‘Love Wins’: A Former Neo-Nazi Skinhead Reflects on Path of Overcoming Hate

The following article was authored by Arno Michaelis, a speaker, filmmaker, author of My Life After Hate, and co-author of The Gift of Our Wounds.

A former neo-Nazi, Michaelis draws from his lived experience to work as an interventionist at Parents 4 Peace, helping to lead people away from all violent extremist ideologies, and to support their families:

86 years ago last weekend, Kristallnacht happened — a horrific pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany that is now regarded as the beginning of the Holocaust that claimed over six million lives.

Two days prior to the anniversary, antisemitic mobs ran rampant through the streets Amsterdam attacking anyone even suspected of being Jewish.

My own personal history is interwoven between these events.

As a teenager, in 1987, I strategically placed a swastika tattoo on the middle finger of my right hand. That way I could flip off anyone who had a problem with me being a neo-Nazi skinhead, before closing my fist to hit them.

I squandered seven years of my life like that before leaving hate groups for good. This was a miserable time period for me that included two suicide attempts. The more hate consumed me, the more depressed I became.

Today, I see the same toxic process afflicting young people across cities and college campuses worldwide. Since the heinous October 7th massacre perpetrated by Hamas, targeting innocent Israelis of all ethnic and faith backgrounds, it’s become once again fashionable to not only hate, but also openly engage in wanton violence against Jews across the globe.

I, unfortunately, was a fairly successful neo-Nazi. The skinhead gang I helped to organize rapidly grew to an international scale. The hate-metal band I bellowed for sold more than 20,000 records by 1994, and is still popular with haters today. I was driven by mission to cultivate the hate that had become an addiction.

Looking back, I now understand that what I was really doing was fostering irresponsibility along with the hate, which of course further diminished the quality of my life. I was stuck in a cycle of irresponsibility, self-induced trauma, and hate.

We convinced ourselves that Jews were to blame for everything wrong in our lives, and for everything wrong in the world. We hated the United States as vehemently as we hated Israel, calling the former the “Zionist Occupation Government,” and demanding the complete annihilation of the latter. We accused Jews of “genocide,” and of “colonizing” our societies. Obsessed with blood and soil, race and nation, we justified our hate and violence as resistance. The record label my band was on was even named “Resistance.”

Demonizing Jews was nothing new. For thousands of years, a diverse range of cultures and societies have falsely blamed Jews for everything from the Black Plague, to droughts, famines, natural disasters of all sorts, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Whether on an individual or societal level, Jews have been the go-to scapegoats for just about every problem humanity has ever faced. And every time Jews were blamed, societies were corrupted by that hatred.

Fortunately for me, circumstances fell into place to lead me away from those incredibly self-destructive practices of hate and blame. This included meeting and interacting with many Jews.

I grew up as a passionate and curious geek into a variety of sports, music, literature, film, and TV. Once I assumed the white nationalist ideology as my identity, all of these things were forbidden. Virtually all culture was seen as “Zionist propaganda” meant to oppress the white race. Blame, lie, fear, hate, suffer –repeat.

Thus clandestine viewing of Seinfeld, This Is Spinal Tap, and other shows and films produced by what we saw as the “Jewish entertainment industry” were actually a big part of my turnaround. The joy that brilliant Jews brought to my life was a daily reminder of how stupid antisemitism was.

But the biggest driver of the exhaustion that ultimately led me out of hate groups was when people I claimed to hate treated me with kindness. People like the Jewish boss who said I was “a good kid just going through a phase” rather than fire me when I wore swastika patches to work. Black, Asian, and Latino co-workers who treated me with benevolence when I least deserved it, but needed it most. Every time I received compassion from people who had absolutely no reason to show it to me, other than the faith that there was a good person underneath the swastikas, it blew my nonsensical ideology out of the water.

Years after I left what we called “The Movement,” I worked as a freelance IT consultant. My biggest client was an independent urology practice where half of the doctors were Jewish. I worked for them for a decade before going public with my story. To a man, the Jewish doctors I worked for were some of the kindest, most compassionate, honest, and hardest-working people I had ever met. Over the years they became good friends, and since I’ve transitioned to a career of sharing my story with the world, they’ve been some of my biggest supporters.

