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Nechama Brodie is a South African journalist and researcher. She is the author of six books, including two critically acclaimed urban histories of Johannesburg and Cape Town. She works as the head of training and research at TRI Facts, part of independent fact-checking organisation Africa Check, and is completing a PhD in data methodology and media studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The Making Of An American Nazi — Or: How To Write About Nazis Without Normalising Them
I can't imagine anyone in mainstream media imagined some time between 2016 and 2017 we would have to start thinking about the way in which we cover Nazis (let's also include fascists here). Sure, there had always been fringe groups — by which I mean actual [neo] Nazis, not right-wingers — but they were outliers. Like those big Hollywood disaster movies, involving a plague or an asteroid: theoretically possible but unlikely.
And yet here we are. Nazism and fascism are back, if indeed they ever really went away. And the media has to decide how to cover this social shift — a Zika, an Ebola, but about human society. How does this disorder, this disease (I don't believe a malevolent infection is an inappropriate metaphor for Nazism) spread? Where does it come from? Who are its hosts and what are its vectors?
There are many different ways to approach this, and this week has seen two quite opposite attempts, one from the New York Times — a platitudinous mess about the well-mannered Nazi-next-door that, bizarrely, panders to the niceness of the Nazi and never calls him out about his false beliefs around the Holocaust, among other things. Read this only as a guide on how not to write about Nazis, unless you are a Nazi.
On the other side is a piece I strongly recommend, published in The Atlantic. The report is shocking, and distressing in parts, and is the product of many, many months of exhaustive research and investigation, painstakingly compiling a horror jigsaw of one of America's most influential, and malicious, internet Nazi trolls.
This piece is significant because of the careful way it explores and explains the context in which the troll — Andrew Anglin — emerged, and his upward vortex of popularity and influence paralleled to a downward spiral into violence and conspiracy. The report also gives insight into the world that created and is created by Anglin and his ilk. It is an excellent how-to for media interested in covering this hate crime.
