Radicalization and Disengagement in Neo-Nazi Movements

Social Psychology Perspective

Christer Mattsson, Thomas Johansson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000463125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers an in-depth study of personal accounts of men and women who have at one time entered, participated in and ultimately exited the neo-Nazi movement, with a focus on advanced Western states.

Through detailed stories of the movement's violence, hatred, and ideology, coupled with narratives of the individuals' life plans and dreams when entering the movement and reintegrating into society, the work provides knowledge, hope and new directions for readers to better understand and react to a reinvigorated extreme right across Western nations. The book provides innovative research on the relationship between the life trajectories of neo-Nazis and their significant others, enabling better and more evidence-based strategies for preventing radicalization and promoting deradicalization. The extensive case studies include the voices of those who returned to the movement, or never left at all, providing a rare opportunity to compare active, former and returned right-wing extremists. The main contribution of the book is to provide an innovative approach to the oral history of young men and women who have participated in different national and local neo-Nazi movements in Western countries, namely Sweden and the United States. In order to understand the current trends within the movement and their relationship to the surrounding society, this shift calls for in-depth analyses based on social-psychological and sociological perspectives. Stressing the importance of having a gender theory, sociocultural, historical and both a national and contextual perspective on the neo-Nazi movement, this book contributes new knowledge to this field of research.

This book will be of much interest to students of political extremism, radicalization, terrorism studies and social psychology.

1 Contextualizing the book

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152101-1

Introduction

Today, the neo-Nazi movement is mobilizing heavily once again, and its hateful messages are gaining political traction in Europe and the United States. This development takes place in particular through increasing support for their views among the general population and the spread of conspiracy theories, which can be seen frequently, even in everyday political debate. Occupying the extreme position on the far right, they are undergoing a transformation in how they want to portray themselves, and how they want to attract new activists. A number of studies have also identified an increase in the average age at the time of the radicalization and a change in the entry processes into the violent circles of the neo-Nazi movement (Mattsson & Johansson, 2021). This shift calls for in-depth analyses, based on social psychological and sociological perspectives, to understand the current trends in the movement and their relationship to society as a whole.

In this book, we will refer to the skinhead era and the post-skinhead era to distinguish two periods between which a transformation in the movement has taken place. The terms may be a bit blunt, and we are not implying that the transformation is complete, or that the non-skinhead aesthetic of the current Swedish movement is the most suitable way to describe the global movement today. However, our focus is on understanding crucial components in the transformation from the period when the movement was publicly identified by the presence of rowdy skinheads, which is from the mid-1980s through the turn of the millennium, until today. How the movement is publicly understood today is not an issue for this book, but as we will show, today’s movement members are eager to get rid of the skinhead identity both individually and on a collective level, for the sake of the reputation of the movement as a whole.

The book focuses on the processes of becoming, belonging and leaving or staying. It provides numerous in-depth case studies of the subjective and very personal stories told by a number of young men and women who at one time entered, belonged to and left the Swedish neo-Nazi movement. The book also includes the voices from those who returned to the movement or never left at all, which provides the rare opportunity to compare active, former and returned right-wing extremists. Through repeated interviews with 27 informants from Sweden and the United States, the book provides the reader with a close reading of the informants’ dreams, fears, wishes and reasons for engaging into, living within, disengaging from and in some cases remaining within the neo-Nazi movement. The book also offers a social psychological perspective on the life trajectories and experiences of these 27 individuals, remembering and providing their views on their ideological convictions, violence, disillusionment and fateful moments in their disengagement process or decisions to remain.