I’ve been sharing my story since 2010, hoping to inspire all people to see themselves in others, and others in themselves. I’ve been at the service of civil society around the world, helping governments and NGOs better prevent and counter violent extremism of every type. I also directly coach radicalized individuals to abandon hate and teach their families how to best facilitate that process.

The swastika that was on my middle finger was removed back in the late 1990s. Now there is a V there, part of “L O V E   W I N S” spanning the knuckles of both hands. This is a tattoo given to me by a man named Chris Buckley. After his wife Melissa sought me out in 2016, I helped Chris leave the KKK to begin a recovery process from hate addiction and begin an amazing friendship with Kurdish Muslim refugee cardiologist Heval Kelli, as told in the award-winning documentary Refuge.

Love has won in my life, thanks to people brave enough to defy hate, including many Jews who overcame thousands of years of hate and persecution to be the people I needed, when I needed them. Their evolved survival mechanisms of dedication, compassion, love, and yes, humor, lit a beacon that guided my life away from hate, as it has guided so many others to better places. As the light of Judaism has guided human society toward a day when all people are valued and included, in spite of the exclusion Jews have been subjected to for millenia.

Every day I’m grateful to be free from the yoke of hate. Every day I’m grateful to understand that the world is a much better place thanks to Jews, Muslims, and everyone else I once hated. And every day I’m grateful for the chance to be accountable for the harm that I did.

Accountability is what motivates me to reach those who are still infected with the misery of hate. I need them to know that there are much better ways to live their lives.

Today, the Iranian regime and its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, all follow an antisemitic ethno-nationalist ideology that is identical to white nationalism once you swap the word “white” for “Muslim.” The written creeds of these groups explicitly call for the complete destruction of Israel, the United States, and every Jew on the planet — exactly like the manifestos of white nationalists around the world.

Their cheerleaders threatening Jews throughout North America, Europe, and Australia use the same Jew-hating rhetoric my old skinhead gang did, word for word. In universities around the world, the most brutal and sadistic terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah are hailed as freedom fighters. Throughout the century-plus of terror waged by the Ku Klux Klan, they also considered themselves freedom fighters, just as the Nazis did, and just as the Hutu militias did while they slaughtered Tutsis in Rwanda. Human history is tragically strewn with abject horror perpetrated in the name of “resisting oppression.”

“When land is occupied, resistance is justified” was the rationale behind the Holocaust, and every white nationalist mass-casualty attack since then, just as it was the rationale behind the October 7th massacre, and for the antisemitic rampage that happened in Amsterdam.

White nationalists claim to speak for the entire “white race” in the exact same way the Tehran regime and its proxies claim to speak for Palestinians and the entire Muslim ummah. Both are liars. Just as the vast majority of people racialized as white do not agree with white nationalism, most Palestinians and Muslims aren’t represented by Islamists.

While I’m ashamed to say I’ve been involved in all sorts of street violence akin to what happened in Amsterdam, I was fortunate to leave hate groups before I had deteriorated to the point of committing a mass-casualty attack. Had I not, the use of kinetic force to stop me or any other white nationalist terrorist would have been not only justified, but essential. The Iranian axis and its operatives must be disarmed and neutralized the same way any white nationalist active shooter would be.

While kinetic action to stop hate and violence is sadly all too necessary, it must be taken from a place of compassion in order to facilitate reconciliation afterward. Kindness and forgiveness are essential to this tactical process.

The tenants of Judaism, a faith tradition that has embodied empathy and compassion for thousands of years while its adherents suffered all manner of oppression and persecution, provide all of humanity with a road map to peace. We just need to assume responsibility for our own lives to navigate it, rather than blame Jews for our shortcomings.

I was fooled by antisemitic lies for seven years. It nearly cost me my life. Today, it is my greatest hope that those who have fallen under the same irresponsible spell can wake up and realize that not only is our world much better off thanks to the contributions of the Jewish people, but also that life is so much better when it’s not perverted by hate for anyone.

Whether it’s Nazis or terrorists in Muslim clothing cultivating antisemitism, the mechanism that fools people into believing them is the same, as is the atrocious impact on civil society. Antisemitism hurts everyone, and we all need to work to stop it.