The Nazis of my generation grew up. They have kids now. But they still carry the hate of their teenage years. On the day the Berlin Wall fell, as it happened, I almost died. Constipated from too much chocolate, I battled for my life in an east-Berlin hospital with my panic-stricken mother at my bedside,… Continue reading “30 years after the Berlin Wall fell, the far right has come of age”
In the 1980s, white supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller, founder of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, got active duty Marines to train his followers in violence, plotted to murder civil rights leaders and others, and was finally arrested in a Missouri trailer with a huge cache of military-grade… Continue reading “NPR “Embedded” Podcast: “The Terrorist””
The extreme right in Britain has changed and developed in recent times, while its impact can be felt across a wide variety of professions. From policing to teaching, and from healthcare to law, many professionals can find themselves dealing with people with extreme right activists, or whose lives have been affected by the consequences of… Continue reading “Extreme Right Aware Training Course, 20 September 2019”
It seems like a political nightmare found its end in Sunday’s snap elections in Greece: the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn did not make it to the national parliament again. After seven years of a highly controversial presence – featuring antisemitic diatribes, ultra-racist hate speech, calls for coup d’états and physical attacks against MPs –… Continue reading “From Dawn to Dusk: The End of Parliamentary Neo-Nazism in Greece”
The 2019 European Parliament Elections provided an important case where the far-right Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) performed electorally well. However, we argue that there is a core tension within the AfD’s party strategy. This tension lies at the regional level, with a clear split ideologically within the party between Western and Eastern Germany. We… Continue reading “East v. West? The Internal Battle within the Far Right in Germany”
On 25th – 27th April 2019, the inaugural conference of the Center for Right-Wing Studies took place at the University of California, Berkeley. This was a refreshing exchange between early career researchers and more established scholars that provided some international perspectives on right-wing movements: from conservatism to fascism, from the past to current developments. Around… Continue reading “Conference Report: Inaugural Conference on Right-Wing Studies”
German neo-Nazi bands attempt to appeal more broadly to an audience that is opposed to the government’s position on asylum seekers. Plato once wrote, in an argument postulating the banning of music, that “any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State.” While an extreme position to adopt in its own right, the… Continue reading “Tracking German Neo-Nazism Through Music”
The American radical right has almost always been fractured, riven by red-hot splits over ideology, raw power, and an unrelieved series of petty fights revolving around sex, drugs, money, and over-inflated egos. A neo-Nazi leader sneers at the “freaks and weaklings” who inhabit other hate groups. One Klansman shoots another over the theft of a… Continue reading “Recent Splits & Spills in the American Radical Right”
Germany to the Germans! Foreigners out” was the central slogan of the racist riots in the city of Rostock in 1992. For around three days, neo-Nazis controlled the streets in the plattenbau district of Lichtenhagen where the central registration for asylum-seekers (as well as a housing block of Vietnamese contract workers) were situated. With stones… Continue reading “The truth lies in Chemnitz?”
Music has long been a key factor in spreading neo-Nazi ideology, serving both as a tool to attract (young) people and to reproduce identities of those already part of the scene/movement. Indeed, it is through music that the extreme right has voiced its ideas, including racism and xenophobia, othering of ‘internal enemies’, antisemitism as well… Continue reading “Fancy a show? Neo-Nazi concerts in Germany”