EXTREME RIGHT: Neo-Nazis, Holocaust revisionists, white supremacists and plain ordinary racists are seldom engaging people, and their hate-filled theories are only interesting in that voyeuristic way that perversity intrigues.
The Irish discussion page of the Stormfront white nationalist website is full of lowbrow rants from such people about how African savages are invading the country and how disgraceful it is that Samantha Mumba, a black Irish pop star, led the St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin.
These contributors, going by pseudonyms such as "War Maiden" and "White Irish", exist in a twilight underworld peopled largely by misfits, loners or just plain hooligans looking for an underdog to pick on. But then, sometimes, the extreme right throws up characters like the late Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, Austria's Jörg Haider and even Nick Griffin from the British National Party. These are people with intellect and varying degrees of popular support, but they are the exception to the rule.
Nick Ryan delves deeply into the sub-culture of the extreme right for his book Homeland: Into a World of Hate. His is a six-year-long odyssey from Central London to North Carolina, from Alabama to Berlin, meeting people whose ideas are repugnant to him.
Ryan bravely declares himself to be a journalist in this sometimes violent world where people from the "liberal media" are often met with at best distrust and at worst contempt. This is a hefty book, a sort of world compendium of the far right (as well as their anti-fascist nemeses in organisations such as the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine who help Ryan along the way).
The homeland in the book's title is a reference to a utopian project of the violent British extreme right gang, Combat 18, to create a self-contained community in the hinterlands of Essex along Ayran lines - a vision which supposedly takes its inspiration from segregated communities in Belfast. The C18 characters Ryan meets draw inspiration from how the North's loyalist and republican paramilitaries have policed their respective communities.
Even odder bedfellows still are the Holocaust deniers and Islamic fundamentalists who had planned to attend a conference in Beirut which Ryan was due to attend. However, the Lebanese authorities eventually banned the conference organised by the Swiss Institute for Historical Review, described as a revisionist think-tank. It is a pity that, instead of telling us more about the dynamics of this odd coupling of revisionists and Zionists (a case of my enemy's enemy is my friend?) Ryan instead sets off planning his next trip to Belgium to meet members of its ultra-nationalist movement, the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block).
Ryan encounters many people who don't hold our interest for any length of time, like Charlie, the working class British "Big Man" of C18, a convicted murderer and enemy of immigrants and the State, (also known in those circles as ZOG - Zionist Occupation Government).
But he also encounters figures such as Griffin and David Myatt, an English eccentric, former Satanist and martial arts expert, who provides much of the intellectual legitimacy groups like C18 lack.
Then there's William Pierce, a reclusive American former physics professor who lives in a compound in West Virginia where he heads a pseudo-religious entity, the anti-Semitic Cosmotheist Church. He is also the creator of the National Alliance, an exclusive white-power organisation with a nearly cult-like structure. Ryan describes him as holding almost mythical status among white supremacists. Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of the activities of a racist, anti-Semitic underground power. Copies of this book - as well as The Hunter, by the same author, about a man who kills race mixers - were found in the possession of the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh and the London nailbomber David Copeland.
Ryan gets within a hair's breadth of interviewing Pierce (who has since died of cancer) but unfortunately is rumbled by an article he wrote in the Guardian, as well as suspicions that he has links to Searchlight.
While this book is as much about a "liberal journalist" trying to access this underworld as succeeding, such failures are forgivable. However, Ryan has an annoying habit of repeatedly reminding us just how brave he is to be out mixing with violent types. His hard swallows and self-pinches tend to distract from the flow of the book, which is already slightly disjointed as he jumps from country to country, dateline to dateline, encounter with extremist to encounter with extremist.
There is also something laddish about his fascination with this male-dominated world, and Ryan comes out with many cringe-inducing lines, such as this description of Will "The Beast" Browning from Combat 18: "I met him only once, but I sensed his pall-like presence constantly". Or this gem while musing on his own childhood and life while travelling to meet a British National Party member: "What would I tell an outsider about my world? About us? After my travels, I've seen how mean, twisted and introverted we can be. Can we offer no better than these puerile extremes of religion, ethnicity and political beliefs? Why do fear and hate rule so much of our lives - not just in the war zones I've seen, but here, too?"
This book is a timely and well-researched excursion into white nationalism. But, while it is an interesting journey in parts, it lacks an analytical edge that would make it more than a who's who of right-wing extremism.
Homeland: Into a World of Hate
By Nick Ryan
Mainstream Publishing, 319 pp. £15.99
• Nuala Haughey is Social and Racial Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times