By American Renaissance | Created at 2024-10-01 20:24:02 | Updated at 2024-10-08 06:40:48
6 days ago
In a food hall adorned with pastoral scenes of rural German life, Martin Sellner, self-proclaimed champion of mass migrant deportations, fielded questions from a rapt audience. {snip}
{snip}
When asked directly, Sellner, 35, a far-right Austrian provocateur, will say he is no racist — but argues that each race would be happier in its own geographic corner. His Generation Identity movement, he says, adheres to nonviolent activism to protect ethno-European culture, citing Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Arab Spring as inspiration.
European intelligence officials, however, call him “dangerous” — the leading figure of a right-wing extremist group that they say is radicalizing a generation of White and angry Europeans.
With studious glasses, philosophical references and the vibe of an intellectual, Sellner has become a major force in normalizing words and concepts considered unsayable only a few years ago.
“When it began, right-wing activism in Europe was something of a skinhead line, and [Sellner] made it fashionable, like Greenpeace,” said Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Analysts assess that Sellner has been particularly effective in cultivating young activists. But the ideas he propagates are also finding a home with established political parties on both sides of the Atlantic.
Austria’s far-right Freedom Party could win an election Sunday on a platform that incorporates Sellner’s rhetoric. And when The Washington Post spent time with Sellner this month, he excitedly described his latest “vindication”: former president Donald Trump’s mention of “remigration,” Sellner’s pet project, as part of a plan to “end the migrant invasion of America.”
Sellner told The Post: “I always thought that this would be a meta political victory to make this term known, and against many odds, we really made it international.”
As popularized by the multilingual Sellner, “remigration” envisions the systematic expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants. He has his sights on Austrian citizens with foreign heritage, too. He contends that those who insist on living within separate communities should face “economic” and “cultural” pressure to “either assimilate or remigrate.”
Various governments have tried to constrain Sellner’s influence. Britain has barred him from entry, and Switzerland kicked him out. He says the United States canceled his travel permit in 2019, ahead of his wedding to American alt-right influencer Brittany Pettibone. German authorities this year sought to ban him — a ruling Sellner challenged in court and won.
Sellner has also been banned from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. Eighty-seven financial institutions in multiple countries have blacklisted him or closed his accounts. In Austria, displaying the shieldlike symbol of his movement in public is now punishable by law.
Yet despite, or maybe because of, the attempts to silence him and limit his movements, his reach and notoriety have continued to grow.
{snip}
In Germany and, to a lesser extent, Austria, the horror of Adolf Hitler’s war produced a societal firewall — a consensus that the far right should never again gain political power or intellectual purchase. But brick by brick, that wall is crumbling, with the help of Martin Sellner.
Earlier this year, his latest book — promoting remigration — became a bestseller on German-language Amazon. The concept has its intellectual origins in France, but analysts and the Identitarians themselves see Sellner’s advocacy as key to its spread.
Following revelations in January that Sellner discussed remigration during a secret meeting with members of Germany’s AfD, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of German cities for days, suggesting both the extent of his enduring toxicity and the measure of his power. Despite those protests, the AfD in Thuringia — which campaigned on a slogan of “summer, sun, remigration” — this month became the first far-right party since World War II to win a German state election.
Austria’s Freedom Party, which once saw the Identitarians as too extreme, now compares Sellner’s movement to nonprofits like Greenpeace while suggesting it has been wrongly labeled as extremist. “If the Identitarians are championing a political project or initiative that we think is acceptable, then why should I not support it?” Herbert Kickl, the party’s leader, told Austrian national broadcaster ORF last year.
{snip}
Yet Sellner and his Identitarians remain under surveillance by several European intelligence agencies.
“They are a dangerous right-wing extremist organization,” said a senior official with a European intelligence service, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential assessments. “Their ideas are clearly operating against the constitution, endangering democracy in the same way the Islamic State is endangering democracy. They are a deeply racist organization.”
{snip}
[Editor’s Note: Mr. Sellner is a speaker at our upcoming conference.]
