The Rage

The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism

Julia Ebner

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The early twenty-first century has been defined by a rise in Islamist radicalisation and a concurrent rise in far right extremism. This book explores the interaction between the 'new' far right and Islamist extremists and considers the consequences for the global terror threat. Julia Ebner argues that far right and Islamist extremist narratives - 'The West is at war with Islam' and 'Muslims are at war with the West' - complement each other perfectly, making the two extremes rhetorical allies and building a spiralling torrent of hatred - 'The Rage'. By looking at extremist movements both online and offline, she shows how far right and Islamist extremists have succeeded in penetrating each other's echo chambers as a result of their mutually useful messages. Based on first-hand interviews, this book introduces readers to the world of reciprocal radicalisation and the hotbeds of extremism that have developed - with potentially disastrous consequences - in the UK, Europe and the US.

1

The End of a Collective Illusion

WE LIVE IN BETTER CONDITIONS TODAY THAN ANY GENERATION BEFORE US. On a global level, we are wealthier, healthier and more educated than ever before. Despite the 2008 financial crisis, the subsequent European debt crisis and the current migration crisis, worldwide life expectations, living standards and literacy rates are at a record high.¹

Every day we are moving one step closer to reaching the Millennium Development Goals. Poverty, hunger and child mortality are lower than ever before.² ‘The end of extreme poverty is in reach’, Oxfam enthusiastically claimed in 2015.³ Half a billion people escaped extreme poverty between 1990 and 2011.⁴ Over the past 25 years the child mortality rate has gone down by 53 per cent⁵ and the conquering of major communicable diseases such as malaria, HIV and tuberculosis is in sight.⁶ For millions of people in developing and emerging countries we live in a golden age.

Yet, despite all the achieved progress, growth and prosperity, it feels as if we are only one step away from descending into complete chaos. ‘I’ve witnessed the years that led up to Hitler’s rise. Today, we live in troubling times again,’ my great-grandmother told me in October 2016. One month later Trump was elected US president. Born in 1921, my great-grandmother has lived through almost a whole century. She grew up in the golden 1920s, experienced the Great Recession, saw Nazi Germany rise and fall, fled the Czech Republic as a Sudeten German, raised three children as a single mum in post-war Austria and became one of the country’s first councilwomen during the tense Cold War years. At the age of 80, she completed a university degree in history. ‘We are moving away from tackling problems together and turning our backs on the achievements of international cooperation. This return to isolationism and nationalism is alarming. America first, Britain first, Austria first. I have seen the harm that this uncompromising focus on national interests can cause.’ She leans over to me, now almost whispering. ‘I’m afraid humans will never be capable of learning from history, not even from one of the darkest chapters that hit the whole world not too long ago.’

The Leaning Tower of Jenga

The world we live in today seems to be more divided than ever before. Wherever we look, we can find deep rifts that divide our societies in left and right, Muslim and non-Muslim, Remain and Leave camps, Republicans and Democrats. ‘In many ways, the years to come could be among the most dangerous in recent human history, particularly with the risk of both outright collapse and great power conflict higher than they’ve ever been’, my friend Peter Apps wrote for Reuters during the turbulent 2015 summer.⁷ The tensions are palpable across the world: a fractured and war-torn Middle East, escalating territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, resurgent Russian nationalism, an unstable, rogue Turkey that is just a glimpse away from civil war, an increasingly divided and xenophobic Europe, and, of course, we should not forget to mention that the United States elected an openly anti-Muslim bigot for president.

The current political situation reminds one of the final rounds in a Jenga game, where the tower is already leaning so badly that removing one more block will most likely lead to its collapse. Is it too late to intervene? Many of the bricks that have provided a stable foundation – international consensus, economic integration, a strong political centre – have been removed or are in the process of being removed. There is even a sense that old disputes between East and West, Left and Right, and North and South had never truly vanished and are now coming back to the surface again: a dangerous cocktail of neo-Cold War tensions and neo-fascism. Did we carry all the ingredients in our backpacks over the past decades? Was one stimulus enough to bring back all collectively repressed memories and traumata?

