Breivik: calm, focused, a man at work.
Their eyes met. Breivik took aim. The bullet missed by centimetres.
In the days and weeks that followed, Ihler suffered panic attacks and post-traumatic stress. Then he saw Breivik at the trial. Suddenly, the monster of his nightmares – media reports called him “He who must not be named,” like Voldemort in Harry Potter – seemed small, fallible and human. Someone who could be misled, indoctrinated and, potentially, understood.
After finishing his degree in peace studies, Ihler started to work as a counter-extremist, trying, he says, “to avoid people becoming like Brevik and help people who are entrenched in extremist ideologies out of those worldviews”. But understanding extremists meant getting to know them, which meant encountering them in person. The first neo-Nazi he met was a former skinhead from Canada. They spoke at the rooftop cafe at Waterstones in Piccadilly.
“It was pretty intimidating and scary,” Ihler recalls. “But here he was and he was peaceful and I could speak to him about how someone becomes radicalised, and how someone becomes deradicalised as well.”
And that was how Ihler met Arno Michaelis.
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Arno Michaelis knows all too well the danger posed by neo-Nazis. After all, he used to be one.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he grew up, Michaelis founded what became one of the world’s largest white power movements. The scene, like so much American white supremacy at the time, was based around skinhead rock bands. Michaelis sang in one, shouting the band’s racist lyrics, revelling in the baying crowd’s straight-armed salutes. He fought in the streets and relished the violence.
White power persists in Wisconsin: in 2012, skinhead Wade Michael Page marched into a Sikh Temple in suburban Milwaukee and killed six worshippers. But Michaelis is no longer part of the movement. He found his way out at a McDonald’s.
Michaelis worked at a T-shirt factory. His employer was Jewish; his colleagues were black and Hispanic. Their kindness and friendship confused him, but he remained committed to his racist ideology. When he got paid, he spent his money drinking and listening to hate-rock. But, first, he celebrated with a Big Mac and Diet Coke.
One payday in 1994, Michaelis went into his local McDonald’s for his monthly meal. He’d just got a new Swastika tattoo on the middle finger of his right hand; he imagined shoving it in someone’s face, right before he clenched his hand into a fist. But, as he recognised the friendly black woman serving him, he found himself attempting to hide the Nazi symbol.
As he later recalled, she gave him a look that said, “I love you, but let’s stop this foolishness.” Then she asked, “What is that on your finger?”
Michaelis couldn’t meet her eye. “It’s nothing.”
“You’re a better person than that,” she said. “I know that’s not who you are.”
“It was,” explains Ihlers, “a very human interaction that showed she saw him as a human being, that also showed him there was some room for coexistence in diversity. That unravelled his entire house of cards of extremist ideology. And that was one of the triggers for him leaving the neo-Nazi scene completely.”
Michaelis watched the marches in Charlottesville with a mounting sense of dread and frustration. The neo-Nazi movement was gaining strength and the counter-protesters were helping it by responding violently. “It’s exactly what the alt right sought to provoke,” he tells me. “This is on their shoulders for the most part but antifa played right into their hands.”
Michaelis isn’t a pacifist. “A mix of hard and soft response is tactically wise in general,” he says. But his experience with neo-Nazis suggests confrontation simply plays into their hands.
A few days after Charlottesville, Michaelis published a post on Medium: “How To Smash Neo-Nazi Events”. The basic principle: let them do what they want, but don’t acknowledge their presence. “Organise a fundraiser for a peacebuilding non-profit across the street from their event, or somewhere closeby,” Michaelis wrote. “Organise an engine of what diversity has to offer, and how much happier life is when we’re not afraid of each other.” Or, as he tells me: “A 6k run would do far more damage to the neo-Nazi cause than the response that happened.”
White supremacy has changed since Michaelis was active in the movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, neo-Nazis met and recruited primarily through white power music; now, they do it online. (Fashwave, electronic music for fascists, is the closest contemporary equivalent.) “You still see enthusiasm for the old bands, but it’s a little bit diminished,” says Keegan Hankes, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a US hate-monitoring group. “The majority of the propaganda and the indoctrination is taking place on social media platforms and taking place online.”
