麻豆传媒

TIM ZAAL hurt a lot of people in his time: blacks, Mexicans, gays. Strung out on drugs and propaganda, he fitted the toes of his engineer boots with razor blades, all the better to kick the scum and save the white race.

Zaal has since recanted, but others continue to follow in his bootsteps. After decades largely under the radar, race-based violence and extremism is back in the news. In June 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black worshippers at a Methodist church in Charleston, South Carolina. In August 2017, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, saw youths on the streets giving Nazi salutes, and one counter-protestor killed, deliberately mown down by a car.

It鈥檚 not just in the US. In June 2016, British politician Jo Cox was murdered by a white nationalist. Last November, tens of thousands rallied by torchlight in Warsaw, Poland, waving banners that advocated deporting refugees and making Europe white again, while chanting 鈥淪ieg Heil鈥� 鈥� in the once-Nazi-occupied land where Auschwitz was built.

For most, the motivations of such hate seem unimaginable. But pioneering work in the US is beginning to reveal its roots. What it is uncovering turns a conventional view of terrorist motivations on its head 鈥� with implications for how all societies should deal with the phenomenon.

IT IS a cold night in January, and I鈥檓 eating hamburgers with Zaal in a mall restaurant at the border of Orange County and Los Angeles. A big, affable man in his early 50s, he talks easily about his life as a violent white supremacist during the 1980s and 1990s. Also at the table is , a sociologist at Chapman University in the city of Orange who researches white supremacist extremism.

Simi first met Zaal when he disengaged from organised racism at the turn of the millennium. Since then, Simi has interviewed Zaal about his life history, as he has done scores of active and former far-right extremists. The two have common acquaintances, and casually drop names. 鈥淒id you know that so-and-so is dead?鈥�

White supremacism has a long tradition in the US. From the 1860s, after the southern Confederate states lost the US civil war, white workers found themselves competing with freed slaves for economic resources and social status. The backlash was often murderous: thousands of black men, women and children were lynched, shot, stabbed, tortured and burned alive, and their property often expropriated with impunity. Racial segregation was the law of the land, not just in the agrarian south, but also in the industrial north as millions of black people fled the cotton fields for factory ghettos. By 1925, membership of the Ku Klux Klan approached 6 million, .

Orange County is best known as the home of the Disneyland theme park. Its affluent suburbs were long a bastion of old-school Republican conservatism. Richard Nixon was born there and it is where Ronald Reagan kick-started his political career. Until the 1970s, the county was almost exclusively white, before African-American, Hispanic and Asian incomers changed its complexion.

Like similar places nationwide, Orange County became a centre of a small but hardcore white supremacist backlash. Zaal viewed himself as a patriot fighting against a Jewish-orchestrated plot to commit genocide on the white race. 鈥淲e saw it as doing what police wouldn鈥檛 do,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e were cleaning up our neighbourhoods of the scum.鈥�

Just days before I met Zaal, white supremacist Samuel Woodward was charged with stabbing to death a Jewish gay man called Blaze Bernstein, whose body was found buried in an Orange County park. Woodward has pleaded not guilty to the charge. The murder was by Woodward鈥檚 comrades in the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division.

IN THE wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, counter-terrorism expert at the University of Southern California wrote an opinion article for USA Today, which linked the violence to Donald Trump鈥檚 racialised rhetoric. The next day, someone shot out his front door.

Southers is black. A retired FBI agent, he teaches courses on homegrown terrorism to law enforcers. 鈥淲hite nationalists are a greater threat to Americans than jihadists,鈥� he says.

The Anti Defamation League reports that in the US, white supremacists were responsible for . Seven of the remaining 16 were anti-government extremists, leaving nine tied to Islamist terrorism. Since 2002, than jihadist attacks in the US, although the jihadist attacks have claimed more victims overall, reports the New America Foundation.

In the UK in the year to March 2017, made up around one in six of over 6000 referrals to the country鈥檚 counter-extremism programme, Prevent, and almost 40 per cent of 332 people entering Prevent鈥檚 鈥淐hannel鈥� process, which supports individuals considered vulnerable to be drawn into terrorism. In February this year, in the UK in the previous 12 months.

In the US, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which , has catalogued more than and hundreds of anti-government militias that either have a stated intention to overthrow liberal democracy or historically engaged in armed struggle.

Southers sees similarities between the white extremist and Islamist terrorists: both fit the prevailing notion among researchers that most terrorists are not psychopaths, but relatively typical people motivated by circumstance to protect their 鈥渋n-group鈥� from dangers, real or imagined. 鈥淕iven their belief systems, both types of terrorists are acting rationally,鈥� he says. 鈥淢ost terrorists are 鈥榓ltruists鈥� who view themselves as soldiers fighting for a noble cause.鈥� The calling to enact political change precedes the calling to violence: the ends justify the means.

