Going Dark by Julia Ebner review: Fails to bring her time undercover with extremists to life

Julia Ebner spent years undercover in every kind of extremist group but, Going Dark, her book charting those encounters fails to bring them to life

Going Dark

Julia Ebner                                                                                       Bloomsbury £16.99

Rating:

By day, Julia Ebner worked for the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, monitoring the online behaviour of extremist groups from Islamic jihadists to Neo-Nazis.

Heavy stuff, yet Ebner, 28, still felt it was only scratching the surface of these organisations. So for two years, she devoted her spare time to going undercover in every kind of group, from the all-female Trad Wives who call their husbands ‘Captain’ and urge women to ‘submit’ to men, to the pro-Isis MuslimTec, which taught her how to hack all kinds of digital systems.

Most of these encounters were in forums, with Ebner assuming an online persona, but her Aryan appearance and fluent German (she’s Austrian-born) meant she was able to masquerade as a member of the alt-right (white extremists), for instance spending an evening in a Mayfair pub with a gang from the white nationalist group Generation Identity, where a middle-aged man complains: ‘You get fired here if you are a Nazi.’

For two years, Julia Ebner devoted her spare time to going undercover in every kind of extremist group, from the all-female Trad Wives to the pro-Isis MuslimTec

For two years, Julia Ebner devoted her spare time to going undercover in every kind of extremist group, from the all-female Trad Wives to the pro-Isis MuslimTec

As a result, we learn a fair bit about how neo-fascists are working on wooing the mainstream, by – for example – dressing smartly. Rules for a Unite the Right march in Charlottesville in the US included: ‘If your appearance is seriously lacking (morbidly obese, disfigured etc – be honest) please do not go to the rally and instead spend the time working on yourself.’

In contrast, Ebner’s inevitably less insightful about Islamist groups. Still, as she points out, despite their polar ideologies, these groups share the same modus operandi: ‘Their leaders created protected social bubbles to encourage antisocial behaviour in the wider world.’

Often Ebner is so repelled by her subject matter, or frightened of being uncovered by these thugs, that her encounters never really come alive. Take her date in Cambridge with a ‘fairly handsome’ man she meets on WASP Love, a white supremacist dating site with the motto ‘Love your race! Procreate!’ 

IT’S A FACT

The Ku Klux Klan, formed by six former Confederate officers after the US Civil War, derives its name from the Greek for circle, kyklos. 

He tells her that ‘white identity is very important to me’ but we’re left with no idea of why this might be so. In Germany, she meets an image consultant who runs workshops on ‘how to be a nice Neo-Nazi’ but – frustratingly – she doesn’t attend one.

In truth, Ebner’s subtitle is misleading. The odd pub outing aside, extremists don’t have social lives, preferring to whip each other up from behind computer screens, the lack of real-life contact destroying all empathy.

The book ends with the 2019 murder of 51 people in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, shot by an alt-right ‘activist’ who live-streamed his killings on social media. 

A few of the forums he frequented suddenly realised that online racist ‘jokes’ can have horrific real-life consequences. But many more praised the killer, turning his footage into videogames. Within days, 23 more people were murdered in copycat shootings in the US.

Unless business, governments and society unite to fight this online extremism, Ebner warns, ‘the future is dark’.