rollingstone | Coincidentally or not, the emergence of the nipster has taken place
at the same time as the rise of a new far-right political scene in
Europe: In this May's European elections, the National Front — the
anti-immigrant party headed by Marine Le Pen — won the biggest voting
share of parties in the French elections, and the British United Kingdom
Independence Party won 27.5 percent of the vote in the U.K. Many people
link these parties' success to their ability to package themselves as a
friendlier, less-threatening far right. Dutch political scientist Cas
Mudde has argued
that these parties largely swept into power by linking the euro crisis
"to their core ideological features: nativism, authoritarianism and
populism."
The current German wave of, for instance, hip, vegan neo-Nazis
functions in a similar way. Rafael says they attempt to slide into
debates where young people wouldn't expect them, and then sell their
politics as a palatable outlet. "They use subjects like globalization
and animal protection as entry points, and then offer a very simple
worldview that makes complex subjects very easy to understand," says
Rafael. "Of course, in the end, it's always about racism and
anti-Semitism and nationalism." The danger — in both cases — is that
extreme-right positions might quietly shift into the mainstream.
Over the past two years, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an associate
professor at American University in Washington, D.C., has been
conducting research with young people in Berlin schools who are on the
periphery of the extreme-right. She says that, if anything, the change
in neo-Nazi fashion has made it more difficult to step in when young
people are being embroiled in the scene. "If you were a teacher," she
says, "you used to be able to identify a skinhead in your class and you
could think of ways to intervene. But now it's harder to mainstream
society to understand who these young people are and to engage with
them."
Miller-Idriss suggests that for a generation raised on Facebook and Twitter, it may no longer feel ridiculous to, say, love Rihanna
in real life but disparage black people on Facebook. "The social media
space allows young people to have different expressions of their
identities in different places," she says. "This generation of youth
likes the idea of having more control over their own identity. They've
realized your style doesn't have to be connected to your ideology. You
can dress however you want to and still be a neo-Nazi."
With this in mind, Koehler thinks there is a need in Germany for a
new, broader educational campaign on how to identify members of the
extreme right. "A short while ago we did a study with judges and
lawyers, who thought they weren't encountering neo-Nazis because they
weren't seeing any skinheads," he says, "but they have no idea anymore
what a neo-Nazi looks like."