In the wake of the Charlottesville march, Google and GoDaddy expelled the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer from their web address registration services. Cloudflare, a company that helps protect websites from denial-of-service attacks, also terminated The Daily Stormer’s account. “I do think this is a win,” Hankes says. “The way these platforms are being used by extremists really gives them an outsize voice.” But for Ihlers, it’s simply the online version of counterproductive counter-protesting.
“This one worries me,” he says. “Pushing extremists further into echo-chambers, off the large websites and into smaller, encrypted spaces both makes it harder to keep track of them, and makes it harder to oppose the things they say and do on these sites.”
“Instead we, the moderates, the non-Nazis, should get on their sites, argue back, show humanity in the face of inhumane thoughts and ideology.”
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In the years before his attack, Anders Breivik collected email addresses. “I spent thousands of hours doing this over a duration of more than six months,” he wrote in his manifesto. The day he left to plant his bomb and sail to Utøya, he sent out an email to a list of over 1,000. Attached to each one was the 1500-page document, written in English, justifying what he was about to do. Breivik called it “the compendium.”
Reading it six years later, the work is eerily familiar. It’s not so much the laments about political correctness, media bias, feminism, Islamic immigration and “cultural Marxism,” delivered at voluminous length alongside dissertations on everything from the Frankfurt School to EU politics (a section alarmingly reminiscent of the Brexit debate, that even quotes Michael Gove and Melanie Phillips). It’s the tone, that increasingly current mix of intellectual arrogance and towering self-pity – the tone of the global alt-right.
“I have spent several years writing, researching and compiling the information and I have spent most of my hard earned funds in this process,” Breivik complains at one point. Later, he adds, in what must be one of the most contradictory sentences ever written: “Due to the fact that I have been exposed to decades of multicultural indoctrination I feel a need to emphasise that I am not in fact a racist and never have been.”
It’s all in there: prejudice, conviction, self-righteous rationalism, pre-emptive indignation. It’s Breitbart and Infowars. It’s Nigel Farage and Arron Banks. It’s Donald Trump, who, in his press conference on Tuesday, managed to combine both attitudes in a single garbled sentence: “I watched those very closely – much more closely than you people watched it.”
For Ihler, this tone is the key to understanding extremists of every stripe. “The people who become extremists don't get that sense of fitting in, of belonging anywhere,” he says. “They're adopted by an extremist community in which they find some sense of brotherhood and familiarity, and that in many cases is also tied to a higher cause of some sort. In Islamic extremism that's Islam and the Caliphate. In white supremacy it's the idea that the white race must be protected, things like that.”
It’s also, he argues, the key to protecting against it. “A lot of it has to do with the sensation that the rest of the world is out to get them. Narratives of extermination, victimhood. So the general strategy for countering that is building a sense of belonging elsewhere, building what they call strong positive identities, so we can happily coexist and be different and diverse.
"Extremism in all cases seems to be about the violent denial of the right of diversity to exist. It's extremely simplistic thinking. We have to work on that.”
Seen in this light, the actions of Google and GoDaddy are harmful twice over. First, they reinforce the far right’s sense of victimhood. Second, they represent the lack of diversity of the internet itself, as Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince acknowledged. “I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet,” he told his team. “Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous.”
Ihler insists his approach is not only morally correct, but also “smart and effective.” But it’s a hard idea to accept. Neo-Nazis reject a diverse world in the most disgusting terms – and in return we offer them greater diversity? Maybe it would work, if everyone did it. But in the absence of a coordinated effort – and, in the US, in the absence of an effective, stable state – it seems almost impossibly Utopian. I want it to work. I just don’t know if it would. And right now, being effective seems as important as being right.
I message Ihler on WhatsApp, telling him I’m struggling with the idea. What does it mean to increase diversity in concrete, day-to-day terms? He's slow to respond. But when he does get back to me he tells me he's been putting together IKEA furniture with people he can't name for privacy reasons "but they'd qualify as alt right."
He says: “Right now for me it's very much about reaching into spaces where there are people who react to fear with hate and violence and present an alternative way of viewing the world,” he writes. “Breaking into echo chambers, speaking to people as people and opening them up to a diversity of ideas.”
“And you do this every day?” I reply.
“Yeah,” writes Ihler. “It's pretty much my job description.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
