How to 'Cure' a Nazi: An important principle in mentoring people involved in extremism is to sow seeds of doubt, but not try to win arguments

by: Katie Engelhart

Illustration by Cei Willis

When Robert Orell was 13, he got really into Vikings. The young Swede even had a Viking-patterned T-shirt that he liked to wear around Stockholm. It was while wearing this T-shirt that, one day, Orell was approached by a group of people bearing pamphlets and a message that “I was special and was needed for the cause.”

The pamphlets carried an assortment of xenophobic missives. Orell, a young man with “a lot of frustration and anger,” found them instantly appealing. Within a year or two the boy was knee-deep in “the organized White Power environment,” listening to hardcore music and partying with bomber-jacket-clad skinheads (while himself preferring “more of a militarized style”). He saw everyone as an enemy, and sometimes he pursued them with brute force. Orell and his comrades spent weekends getting drunk and looking for trouble.

Twenty years later, Orell has a young son and a rather niche day job. He is a trained psychotherapist and head of EXIT Sweden : a nonprofit whose clients are “those who wish to leave nationalistic/racist/Nazi-oriented groups or movements.” EXIT Sweden works with (mostly) Swedish men as they disengage from their radical folds and transition back into the mainstream.

It’s a good time to be a former radical in the de-radicalization biz. Over the last two years, an international network of "formers"—industry speak for former violent extremists who have renounced their views and now work to rein in in others who hold similar ones—has been growing. Around the world, former-run organizations are taking hold, and governments are using them to boost domestic counterterrorism programs.

Since 2012, support has also come from the private sector. Gen Next is an invitation-only clique made up of San Fran start-up types, and Google is a co-sponsor of Against Violent Extremism (AVE), which is in part a social network and Who's Who centering around former radical hate. “Some of this is providing people with networking opportunities,” says Ross Frenett, who manages AVE on behalf of a London think tank with the jargon-ish title Institute for Strategic Dialog (ISD). “This work can be lonely.”

The idea of mobilizing and deploying formers to wage battle against extremism is partly based on the premise that Formers are best equipped to beat chinks into the armor of radical ideology. They also know what it feels like, on a personal level, to be drunk on radical hate.

But the scheme also makes broader assumptions—for instance that de-radicalizing radicals is a science, and an exportable one, such that former members of al Qaeda, an American fundamentalist cult, an LA street gang, and a clique of Swedish skinheads may be deprogrammed in similar ways. If this is true, then maybe radicalization has little do with the particular form of ideology offered, and more to do with a certain indefinable something that leaves individuals susceptible to the firm embrace of extreme groupthink.

As they mobilize, formers have also been working to build a brand. In a promotional Google video, one member enthused: “My goal is just to take the term former and make it cool!"

It started in 2011, in Dublin, at the Google-sponsored Summit Against Violent Extremism. Jared Cohen —a former aide to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then the newly minted head of Google Ideas , a self-described “think/do tank”—had turned the internet giant’s attention to the problem of internet radicalism. The web, read a company statement, is playing a growing role in extremist recruitment. (Apparently, “55 percent of gang members report posting gang-related videos online.”) By extension, the web should also seek to “provide solutions.”

The Against Violent Extremism (AVE) network, and an accompanying YouTube channel, was born of the Summit. It quickly began recruiting formers, including " a former Muslim extremist from Nigeria and the Christian pastor who once tried to kill him, a former violent Israeli settler, a former member of the Iranian militant Islamic group Ansar-e Hezbollah, a Latino street-gang leader, a former Tamil Tiger, the former founding members of a transnational Salvadoran gang, a former member of one of the world’s most popular skinhead bands, a former member of the Bloods, and a former member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. ”

Nachum Pachenik (Photo by Mark Seliger )

One such former was Nachum Pachenik, the aforementioned “ former violent Israeli settler.” Pachenik, son of a Holocaust survivor, was born in a Jewish settlement near Hebron; his family was among the first to settle conquered territory after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. In his early 20s, after leaving a special-forces unit in the Israeli military, Pachenik “became involved in violent activities.” Today, he is a writer and poet, and a founder of Eretz Shalom (Land of Peace)—an Israeli-Palestinian peace-building project.

Another was Usama Hasan who, while living in London at age 13, became involved in an extreme Salafi group. Later, when he was 19, Usama traveled to Afghanistan to train with the Arab mujahideen. After 9/11, Husan began to question his Islamist faith. He is now a physics PhD, as well as a Muslim imam, who works “to promote democratic and pluralistic visions of Islam.”

One of AVE’s goals is to develop best practices, a kind of manual for how to effectively de-radicalize people. Academic and government conferences have studied the effectiveness of one-on-one mentoring. “An important principle in mentoring people involved in extremism is to sow seeds of doubt, but not try to win arguments,” concluded one conference , co-sponsored by the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration. They have also considered specific policy questions, like "Should violent extremists who are arrested be jailed in isolation so that they won’t radicalize other inmates (this is the strategy in Holland)? Or should they be dispersed so that they are shaken out of their extreme element (this is the strate

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