The concept of life trajectories will be used as a heuristic concept. This concept is commonly used to capture individuals’ movements in time and space. Often, it is used in studies of young people’s transitions in life (Johansson & Herz, 2019). In this book, we will use the concept to capture and identify some key aspects of our informants’ movements in time and space. First, we will focus on age and the key transitions—through institutions such as the family, school and work—connected to age. We will also focus on the importance of what we have called geographies of hate, that is, what it means to grow up in local neighborhoods saturated by hate speech and everyday racism. Second, we will focus on cultural passages, and in particular, what it means to participate in and become a part of a subculture and a subcultural space. Finally, we will also look closer at agency. Traveling through time and space also means making decisions and taking control of one’s life and life plan. Using the concept of trajectory to make sense of the individual’s entrance into, involvement in and decision to either stay or leave the neo-Nazi movement, we will try to develop a social psychological and contextual analysis of our study object.

Out of the 27 informants, ten of them are still active in the movement or are still ideologically convinced neo-Nazis. Five of our informants are women, all of whom have disengaged and left the movement. The low numbers of women also reflect the low representation of active women in the movement as a whole. Through detailed stories of the movement’s violence, hatred and ideology, coupled with the narratives of individuals’ life plans and dreams when entering the movement and reintegrating into society, this book provides knowledge, hope and new directions for European and global studies, to better understand and hopefully react to a reinvigorated extreme right across Western nations. Additionally, the book provides innovative research on the relationship between the life trajectories of neo-Nazis and their significant others, allowing us to establish better and more evidence-based strategies for preventing radicalization and promoting deradicalization.

In the book, we will provide an innovative approach to the oral history of men and women who have participated in different national and local neo-Nazi movements in Sweden. Our book offers an in-depth study of the processes of entering, participating, exiting and staying in the neo-Nazi movement. The innovative features of this book include the use of an extensive qualitative and process-oriented body of interview material. Stressing the importance of having a sociocultural, historical, gendered and national/contextual perspective on the neo-Nazi movement, this book will contribute new knowledge to this field of research. We will now situate our study in the history of the skinhead movement and the neo-Nazi movement.

From skinhead culture to the Nordic Resistance Movement

Skinhead culture developed in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Initially, the skins were influenced by different styles of music, and there were no clear dividing lines between them, for example, the Jamaican Rude Boys—which was a West Indian subculture—and the British skinheads (Brake, 1974). Toward the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the scene changed and the nationalist currents of 1980s Britain became linked with skinhead culture. Some bands, such as Skrewdriver, came out as racists, and racist and neo-Nazi lyrics became more common. Nationalist movements, such as the National Front and the British Movement, started gaining more followers in the 1980s, and a strong link between this type of a right-wing extremist movement and skinhead culture was gradually established (Ware & Back, 2002). In the 1980s and 1990s, skinhead culture was exported to several European countries, including Sweden (Lööw, 2000). In many, though not all, cases, skinheads developed racist attitudes and became intimately involved with extreme-right movements (Johansson & Herz, 2019).

Since the late 1980s, there has been a growing body of research on racist skinheads. In a study of 14 male skinheads in Canada, 12 of the 14 youths reported experiencing regular physical discipline at home (Baron, 1997). All the interviewees reported being involved in many violent incidents. In addition, they withdrew from the labor market and survived through theft and selling drugs. Although there are some connections between these ‘street crime skinheads’ and extreme-right movements, Baron (1997) draws the conclusion that there is a difference between these less-organized skinheads and skinheads engaged in political activism. However, Baron (1997) also argues that an attractive aspect of the street skinheads is their fighting skills and violent capital. The extreme right-wing scene has been characterized by a fluidity and a notoriously unpredictable activism. In a study of German skinheads and xenophobic youths in Germany, Watts (2001) concludes that what she calls xenophobic culture—that is, racist and violent sentiments in society—includes both highly spontaneous youth culture/subcultural expressions and more organized forms of political activism. She also suggests that aggressive subcultures do not always act based on ideological motivations, but may instead be driven by thrill-seeking behaviors.