In an attempt to predict how prone a society is to polarisation and conflict, political scientists have come up with a political instability index, which calculates the sum of change in vote totals per party from election to election divided by two. According to this metric, political instability has been rising among various EU members over the last decade.⁸ Yet there are, of course, no reliable indicators to measure the likelihood of war in a society. It is only with hindsight that history books can tell the full story of what led to the escalation of a conflict. Sometimes the dynamics appear so complex and the events so intertwined that even a retrospective description of what happened becomes a challenge. Even today, you can get into a passionate argument with historians when speculating about the developments that led to World War I. Yet one thing is almost undisputed: once the shot aimed at Archduke Franz Ferdinand was fired, there was no going back. The first brick had fallen, causing a chain reaction that brought all the others down. One event led directly into the next and it was too late for any single state to halt the collapse.

In the aftermath of World War I, the tower was rebuilt. Yet its foundations remained fragile. In the Paris Peace Conference, the Allies accepted most of President Wilson’s ambitious peace programme put forward in his so-called Fourteen Points. It was the birth of The League of Nations – the collective will to ensure a peaceful future was there. But so was self-interest. Germany was declared solely responsible for the war; the Treaty of Versailles and its harsh punitive implications left the German population suffering. Unbearable reparation payments, painful territorial losses and escalating tensions with the French nourished German post-war grievances, effectively turning the country into a ticking time bomb.

Eventually, the tower collapsed under the weight of the Versailles Treaty’s war-guilt clause and the Great Recession. Hitler’s promise of a glorious future that would expand the German Lebensraum and make Germany great again was appealing to the German people, who were desperate for change. This time it was not only the politicians who wanted war; it was the masses’ desire – at least in the beginning. ‘Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?’ German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels asked in 1943 at the Berlin Sportpalast. After half a decade of war, millions of extinguished Jewish lives and major defeats on all fronts, Goebbels had to select his audience carefully to make it appear as if the public still cheered at the idea of war. The total war brought about the total destruction of the tower. This time, the bricks did not simply fall; they were shattered.

Again Europe rebuilt the tower – this time on a more solid basis, so its architects thought. Everyone joined in. Everyone wanted to avoid another war, at any cost. The Americans pumped $12 billion into rebuilding the foundation for a stable continent. Nations came together, leaving behind their enmities and hostilities to create the United Nations (UN) and to set up the predecessors of the European Union (EU) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Increasing economic interdependency was seen as a tool to secure peace. They had learnt from the past, European leaders thought. They believed in the virtue of supra-national organisations and multi-lateral trading as a prophylactic treatment against war. No one would be able to attack an economic partner without harming their own interests. Trade disputes would no longer escalate into armed conflict. This could have been the end of patriotic and nationalist narratives and the beginning of a stable world order.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. ‘The cold wind of intolerance, authoritarianism, and nationalism is blowing across America and Europe’, a post-Brexit Huffington Post article reads.⁹ The tower appears shaky again. On 23 June 2016 more than 17 million Brits¹⁰ voted to remove a major brick of its foundation by leaving the EU. Britain’s independent anti-terrorism watchdog Lord Carlile argues that the EU has been one of the most important guarantors of a peaceful Europe. ‘If you compare that period since the Second World War, which is now 70 years, to the previous 70 years, it’s game, set and match for the EU. The EU has meant peace in Europe,’ he told me a few weeks before the referendum.

The fear that Brexit might cause a chain reaction among other European countries is real. Post-Brexit polling results published by the London-based think tank Demos give a gloomy outlook of the future of Europe. Their polling project ‘Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself’ revealed that a ‘widespread sense of precariousness, uncertainty and pessimism is sweeping the continent – presenting an unprecedented social and political challenge to the future of the Union’. It demonstrated that Euroscepticism is no longer a phenomenon that is exclusive to the UK but is increasingly becoming commonplace all across Europe.¹¹

Meanwhile, far-right leaders across the US and Europe have been gaining support, mainly playing on people’s fear of Muslims and benefiting from their lack of understanding of the distinction between Islam as an individual faith and Islamist extremism as a political ideology that exploits religion. This has led to a stark rise in political radicalisation and violent extremism. Growing support for both far-right and Islamist extremist militant groups has manifested itself in a surge in terrorist attacks and hate crimes throughout the world.

