On Jan 27, we learned that a 16-year-old Singaporean was detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) for planning attacks on two mosques in Woodlands. 

The Internal Security Department (ISD) said that he was the first detainee to have been radicalised by far-right extremism. 

He was influenced by Brenton Tarrant’s violent extremist manifesto and heinous 2019 Christchurch terror attacks. 

The ISD also said that the boy had internalised Islamophobia, possessed a “fascination” with violence, and methodically planned how he would execute the attack. 

While ISD has noted that far-right extremism has not shown signs of gaining significant traction in Singapore, the fact that it has influenced a young boy here to want to carry out a terror attack is a major concern. 

How then should we understand far-right extremism, as well as its spread across borders? And what can we do about it? 

THE ROOTS OF FAR-RIGHT EXTREMISM 

Far-right extremists subscribe to a set of ideas. Some buy into the white genocide theory, or the notion that there is an organised conspiracy to make whites a minority in the West. 

Some believe in variations of Christian supremacy, or the making of Christian fundamentalism into a project for absolute political dominance. 

Virtually all of them are anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, terrified of communism, and believe that the West is, by far, superior to the rest. 

Thus, the central tenet of far-right extremism is white supremacy.

While white supremacy may be in the far-right today, it was in fact politically mainstream for centuries. 

It is historically rooted in the racist structures of colonial rule. 

Wherever the frontiers of colonialism spread, colonial governments condemned native populations as inferior and subhuman, frequently subjugating them violently. 

Colonial rule was by definition founded on white supremacy, and that was the dominant discourse of the day. 

We have since then seen a long list of violent iterations of white supremacy. Slavery, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan’s terror, the Holocaust, and resistance to the civil rights movement are but a few examples.

In the last few decades, far-right extremism was generally considered a fringe movement limited to organised gangs and groups. 

These include the Aryan Brotherhood and the Racist Skinheads. 

However, far-right extremists have been emboldened by the waves of nativist populism to grip mainstream politics in the West over the last 10 years or so. 

Thus, with increasing frequency, we have witnessed lone-wolf terror attacks on synagogues, black churches, and mosques. 

White nationalist militias like the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers have been growing. 

Military personnel have been radicalised by neo-Nazism — so much so, that Germany was forced to disband an entire unit in 2020.

A MALLEABLE IDEOLOGY 

If far-right extremism is fundamentally pro-West, what business does it have in the rest of the world? 

A couple of reasons could explain this. 

Variations of white supremacist ideologies have a history of influencing the emergence of far-right movements in other parts of the world. 

Take the proto-Hindu nationalist movement in pre-independent India as an example. 

One of the early political parties, the Hindu Mahasabha, frequently incorporated ideas from “Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany” to expound theories of Hindu supremacy. 

It even supported the notion of the Third Reich, as well as the idea that there existed an intimate bond between Nazism and Hindutva (which forms the basis of Hindu nationalism). 

At one point, they considered Nazism’s deplorable treatment of the Jews as a model for how India should “manage” Muslims. 

Pre-existing and, indeed, widespread prejudices towards Muslims in the Indian subcontinent were married with the racist project of Nazi Germany. This provided greater ideological clarity to how some early Hindu extremists envisioned exercising political power.

These trends were not exclusive to India. 

During World War II, propagandists in Nazi Germany pragmatically used anti-Semitism to galvanise and form alliances with some Muslim clerics and anti-colonial nationalists in the Middle East and North Africa to aid the war effort.

Today, far-right extremists in the West and Hindu extremists in India are seen to act in coordination and openly support each other. 

Similarly, Christian evangelical movements in Africa openly supported Donald Trump’s re-election bid — even though Mr Trump reportedly referred to African nations quite derogatorily.

This indicates the ease with which far-right extremist discourses can cross borders, transcend ethnic boundaries, and blend with other political ideas elsewhere. 

Along the way, certain characteristics — the white genocide theory bits — may be dropped, while others, whether its Islamophobia or anti-Semitism, are retained and amplified.

As the ISD has explained, the radicalised teenager equated Islam with the violent extremism of Islamic State (IS). 

Similar to how Hindu extremists adapted discourses from the West to aid their “cause”, the teenager drew from a manifesto written by an Australian terrorist to frame his radical Islamophobia. 

WHAT NEXT? 

Accessing far-right extremist material — manifestos and hate speech — is sadly not too difficult. 

One need only scroll through online message boards to get a dose of the vitriol that circulates there. And indeed, those are the forums of choice for far-right extremists. 

Such hate speech is also not uncommon on major social media platforms. 

On the one hand, efforts can be made to limit the spread of such content. 

Yet, for every page, group, channel, or website that does get shut down, another rises in its wake. So, in many ways, policy teams are almost forced to play catch up. 

What is more, the unfortunate truth is that the ideological antecedents of far-right extremism are still with us. 

Till today, the United Kingdom has an on-and-off nostalgia for the Empire even though British colonialism was objectively racist and brutal. 

Till today, notions of Western chauvinism masquerade as American exceptionalism, just as it paraded itself as European exceptionalism at the height of colonial rule. 

This is not to say that these ideas inherently breed terrorism and extremism. 

Yet, they are ultimately variations of supremacist modes of thinking — and often, policymaking. And the fact is, the far-right does point at those ideas to legitimise their own extremism.

The problem is therefore significantly more pervasive than many — especially those in the West — would perhaps like to admit. 

And until they confront their pasts, it is difficult to imagine how they will seriously dismantle this brand of extremism in the present and the future.     

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Prashant Waikar is a senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University.