Far Out: Encounters with Extremists,

Granta,

£18.99

Review by Neil Mackay

MANY moons ago, I spent a year travelling the world meeting neo-nazis in America, Sweden, Italy, Germany and here at home in Britain and Scotland. It was for a film, not fun. One of my more bizarre experiences happened in an armed neo-nazi compound in West Virginia where I stayed with the ultra-extremist National Alliance organisation.

There was a church in the compound, replete with nazi regalia. Two key figures in National Alliance were Eric and Erica Gliebe. Eric was an ex-boxer, who fought under the name ‘the Aryan Barbarian’; his wife was a former Playboy Playmate turned high priestess of the First United Church of Adolf Hitler.

It sounds so absurd you might snigger, but National Alliance was no laughing matter. It was founded by Dr William Pierce, who wrote the infamous book The Turner Diaries, seen as a blueprint for white race war. The book inspired Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma Bombing which killed 169 men, women and children. Members of National Alliance were armed to the teeth.

What struck me most during my time in West Virginia was the intersection in the psychologies of members of extremist political organisations and cults. Blind fervour was at the heart of both. I’d previously spent much of my writing career investigating extremists of varying hues – from Irish terrorists to religious cult members. They were, I came to understand, all basically the same sort of people.

Catherine McDonald-Gibson takes us deep into their world in her outstanding new non-fiction book Far Out: Encounters with Extremists. This work is intimate and personal, not political nor polemic. The power lies in McDonald-Gibson’s unfailing humanity – her desire to navigate the souls of others, people regularly dismissed as beyond empathy.

In turn, she humanises a feared section of society seen by many as truly evil. The stark truth is: extremists are just like you and I. We all have it within us – given the right (or rather ‘wrong’) set of circumstances and life events. It isn’t lunatics and monsters who walk the path of extremism – it’s people just like ‘us’. And therein lies the terror.

Through McDonald-Gibson’s forensic interviews, we walk in the shoes of neo-nazis, revolutionary anarchists, and Islamists. What strikes home the most is the sense of ‘there but for the grace of God’. Any of us could have fallen into such a hateful life – if we’d the right (or ‘wrong’) parents and friends. Most – though not all – are poor. All of them had unpleasant or difficult childhoods which left them feeling alienated and lost in their teens.

Significantly – and this is something I learned from my own time studying extremists – they're all, counter-intuitively, ‘idealists’ who wanted to make the world a better place. They all believed that their ideology, poisonous and vile though it is to the rest of us, was essentially ‘good’. I’ve never once met a terrorist, neo-nazi or cultist who thought they were ‘bad’. They all thought they were on the side of the angels – even if their angels look like demons to the rest of us.

McDonald-Gibson’s book couldn’t be more timely – for this is the Age of Extremism, evidently, crazily turbo-charged by social media. As she says: “The language of extremism permeates every debate, and the simplest gesture – such as wearing a face mask – becomes a battleground of ideologies.”

One of the most chilling stories told is that of Catherine, a rich Norwegian young woman with family connections to Oslo’s royals, who attended English boarding school. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, and found a sense of identity in 'good causes'. The TV show Roots – about slavery – deeply upset her, as did the 1980s African famines. Catherine falls under the spell of a self-styled left-wing revolutionary who brainwashes her and then humiliates her, turning the young woman into something akin to a slave. He even causes her to become an unwitting accessory to rape. Catherine thinks she’s in some freedom fighter movement, instead she’s just trapped in an old-fashioned cult.

“How could I have done so much bad,” she says, “when I wanted to do so much good.” It’s a heartbreaking sentiment of a life wasted – and a thought I’ve heard repeated often myself in interviews with former extremists.

McDonald-Gibson is able to illicit sympathy from readers for people one would imagine beyond the pale. Peter Cytanovic became the poster boy for white nationalist hatred when he was photographed screaming at the infamous ‘Unite the Right Rally’ in Charlottesville in 2017 – an event which saw a torchlit parade (albeit with tiki torches rather than flaming brands) and chants of ‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’. A white supremacist would go on to drive his car into counter-protestors, killing a young woman and injuring 35.

I came to the sections on Cytanovic expecting to feel no empathy for such a creature. Instead, I discovered a lost young man, beaten down by a hard life, trying to make sense of 21st century absurdity. “People searched for meaning in a confused and uncertain world and the extremists were the only ones who seemed to offer them answers,” McDonald-Gibson writes. It’s a truth I’ve often witnessed myself. The one theme the book could have paid more attention to, is the fraught question of why most lost, young, often poor people don’t become extremists.

Cytanovic wasn’t an anti-semite, it transpired, but a rightwing Christian who made the stupid mistake of not realising he was getting involved with a gang of fascists. His face was flashed around the world on TV. Google him and he’s instantly recognisable. The events, unsurprisingly, still follow him. Some would say, ‘hell mend him’.

One remarkable moment comes when Cytanovic is befriended by a former Islamist extremist – turned counter-extremist – who provides some hope when nobody else will give him the chance to prove he’s turned his life around. This book makes sure to offer redemption.

So often among these pages extremism falters and collapses when someone locked in the embrace of hate meets their ‘enemy’. One neo-Nazi becomes best friends with a Zambian, an act which begins his transformation. “When people from different communities come together,” McDonald-Gibson writes, “their commonalities outweigh their differences.”