Simi鈥檚 research suggests that is not the whole story.

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SIMI and I are hiking with 鈥淐huck鈥� (not his real name) on a rocky beach north of San Diego. Chuck is a 50-year-old electrician who used to advocate Christian Identity, the idea that white Europeans are the lost tribe of Israel.

As an adolescent, Chuck listened to white power punk, hung out with swastika-tattooed neo-Nazi bikers and was into weed, amphetamines, LSD, magic mushrooms and alcohol. He was discharged from the US Navy after he was sentenced for assaulting a Mexican man 鈥� for being Mexican, he adds.

On release from prison, Chuck joined the San Diego branch of the Hammerskin Nation, an ultra-violent neo-Nazi group with international branches. He ran in the same head-slamming circles as Zaal, but he was more enamoured of the cross than the swastika. 鈥淚 did not consider myself to be a national socialist, but a Christian patriot ready to start a race war and take the country back from the Jewish communists.鈥�

As Chuck grew older, raising a family, he began distancing himself from violent extremism. There was no blinding light, just a fading of interest until one day he no longer believed in a world conspiracy. He has been active with , a group that offers 鈥渙ff-ramps鈥� and counselling to far-right extremists who want to heal.

Simi has a professional background in mental health assessment. His interviewees start by talking about themselves in an unstructured way, to uncover their life priorities and emotional impulses. This is followed by more structured, factual questioning about past events, which probes subjects鈥� emotional motivations. It is rare to get such an insight into the minds of those who hold these kinds of extreme views. When terrorist suspects are interviewed about their pasts it is usually by intelligence and police agencies, often in prison and with a focus on ideology and operational methods.

Simi and his team record the emotions associated with events the subjects mention such as family traumas, hurting people, or joining or leaving a violent group. They can then determine the intensity of pleasure or pain the events evoked, as revealed in the language used. The results are to uncover the extent of shared motivations between the people he interviews. The aim is to avoid fitting the data to pre-existing theories of causes and effects.

The first results from this programme were laid out in 2016, in a 260-page paper from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), principally authored by Simi, with the title 鈥溾��. The analysis revealed that white extremists, while not necessarily psychopathic, are often violent before they join extremist groups. Only after joining are they generally schooled in ideologies that justify channelling pre-existing urges into violence towards Jewish people, non-white people and anti-racist groups. The ideology is the excuse for ultra-violence, not the reason. 鈥淔ar-right ideologies channel a pre-existing need to express violence by narrowing the selection of victims,鈥� says Simi.

That insight challenges thinking on the origins of extremism, says ethnographer at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, whose research focuses on female white supremacists (see 鈥�Women of the right鈥�). 鈥淚t shows that the embrace of those really terrible ideas could be a consequence of an immersion in the culture, rather than the cause of an attraction to the culture,鈥� she says.

Simi鈥檚 analyses tease out the possible driving factors. About 80 per cent of his interviewees have : violence, sexual abuse and broken homes (see 鈥�What makes a racist?鈥�). Many had horrible, shame-filled childhoods that morphed into lonely, self-hating adulthoods. White power groups can provide angry loners with a sense of pride in community and conveniently dehumanised targets to blame. White supremacist propaganda is filled with references to , from the Confederacy鈥檚 defeat in the civil war to the election of Barack Obama as the first non-white US president.

鈥淭he behavioural problems represent lives spinning out of control,鈥� says Simi. 鈥淩esorting to violent extremism can be a coping mechanism for these people. They are drawn toward violent extremist groups for non-ideological reasons, for shelter, protection, a sense of family.鈥�

As happened with Chuck. His parents, he says, were pot-smoking hippies who failed to recognise that the male babysitter was sexually molesting him on a regular basis. 鈥淚 just kind of buried that, and it turned into shame and then anger and then self-hatred that got projected onto the world.鈥�

The sun sets and he rides away on his motorcycle. 鈥淢ost of these guys are not crazed lunatics,鈥� says Simi. 鈥淏ut neither are they socially or psychologically healthy. They carry invisible scars.鈥�

SOCIOLOGICAL research on extremists is difficult to design. Researchers cannot advertise for 鈥淣azis鈥� or 鈥渧iolent white supremacists鈥� to join a scientific study. Simi developed his volunteer cohorts of active and former extremists by gaining the trust of his often-paranoid subjects one interview at a time. Interviewees then suggested others for him to contact in a method called 鈥渟nowballing鈥�.

This is not a randomised process. It is subject to ethical review by institutional boards, and Simi鈥檚 studies are required not to cause harm to his subjects. His studies of individual life histories differ in method and level of detail from his previous real-time, ethnographic observations of active white supremacists.

