Former Neo-Nazi on Statues & Life After Hate

When I saw the faces of the white supremacists marching in Charlottsville, I got the sense that for many of these hate-filled guys, this is not about specific ideology so much as it's about belonging to something that will give them meaning and purpose. 
Violent ideology can be very attractive--I get that.

When I was a young lesbian-feminist, I dabbled (not for long) in some pretty violent views, like those of Valerie Solanis, who wrote SCUM Manifesto
[excerpts, where I got the screencap below].

Hm, looking at it again, I see she does raise some good talking points about a certain kind of male, one we've been hearing an awful lot from, one who thinks Confederate statues are "Great Art":

Yeah, but I always leaned more toward the "we will heal hatred with essential oils" kind of Piscean, Peace & Patchouli, let's-revive-Mother-Earth-with-menstrual-blood branch of feminism.

I'm still a little sad that didn't work out.

Anyway, former Neo-Nazi and founder of the Life after Hate group, Christian Picciolini, explains how the recruitment of vulnerable young men into white supremacist groups works
in an interview (with transcript) on Democracy Now.

Picciolini's memoir >>
Romantic Violence, Memoirs of an American Skinhead

The group he founded, Life After Hate [www.lifeafterhate.org] 
"works to help white nationalists and neo-Nazis disengage from hate and violent extremism. It is dedicated to inspiring individuals to a place of compassion and forgiveness, for themselves and for all people." 

It's not just a matter of compassion, though, to want to rescue people who've joined hate groups, it's preventative.
From an article in Newsweek:

"The FBI explicitly says in the briefing that white supremacists are to blame for the majority of domestic extremism. They 'were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016…more than any other domestic extremist movement,' the document states."

_________________

Some extracts from the fascinating interview with Picciolini (which also includes the close relative of a fascist who marched in Charlottesville):

CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: I was recruited at 14 years old in 1987. And I spent—

AMY GOODMAN: Where did you live?

CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: I was in Chicago, and that was the home and the birthplace of the American neo-Nazi skinhead movement. In fact, I was standing in an alley at 14 years old, and a man pulled his car up as I was smoking a joint, and he came over to me, and he said, "Don’t you know that that’s what the communists and Jews want you to do, to keep you docile?"

At 14, I was a marginalized kid. I had been bullied. I didn’t know what a communist or a Jew or even what the word "docile" meant. But this man brought me into a family. He gave me an identity, and he fed my sense of purpose.
While it was all misdirected, being marginalized and disaffected and feeling abandoned, I was willing to trade in the feeling of power, when I felt the most powerless, for something that was evil and eventually swallowed whole.

AMY GOODMAN: What was it that started you moving away and questioning what you were doing?

CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: I started to meet people who I had kept outside of my social circle, who I hated: African Americans and Jews and gay people.

But the truth was that I had never had a meaningful interaction with them. But when I started to, I started to receive compassion from the people that I least deserved it from, when I least deserved it. They could have attacked me. They could have threatened me. They could have broken my windows.
But they didn’t.
And they knew who I was, and they took it upon themselves to show me empathy when I deserved it the least. And that helped me humanize them and dispel all the stereotypes that I had in my head. And suddenly, I couldn’t reconcile my hate anymore.

GOODMAN plays a clip of a white supremacist at the Charlottesville rally

CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: This gentleman is an insecure—has no self-confidence and is clearly broken. There is something broken.
I’m a firm believer that ideology isn’t what radicalizes people. I think it’s the search for identity, community and a sense of purpose. And if there’s some sort of brokenness, a void underneath that in your life—and it could be trauma or addiction or mental health issues, anything that would hold you back or deviate your path from the intended one that you were on—you tend to look for acceptance in negative pathways.

ON THE STATUES:

"CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI:  Well, first of all, the monuments don’t really mean anything to these groups. They use them as an excuse to gather. You know, they don’t care. They’re egotists. They only care about themselves, their agenda and how it moves them forward.
And they’ll use, you know, the term "free speech" to hold a rally, or they’ll use an excuse to protect a statue to hold a rally. So, let’s just dispel that myth. Those statues really don’t mean anything to them.

 Let’s take the statues down, however we need to take them down. Let’s put them in Confederate cemeteries, so people who do genuinely believe in the heritage, even though I disagree with that, can still pay homage to their idols and to their family members who lost their lives in the Civil War.

However, I think we need to replace those statues with civil rights heroes, true Americans, who did give their lives to fight for justice and the American dream. And especially the Robert E. Lee statue that is in Charlottesville, I would propose that a statue goes up in its place to honor the three people who died that day, you know, because those are true Americans."

END OF EXCERPT: Read or watch full the interview: "Life After Hate: Full Intv. with Nephew of Fascist Who Marched in Charlottesville & Former Neo-Nazi"