This week marks the publication of the expanded second edition of My Fabulous Fascist Summer Vacation. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing interviews and stories from the 2024 overland journey across Europe that feel especially relevant today. The new edition includes my 2025 journey across Ukraine, “Stop Stealing the Future: Chronicles of the Ukrainian Resistance.”
Michael Staack
The globalization of far-right ideology
Michael Staack works with The Regional Center for Democratic Culture, which supports, advises, and provides training on the topics of democracy development and right-wing extremism. The work aims to enable people to recognize right-wing extremist strategies and to discover and implement their own opportunities for participation in democratic society.
We help people to deal with the challenges of far-right extremism. We are a state funded organization, private, but derive money from different funding channels. We have educational projects for migrant families. My project is focused on far-right extremism. Funding comes from the European Union in our case. Most of the teams in Germany who do what I do are publicly funded to strengthen democracy.
Why is there a need for this in Germany?
This special field of work started in the early to middle 90s after the reunification of Germany. In the eastern parts of Germany, the new states or neue bundeslander (formerly communist East Germany), there was comparatively big amount of far-right activists and hate violence. They called it the baseball bat years, neo-Nazi groups openly in the street marching, threatening migrants. There was a wave of incidents. Several houses for asylum seekers were burned. People were beaten to death. It was a political situation where we have to do something.
What do these folks want?
It’s always in times of crisis when people radicalize and far-right groups, hate groups gain more strength. After the unification of Germany, the eastern parts had massive problems in economic terms. Many state institutions like agriculture, big manufacturing facilities were insolvent, so people couldn’t work anymore. Western German companies took the profitable parts and vast parts of eastern Germany were hit pretty hard by the economic impact. So people were frustrated, they didn’t feel seen, they felt left alone. In rural areas where people don’t find jobs, especially young men who search for offers of identification. They join groups where they can feel strong, where they have a sense of life. And of course extremist groups profit from this.
How do those two different buckets, anger at migrants and anger at economic conditions, become connected so frequently in these movements?
You talk about this other layer, which is how society develops in ideological terms, not equality in economic terms, but in the value of human life and human groups. People say we are not equal. Of course, we are not equal. Some people have more money. Some people have better health conditions. And society has to adapt to this, to support the weaker parts of society, so that people with worse conditions can catch up. In these ideologies, people are seen as lesser beings. This ideology was already there in the 90s. I can send you a link to a good German documentary, on this German French TV station, Arte. They basically said the de-Nazification never was truly accomplished. Because in the western parts of Germany, where the U.S. and Brits and French were, many positions in society were helped by old Nazi people. If you push away all the people in German society who had important functions, like judges, like administrative positions, the state couldn’t have worked after the war. So many people had, like, a white vest. You couldn’t bring everybody to trial. People were asked in a questionnaire, have you been part of the national socialist regime? Many said, no, I wasn’t. Influential groups in the society survived. And during the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, there were always Nazi parties, small ones, but they could survive in the German society. Eastern Germany was communist. There was an offer, you leave your national socialist ideology you come to us, be a communist, then you are clean again. So after the breakdown of the communist part of Germany, there was this ideology in the former German Democratic Republic, we don’t have Nazis because they went away. We are communists now. So the underlying problems with racism, with far-right ideologies, it was a blind spot.
When you look at United States right-wing militias, is any of that eerily familiar to you, in your work with neo-Nazi or far-right groups in Germany?
A connecting point is the globalization of far-right ideology. You have the inner history in the USA with the KKK and other hate groups. In Germany, youth bunds are a follow organization from the Hitler Youth. So there were always these structures, but with the coming of the internet, the ideologies are interconnected.
When you look at far right terrorist attacks in Norway, Anders Breivik, in Christchurch in New Zealand, hate crimes in the U.S., in 2019 the attack on a synagogue in Halle in Germany where two people were killed, and then in Hanau where a shooter killed nine migrant persons. All these people are on the internet. They get radicalized in their bubbles. And what they have together, the Proud Boys and the groups in Germany, is this narrative, which is also antisemitic of course, the great exchange (or replacement). That the white societies, the white folks are getting exchanged by mostly Muslim migrants, and that this is steered by politics and some forces, of course, the Jews. So you have anti-Muslim racism connected with old antisemitic narratives. And this narrative of the great exchange, was also strong in the coronavirus pandemic, with The Great Reset. This was cultivated in the groups. They make conferences. They talk about this. I won’t say they are intellectual, but they see themselves as intellectuals. They lay the ground for these narratives, they meet also with far-right politicians like the AfD politicians in Germany, and they create a global union of these far-right groups who see, and you can add Trump to this, that the white western societies are threatened by Muslim migrant groups coming and destroying Western culture, the Western white societies.
The narrative seems almost replaceable. Our problems are caused by the Jews, then our problems are caused by eastern Europeans, by Muslims, our problems are caused by Mexicans. Is there a certain kind of template there where far right fascistic movements need to challenge the humanity and the rights of someone who doesn’t look or sound like you? If there were no Muslims, would those groups find someone else to blame their grievances on?
In Germany, we use this English term of ‘othering’ when we talk about how discrimination works. We start on this very basic level about stereotypes, discrimination, and then go to racism. We have studies in Germany that about 25 percent of the population have racist views. And of course it comes together with conservative views. Reactionist views. People want to have a very traditional picture of society. They want to have the traditional family, man and woman, together with children. They don’t want diversity. They have this because the knowledge is not enough, or the experience of meeting other people from other parts of the world. Xenophobia is especially strong where people don’t have contact to other cultural groups or other ethnic groups, studies show all over the world. So when you have these parts of society who have these views, conservative, anti-feminist, reactionist, racist views, these people oftentimes are also privileged. There are rich people who have these views, but also many in Germany live in the rural areas, who don’t take part in the privileged society, these people who follow Trump on the rallies, who don’t have a good education. These people, a big part of society, should be the focus of political education to develop or see the benefits of a democratic culture and the culture of being together. But then we have the far-right strategists like Martin Sellner, like the leading persons of the Proud Boys who have an agenda, who have a political goal, to abolish the democratic system. And using the democratic system of elections and jurisdiction to in the end abolish all these structures.
People on the right in my country have become more brazen about saying democracy really doesn’t work, stating their fond regard for Putin and various authoritarian leaders. They’re not trying to shield it, rather simply saying, no, we want to be in charge, and we want people who are representing our values and our interests, and we’ll be quite okay with a strongman.
We always had the open radical groups, like the DVU or the NPD, the most well-known neo-Nazi party, they openly proclaimed national socialist ideas. They proclaimed openly racist ideas. They openly attacked the democratic institutions. The AfD in the beginning was coming out of crisis situations, from the euro crisis, the subprime crisis, was founded by a professor, Bernd Lucke. He was just a conservative Euro critic. He wanted a party critical of the European Union and the European integration process. But quickly this party was taken over by more radical politicians and now, as of today, the AfD is an anti-democratic, racist party. Our Verfassungsschutz, which is like the NSA in the U.S., monitors this. And the people from the AfD, they attract 25 or more percent, according to the polls. The founder Lucke regrets having founded this party nowadays, because he’s just a Euro critic. He said, I created a monster, because before the AfD existed, all the people who have the racist views, sexist views, very conservative views, they were channeled in our democratic, normal, conservative parties like CDU, Angela Merkel’s party.
I could transfer this to U.S. society. Trump destroyed the Republican Party. So you have a new radical party of far-right extremists, conspiracy theorists. The Republicans in the old sense, like John McCain, they have vanished mostly.
Buy the new expanded edition of My Fabulous Fascist Summer Vacation here.