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https://www.positive.news/society/life-after-being-a-leader-in-the-far-right/>
"April 20 was a special day in Nigel Bromage’s calendar. One to be celebrated
with music, drinks and a cake – in the shape of a swastika. It was Adolf
Hitler’s birthday, and as regional organiser for the white supremacist group
Combat 18, Bromage couldn’t let it pass without raising a glass to the
architect of the worst genocide in modern history.
Bromage had been groomed by the far right in the early 1980s while still in
school. Aged 15, he was lured into joining an anti-IRA group that was
ostensibly committed to opposing terrorism. Free homebrew and tickets to punk
gigs proved irresistible bait for a bored teen, and by the time Bromage twigged
that he’d unwittingly signed up to a wing of the National Front, it was too
late.
Drip-fed racist ideology, Bromage became consumed with hate for the left, for
immigrants and for the state, and toured the UK attending marches and
demonstrations, which often flared into violence. “There were a few times when
I ended up in the police cells,” he recalls. “I’d sit there thinking: ‘What are
you doing? This is achieving nothing.’ Then I’d catch up with the others,
they’d be patting me on the back telling me how well I’d done, fighting for
Britain, and I’d forget all about it. And before long, I was heading off to the
next march.”
From eager foot soldier, Bromage rose through the ranks to head up the West
Midlands branch of the neo-Nazi organisation, the British Movement, before
leaving to join the more militant Combat 18.
“It sounds crazy now,” he says, “but when you’re in that bubble of hate, you
don’t see anything other than what you’re being told. We wanted to create
enclaves where we could home-school children, work for each other and live in
exclusively white communities. I’d gone from being somebody who hated terrorism
and violence, to embracing a racial religion which believed the only way
forward was race war. “We weren’t going to start it, but we were waiting for a
trigger, a flashpoint, where we’d rise up and take control.”
By the time Bromage began to question his allegiance to the far right, he’d
given 16 years of his life – and sacrificed his marriage – to its misguided
cause. It took another three years of soul searching before he found the
courage to walk away. “I started to hate all the violence. I felt I wasn’t
achieving anything and I could see it was wrong,” he explains. “But I couldn’t
see a way out of this world because once you’re in it, it’s like being trapped
in a gang.”
The turning point came as he left a Combat 18 meeting one day to find 15 fellow
extremists racially abusing a black man. Something snapped. “I told them if
they wanted to get to him, they’d have to go through me,” Bromage says. “I
remember his wife and kids crying in the bus shelter nearby. A couple of other
guys backed me up: we got the family into a cab, gave the driver a tenner and
told him to get them out of there. I decided there and then I wanted out.”
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
