Meet the former neo-Nazi who says being an extremist is 'exhausting'

About six months after he became a skinhead, Arno Michaelis walked into a McDonald's in his home town and was served by an elderly black woman with “a radiant, beautiful smile for everybody who walked through the door”.
That smile made Mr Michaelis deeply uncomfortable, he said this week, “because that smile alone is blowing my bulls*** out of the water”.

Arno Michaelis, was an American white supremacist in his youth but has now drastically changed his views.Credit:Ryan Stuart

To make matters worse, he had just gotten a new Swastika tattoo on his hand, and because he knew that the racist hatred he preached was wrong, he tried to hide it from the woman about to sell him a burger in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, restaurant in north-central America.
“She said to me, ‘What’s that on your finger?’” Mr Michaelis recounted.

“And I couldn’t say, ‘It’s a symbol of my race because I am a white warrior for my people’. I was completely disarmed. I said, ‘It’s nuthin’.”
“I know that’s not who you are. You’re better than that,” she told him.
Mr Michaelis stayed in the white power movement for another six and a half years after that encounter, walking away in 1994, but that momentt stayed with him, and it fuelled what he calls the “exhaustion” at the heart of all extremists, be they Islamists or white nationalists.
Mr Michaelis, who was in Sydney this week to give the keynote address at DIGI Engage, a youth summit aimed at countering hate speech and social polarisation, said extremism is very tiring.
“You’re constantly in this exercise of spinning reality to suit your narrative rather than experience reality as it is, ” the 48-year-old said.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Mr Michaelis was the lead singer of a neo-Nazi skinhead band, and a founding member and later leader of the Hammerskin Nation movement, which is one of the world’s largest neo-Nazi skinhead organisations.

Arno Michaelis in his youth.

When he became a single father to an 18-month-old daughter, and lost a second friend to gang violence, he left the movement, and now devotes himself to his “peacebuilding” organisation Serve 2 Unite.
Mr Michaelis said that a sense of oppression and victimhood underlies all extremist ideologies, and an ideal of “purity” which means members of the group can only consume culture that confirms their world view, and only fraternise with people who do the same.
“The narrative is always ‘my noble, good in-group is being oppressed by this terrible out-group’ … a grandiose, macro-type vision of it. It’s compensating for something because you don’t have a healthy sense of your own identity,” he said.

He also said personal suffering is common among people who fall into these groups (for him it was growing up with an alcoholic father and an unhappy mother) and they are populated by “men who don’t understand what healthy masculinity looks like”.
Mr Michaelis said social media is like a “bellows, or a pendulum” for extremist ideas, “where one side can’t swing without the other side swinging the other way”.
“By definition polarisation is a two-pole process,” he said.
But he also believes social media is one of the best tools for countering violent extremism, as a way of sharing the real, personal stories of the “other” - be they refugees, or Jewish people, or Muslims, or LGBTQ people.
“Extremist people, they’re going to want to talk about the macro level, the southern border of US, or what’s happening in the Middle East with ISIS,” he said.

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/meet-the-former-neo-nazi-who-says-being-an-extremist-is-exhausting-20190628-p522av.html