Other researchers point out that there is a clear connection and strong bonds between the racist skinhead culture and organized forms of activism and even terrorism. In a US study, Blazak (2001) found that some older Nazi skinheads manipulated teens and recruited them into a world of terrorism and possible terror attacks. The presence of a violent and racist skinhead culture varies considerably between different countries. In Russia, for instance, skinhead attacks have become more frequent since 2000 (Arnold, 2010). Miller-Idriss (2017) points out that not all those engaged in far-right movements, including the neo-Nazi movement, exercise violence. She underlines the particularly intense violence in skinhead groups; however, she indicates that there is also widespread support for discarding violent approaches in far-right movements today.

Research on the development of extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi movements in Nordic countries from the 1980s onward suggests that some factors likely influenced the eruptions of violence. These are periods of high levels of immigration, the presence of loosely organized skinhead gangs, anti-immigration rhetoric and media coverage of right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi movements. However, establishing causality in this case is challenging, given that local groups with superficial ideological motives most commonly performed the violence, and this violence was commonly exercised among peers (Bjørgo, 1997; Lööw, 2000; Ravndal, 2018). To conclude, there is seldom one causal factor to explain a particular behavior, but it seems that we have to understand violence within these milieus as a contributing and causal factor that generates more violence.

In a comparative study of the distribution of violence by right-wing extremists in Nordic countries between 1990 and 2015, Ravndal (2018) shows how Sweden stands out in terms of both the number and persistence of violent deeds by the country’s neo-Nazi movement. In this respect, Ravndal points to the country’s high number of immigrants, the relatively late parliamentary success of a party hostile toward immigration (the Sweden Democrats) and a higher unemployment rate. Ravndal (2018) also notes the historical reasons for the development of neo-Nazism in Sweden, namely, that the National Socialist movement continued relatively intact following the Second World War (1939–1945) due to the country never being occupied, with the government unable or reluctant to take legal measures against Nazi collaborators after 1945.

Therefore, looking at previous research on skinheads, we can see that there is a strong emphasis on the connection between belonging to this subculture and exercising extensive forms of violence. Moreover, there are significant differences regarding the appearance and disappearance of skinheads in different countries.

Transmutations of the neo-Nazi movement—From skinheads to post-skinheads

Examining the Nordic Resistance Movement’s (NMR’s) Handbook for Activists, Westberg and Årman find that contemporary National Socialists have reinvented and reinterpreted the heritage of 1930s Nazi Germany in several ways, with stereotypical images of ‘old’ Nazis replaced with new aesthetic and symbolic ways of expressing adherence to the neo-Nazi movement (Westberg & Årman, 2019). For instance, the handbook’s front cover reflects different visual and embodied resources for creating both historical continuity and new ways of being a National Socialist. Similarly, the combination of different elements—including a striving for a life in balance with nature, a natural body, an outdoor lifestyle and conservative values—enables the reconfiguration of what it means to be a National Socialist today. Westberg and Årman (2019) also argue that there is a need to analyze the intertextual links between different right-wing groups, including the alt-right, the identitarians, and neofascist populist groups.

Pollard explores different aspects of the historical development of the racist skinhead phenomenon, arguing that the skinhead way of life typically involves creating a self-image as a warrior or street fighter. Its historical roots in the National Front and British Movement mean that racist skinhead culture is rooted in neo-Nazi ideology. According to Pollard (2016), the skinhead movement is gradually transforming from a working-class and primarily Western European phenomenon into a transnational movement, becoming particularly influential in Eastern Europe. Pollard also argues that the skinhead phenomenon has transitioned from a distinct subculture to a historical symbol for extreme far-right activism. Meanwhile, Whitsel (2001) argues that the American neo-Nazi movement has undergone radical transformations and ideological mutations since the 1970s and 1980s, fracturing into several different philosophical tracks and orientations.

According to Teitelbaum (2017), nationalism in Nordic countries can be divided into three ideological camps: race revolutionaries, cultural nationalists and identitarians. Race revolutionaries encompass individuals that celebrate and reenact the mythology of historical National Socialism. In Sweden, race revolutionaries are represented by the NRM. Usually operating within legitimate democratic parties, cultural nationalists are anti-immigrant and c...