Starting in the mid-1990s, Simi was a guest in the noose-draped homes of white extremists for days and sometimes weeks. He attended white power music festivals in the wilds of Idaho and birthday parties in honour of Adolf Hitler, encounters detailed in a 2010 book, , co-authored with sociologist Robert Futrell. Simi鈥檚 entry ticket was an easygoing demeanour, an ability to drink lots of beer and the colour of his skin.

White power families can seem like any other from the outside. They live in suburban homes, mow the lawn, do run-of-the-mill jobs. But the Christmas tree is often topped with a swastika, not a star. They give their kids racist colouring books. They rally around burning crosses, an ancient Scottish war signal. Armed with automatic weapons, they train to exterminate non-white people.

Some of Simi鈥檚 field subjects had been convicted of attempted lynchings, aggravated assaults and murder. They would happily have stomped him if they had smelled a rat, he recalls. He made a point of identifying himself upfront as a scientist studying their culture, appealing to vanity, perhaps. Not everyone was thrilled by his presence; he did not pretend to agree with racist politics. But he didn鈥檛 argue with his hosts either, or ask the wrong kind of questions about weapons or criminal acts. He kept conversations tracked on cultural and ideological issues, while observing the interplay of relationships in the environment.

In the late 1990s, Simi spent time with an itinerant Hammerskin musician named Wade Michael Page. He had been recruited into organised racism while in the US Army after the first Persian Gulf war. Years later, in 2012, Page , Wisconsin, before being killed by police.

Simi didn鈥檛 see it coming specifically, he says, but he was not shocked. The bass guitarist had many risk factors for violent behaviour, including chronic depression, alcoholism and suicidal ideation. Adding in white supremacy proved to be a recipe for terrorism.

But not every white supremacist with these risk factors opens fire on a minority church congregation, or points their car at an anti-fascist protester and accelerates. 鈥淭he idea of predicting something as complicated and as rare as terrorism is just not realistic,鈥� says Simi. Terrorism is primed when an emotionally damaged person meets the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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ZAAL did jail time for his violent deeds, and now regularly tells the story of how he deradicalised at the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance.

But the Charlottesville march triggered something deep inside him. The chant 鈥淛ews will not replace us鈥� horrified most people. For a moment, Zaal thrilled at the prospect that the revolution might finally be on. 鈥淪uch momentary relapses are not uncommon,鈥� says Simi.

In 2017, Simi and Blee, together with colleagues Matthew DeMichele and Steven Windisch, presented a in American Sociological Review. They wrote that 鈥渢he habitual and unwanted thoughts, feelings, physiological responses, and behavior that can follow exit鈥� from active status mirrors the effects of withdrawing from opiate addiction. It may be no coincidence that, as Simi鈥檚 earlier studies showed, many white supremacists are also substance abusers: the reward of hate may be dopamine, too.

In an unpublished pilot for a future study, Simi and collaborators at the University of Nebraska and the National Institutes of Health have taken fMRI and EEG scans of the brains of five repentant white supremacists and a control group of five mixed martial arts fighters whose brains were likely to show similar signs of trauma.

The volunteers were shown symbols and images designed to be neutral or to activate the former white supremacists鈥� previous identity and ideological orientation. The experiment found significant activation in the emotion processing regions of the brains of the former white supremacists in response to racially charged images, such as of an interracial couple. No such regions were activated for the control group. The researchers conclude that 鈥渢he inherent racial bias in former white supremacists happens before more active cognitive processing鈥�.

In her 2002 book , Blee observes that, 鈥淭he mainstay of any substantial racist movement is not the pathological individual but rather a pathological vein of racism, intolerance, and bigotry in the larger population that the movement successfully mines鈥�. Unconscious bias towards protecting our in-groups is a natural, evolutionarily adaptive feature of the human psyche, and the wellspring of racism. Shortly after the violence in Charlottesville, an ABC News/Washington Post poll reported that 9 per cent of adults in the US surveyed, equivalent to about 22 million people, said it is .

In a roundabout way, that answers the question why only very few people with horrible childhoods and other risk factors for violence end up kicking people with razor-blade-tipped boots: they are the extreme values in a Bell curve that covers all forms of social racism. That provides at least some handle on how to counter the problem, both through tackling childhood trauma and rooting out racism in society as a whole.

For Zaal, the path out of his addiction to hatred opened up unexpectedly after he became a parent. 鈥淚 was with my 3-year-old son at a grocery store. And he says, 鈥楲ook, Daddy, there鈥檚 a big 鈥� and he dropped the 鈥榥鈥� bomb in the store. The black guy just walks away, shaking his head. But all of these little white ladies are screaming and hollering at me, I mean old ladies. 鈥極h, how dare you! How dare you teach your child these things!鈥� And my son looks up at me and says: 鈥楢ren鈥檛 you going to beat them up, Daddy?鈥�. That was my moment of clarity.鈥�

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淥n the origins of white nationalism鈥