3 - Joining the Far Left

Summary

This chapter supplements the previous one and focuses on side-switchers to the far right as well. Here, the case studies that are presented come from intellectual defectors from the extreme left to the extreme right. Those side-switchers, all of them from Germany originally, have rarely committed extremist crimes, even though they provided significant legitimacy and intellectual standing for the far-right environment. In many cases, they have transported key strategies, ideas, and concepts to the extreme right and helped this milieu to build its own intellectual current. The convictions of all those presented in the case studies have shifted from far or extreme left in the beginning to supporting various forms of extreme-right ideology at a later stage their lives. Key motives in the narratives of those defectors are anti-Semitism, feelings of betrayal and loss of status in the far left, personal conflicts, and fierce anti-establishment or anti-democratic opposition.