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Life after: Being a leader in the far right

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
This is a good read because it goes over how he was "groomed" to be a neo-NAZI, what lead to his recovery and his advice to those approaching people still in such groups

For almost 20 years Nigel Bromage was a leading member of the British far right, going on to join the openly neo-Nazi organisation Combat 18. After renouncing his hate-filled past, he formed Small Steps, an organisation made up of fellow reformed neo-Nazis, to try and prevent others following a similar route.​
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“It sounds crazy now,” he says, “but when you’re in that bubble of hate, you don’t see anything other than what you’re being told. We wanted to create enclaves where we could home-school children, work for each other and live in exclusively white communities. I’d gone from being somebody who hated terrorism and violence, to embracing a racial religion which believed the only way forward was race war. “We weren’t going to start it, but we were waiting for a trigger, a flashpoint, where we’d rise up and take control.”​
By the time Bromage began to question his allegiance to the far right, he’d given 16 years of his life – and sacrificed his marriage – to its misguided cause. It took another three years of soul searching before he found the courage to walk away. “I started to hate all the violence. I felt I wasn’t achieving anything and I could see it was wrong,” he explains. “But I couldn’t see a way out of this world because once you’re in it, it’s like being trapped in a gang.”​
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We’re trying to encourage families to have some open conversations and say: ‘Well, why did you support it? What positives came out of it?’” he says. “Hopefully we can highlight that the answer is – nothing. We have to use education, compassion and understanding, and we have to listen to people who feel the extreme right offers them a voice. We have to fill that void.”​
And tolerance, he suggests, cuts both ways. “Let’s listen to why people are angry and try to find some solutions,” he says. “Let’s talk about the fact that it’s OK to be patriotic, it’s OK to support your heritage and traditions – but it’s got to be inclusive, and it’s got to be there for everybody.”​
 
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