Why our youth join Nazi groups

Photo: Contributed

MORE needs to be done to stop young people becoming radicalised and joining farright extremist groups, a University of Southern Queensland academic has said.

The comment comes after Neo-Nazi group Antipodean Resistance stuck Nazi symbols around Toowoomba this week.

Dr Jess Carniel, who lectures in western ideas, said people who were drawn to these far-right fascist groups had anxieties about where they fitted into society.

“We’re seeing at the moment a lot of anxiety about where different people feel they fit in society,” she said.

“It can be threatening for some people who feel the group they belong to in society, that their position is being threatened in some way.”

She said there was a historical precedence for the emergence of these far-right groups.

“If you look back historically to Germany prior to World War Two, it was economic anxiety and the feeling they’d been hard done by the Treaty of Versailles,” she said.

“Today you see a lot of people who feel they are competing for work with people who are seen as ‘other’, whether that’s a racial difference or a gender difference, they feel they are overlooked.

“If people start feeling disenfranchised economically there are other effects; they can seek someone to blame for the reason why they feel excluded. That’s what I’d put it down to.”

Dr Carniel said a big part of making sure these groups didn’t have a greater influence on public discourse was to have a more open conversation about the issues.

“We need to be talking openly about issues around race, culture and gender within schools,” she said.

“By that I mean nuanced discussion where we let people have ‘so-called bad ideas’ and work through them.”

She said there also needed to be more studies into social issues to stop the radicalisation of youth.

“By looking at the nitty-gritty of social issues, such as youth unemployment, racially motivated violence, looking at statistics surrounding that and doing more research into it so we can figure out where young people are and why they’re feeling that way, we can develop community targeted programs to make them feel more integrated,” she said.