United in compassion, curiosity and courage

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

The Bonner County Human Rights Task Force invites the community to a free screening of The Cure for Hate: Bearing Witness to Auschwitz on Sunday, Oct. 22, followed by a discussion with filmmakers Peter Hutchison and Tony McAleer. The documentary explores the history behind the Holocaust and the modern prevalence of far-right extremist groups, while following McAleer on his journey to repent for — and heal from — his past as a skinhead and Holocaust denier by visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“The whole thing was quite the experience because different parts of the camp evoke different feelings. It really built throughout the day and then it hit me full force the next morning,” McAleer told the Reader. The filmmakers spent two days in the former concentration camp, learning and discussing, and were even allowed to stay the night, which denied them respite from the intensely emotional and spiritual experience.

“What we wanted was to bring the Holocaust into the present as living history so it doesn’t just feel like grainy black-and-white photos of the before-time,” said Hutchison, a renowned documentary filmmaker, New York Times best-selling author and the documentary’s director. Hutchison’s work often deals with issues of masculinity and social and political divides in the U.S. His film Healing from Hate: Battle for the Soul of a Nation shows the life-changing effects of the organization Life After Hate, co-founded by McAleer, which specializes in violence intervention and helps people escape far-right hate groups.

In The Cure for Hate: Bearing Witness to Auschwitz, former skinhead and Holocaust denier Tony McAleer travels to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Screenshot taken from the film.

“It was never my intent to immerse myself in this wheelhouse of violent extremism, but now I’m here,” he said. 

Cure examines why people — and specifically young men — are so often drawn to hate groups.

“The ideology itself is almost never the driver,” Hutchison told the Reader. “These young men are looking for belonging, they’re looking for connection and community, they’re looking for the family that they’ve never had.”

McAleer emphasized that this is a reason, but not an excuse. His own experience as a skinhead reflects that idea, as do his years of work helping victims and other “formers” — the term for ex-members of these movements.

“There’s definitely a crisis of masculinity. I think they’re young men seeking a paternal role model — they don’t have a good example of what healthy masculinity looks like,” said McAleer.

“[Extremist groups] offer a simple blueprint for what you’ll be rewarded for being a man. I could never figure out how to get that kind of approval from my father, but there was no shortage of father figures in the movement.”

He went on to explain how similar levels of familial dysfunction and trauma in 1930s Germany aided the rise of Adolf Hitler to power. The death of more than 2 million Germans in World War I left many young men without their fathers — a vulnerability that Hitler preyed upon by making himself into a paternal figure and promoting the nation as the “fatherland.”

Both filmmakers believe that the modern resurgence of extremist groups like the Neo-Nazis speaks to larger cultural and systemic issues in the U.S.

“What happens when you don’t have economic opportunity? What happens when your academic experience is sub-par? All of these things create holes through which we allow people to fall, so it’s not shocking that people will grab on to whatever thread allows them to feel better about themselves,” said Hutchison.

Isolation and a lack of identity are a few of the factors that feed into the hatred weaponized by extremist groups. McAleer and Hutchison travel the country listening to peoples’ experiences, discussing preventative measures and advocating for community involvement. 

According to Hutchison, towns like Sandpoint use programs such as No One Eats Alone, which encourages children to reach out to classmates sitting by themselves at lunchtime, to give the next generation a support network and promote their mental and emotional health.

“A lot of this stuff seems really small and foundational, but I think both Tony and I believe that the kind of transformation that’s required does really need to be built upon these small acts of kindness and compassion,” Hutchison said. “Compassion is not a passive exercise — it involves engagement and it involves work, but it’s been shown time and time again how that amplifies itself.”

Whether deterring or escaping violent extremism, Hutchison and McAleer advocate for the “three c’s”: compassion, curiosity and courage. McAleer credits his family’s compassion as the reason he was able to change, heal and become the advocate he is today — a process that he calls “rehumanization.”

“My children looked at me like I was some kind of amazing human being and perfect dad and that’s not what I saw. Compassion reflects humanity back on the person,” McAleer said. 

His young children’s innocence provided a safe space where he could be vulnerable and emotionally open, giving him the time and ability to find the source of his hatred and work to overcome it.

When asked what small, rural communities like those in Bonner County can do to help young men struggling with fear and hatred, McAleer said: “Listen, and sit down with them without judgment. We can judge the activity, we can judge the ideology, but we should never judge the human being. Speak to them with understanding and take away the stigma of talking about this.”