While World War I was provoked by a chain reaction, World War II can be seen as the product of the ticking German time bomb. Today, there is reason to be worried about a repetition of both effects. As the Arab Spring demonstrated, increasing interconnectivity and modern communication tools can easily spark chain reactions not just on a political level but also on a civil society level. At the same time, one glimpse at the world map is enough to see that there is more than a handful of ticking time bombs akin to interwar Germany. Even more concerning, however, is the non-linear nature of today’s threat. The extremes are increasingly feeding off and escalating one other, effectively creating a vicious circle. Consequently, our democratic societies’ natural resilience to polarisation and, in its extension, radicalisation has vanished. Or was our perceived post-war immunity against conflict never more than a collective illusion?

‘You have no idea how lucky your generation is,’ my history teacher told our class of 13-year-olds in 2003. We had just finished discussing Schindler’s List and were about to start another group exercise on World War II. I remember exchanging looks with my classmate, who was busy finishing her Viennese croissant under the desk. At the time, neither of us understood what she meant. We didn’t care too much about the past, saw little connection to the present and were even less concerned about the future.

In 1942, the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig published his memoirs in The World of Yesterday. He described the pre-World War I period as the Golden Age of Security:

There was as little belief in the possibility of such barbaric declines as wars between the peoples of Europe as there was in witches and ghosts. Our fathers were comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation. They honestly believed that the divergences and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity, and that peace and security, the highest of treasures, would be shared by all mankind.¹²

We had another Golden Age of Security. ‘But history tends to repeat itself, in a circle,’ my great-grandmother cautions. Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday is timeless precisely because today’s yesterday is similar to Stefan Zweig’s yesterday: after the end of the Cold War, European stability appeared staunch, the idea of another war distant. Generations X and Y have grown up in the illusion of timeless peace and prosperity. Today’s only generation to have experienced what war feels like – the wartime generation – is dying out. The Baby Boomers were raised in the bitter post-war atmosphere; they instinctively understood their parents’ pain, though it was not treated in school. Generations X and Y learnt about it in school but had no emotional connection to the topic. The Boomers understood it without talking about it, while my generation talked about it without understanding it.

The Yugoslavia War weighed heavily on my parents’ generation’s shoulders, but it was the war of a different world: the ex-communist world. We, in the West, were deemed immune to war. After all, we’ve had the pre-emptive vaccination of the UN, the WTO, the EU and even NATO. Yet this past decade has exposed the powerlessness of those international organisations and bodies that we had considered to be our invincible vanguards of peace, human rights, democracy and prosperity. In the light of the global financial crisis, the migration crisis and the rising threat of terrorism, they all look ridiculously toothless.

‘Cette fois, c’est la guerre’ (‘This time it’s war’), the French daily newspaper Le Parisien announced after the terrorist attacks in the French capital that killed over 130 innocent civilians in November 2015. It was the first time a French president had officially used the word war since the Algerian war. ‘It felt like I had fallen into a nightmare,’ a Parisian friend recalls. Mattheu was having a glass of wine a few streets from Bataclan when the first shots were fired. The political science major thinks about it for a few seconds as we walk through the militarised streets of Paris. ‘Or rather woken up from a dream. All of a sudden war seemed possible again.’ Even the French, of all people, were shocked to hear the word war and see policemen standing in front of the Louis Vuitton shop on the Champs-Élysées – one would think the revolutionary spirit is encoded in their genes and the preparedness for confrontation runs through their veins. Yet we had all been part of the collective delusion of eternal peace; France was not exempt. Losing this feeling of absolute security and protection almost feels like we have been betrayed, like a broken promise.

Needless to say, the Jenga tower looks shaky: trust in international institutions and national constitutions is dissolving, the viability of democracy is under scrutiny. It is against this background that a global jihadist insurgency and an international renaissance of the far right are looming upon us. Extremists have been good at using the arising insecurity and fears to their advantage, because they thrive in uncertain environments, where their apocalyptic stories find wide resonance.

Extremist Storytellers

Studying extremism without studying stories is like studying the brain without studying the neurons. ‘We used stories to transmit our extreme ideologies,’ Ivan Humble tells me over the phone. The ex-EDL community manager used to recruit people into the group’s East Anglian Division. For the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre,¹³ ‘man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal’. The narrative is what ties it all together: it is the connecting element between non-violent and violent extremism as well as between far-right and Islamist extremism. ‘Radicalising people was easy; I just had to tell better stories than the Establishment,’ Ivan notes. ‘Most people I talked to already had their views; all ...