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Who are
Europe’s far-right identitarians?
What
makes the group’s ideology so dangerous is its invention of an imminent
existential threat.
Opinion
April 4,
2019 4:04 am CET
By Julia
Ebner
Europe
has a major blind spot: the online reach of its far-right extremists.
The
Continent’s far-right groups are digitally savvy; they know how to distort
public perception, drive the political agenda and intimidate journalists.
They’ve disrupted democratic processes and put pressure on politicians to back
down on migration policies.
Newly
revealed connections between Austria’s offshoot of Generation Identity — one of
Europe’s fastest growing far-right movements — and the man charged with killing
50 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, suggest they are also
inciting violence and terrorism.
The
attacker’s so-called manifesto referenced a conspiracy theory dubbed “The Great
Replacement.” The theory — which claims that white populations are being
gradually replaced with migrants — has been at the heart of identitarian
campaigns for years. Just a week after the Christchurch attack, Austria’s
Generation Identity group — known as Identitarian Movement Austria — held a
protest against “The Great Replacement” in Vienna, calling for “remigration”
and “de-Islamization.”
The
group’s demands go beyond calls to deport criminals, extremists and rejected
asylum seekers, which would be in accordance with migration law. “Remigration”
is, in fact, a euphemism for the mass deportation of all European residents
with a migrant background or non-white skin.
In a
manual called “The Art of Redpilling,” Sellner’s movement provides instructions
for step-by-step far-right radicalization.
What
makes this ethno-nativist ideology so dangerous is its invention and promotion
of the idea that its members face an imminent existential threat from an
outside group.
Generation
Identity does not publicly endorse violence, but its members prepare for combat
and their training materials read like a call to arms. Every summer, members of
the movement from across Europe organize military-style training camps in rural
France. Their manuals use militarized vocabulary such as “sniper mission” and
“massive air strike” when describing online attacks.
One of
the leaders of Identitarian Movement Austria is a former neo-Nazi named Martin
Sellner. If the Islamist extremist Anjem Choudary is the foremost European
hate-preacher to inspire Islamist terrorism, then Sellner can be considered his
equivalent for the far right.
Sellner,
whose house was raided by intelligence forces last week after reports emerged
that the Christchurch attacker gave money to the movement, has spearheaded
sophisticated radicalization efforts across Europe. The far-right activist —
who was also a mentee of Holocaust denier Gottfried Küssel — counts over 90,000
YouTube subscribers and 16,000 followers on Telegram.
In a
manual called “The Art of Redpilling,” Sellner’s movement provides instructions
for step-by-step far-right radicalization. It recommends leveraging widespread
grievances related to free speech or gender equality as a starting point,
before gradually introducing new recruits to identitarian ideologies: “You sow
the soft redpill seeds and then you water them constantly. An honest question
to start with, a news piece here, an email there, and in the evening an
anecdote over beer.”
Generation
Identity also trains its members in the tactics of deception and manipulation.
Their
successful playbook for online “Media Guerilla Warfare” has seen their
transgressive campaigns go viral and reach a global audience. Leading members
of Generation Identity have told me they want to create offshoots across the
world, from Australia to Canada.
The
ideology of the pan-European movement has transcended the fringes of society
since its start in France in 2003. Far-right populists across Europe — from the
Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the Italian League and the Spanish Vox party —
have brought the language and policy recommendations of Generation Identity
into the mainstream. These political movements share the ideological premise of
an impending “invasion of the Occident.” Their smear campaigns against the
“lying press” and minority communities cross-pollinate and strengthen one
another.
In
Austria, the movement has been allowed to grow largely thanks to a lax approach
from the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), a member of the governing
coalition whose politicians have now come under fire for their links to
Generation Identity.
There is
no shortage of evidence exposing the FPÖ’s marriage of convenience to the
movement. Pictures show leading party officials — from leaders of the
parliamentary club to vice mayors — side by side with identitarians at
protests, campaign events and parties. Austria’s vice chancellor,
Heinz-Christian Strache, and FPÖ City Council Member Ursula Stenzel have even
retweeted Generation Identity campaigns. Like Generation Identity, the FPÖ has
called for “remigration.”
The
movement also played a key role in pressuring Austria to back out of the U.N.
Migration Pact in late 2018. Research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue
found that Sellner and the Austrian movement mobilized in dedicated encrypted
channels on Telegram before launching large-scale disinformation campaigns
across social media to turn public opinion against the pact.
In
response to mounting public pressure, the Austrian government is now
considering banning Identitarian Movement Austria. But proscribing the group
will do little to prevent the spread of nativist ideologies. The approach is
out of sync with today’s reality of increasingly loose transnational far-right
networks, which no longer operate as closed-off group units. Identitarian
activists are likely to continue finding innovative solutions to circumvent
laws and transport their messages to the wider public.
Security
forces, policymakers and tech firms have been slow to catch up and only dealt
with a small fraction of the online extremism problem. They have compelled
social media companies to take down extremist content related to Islamist
messages but failed to tackle far-right content at the same speed and scale.
Smaller
fringe platforms that have become safe havens for the international far right
have largely been ignored. Unobserved and unchallenged, the far right has been
free to spread its violence-inciting messages on ultra-libertarian platforms
such as Gab, 8chan and Bitchute.
If we
fail to act, or take seriously the threat these networks pose, we risk allowing
them to inspire a spate of new violent attacks.
Christchurch
should be a wake-up call. We urgently need to make our removal mechanisms
faster, our algorithms more transparent and our anti-hate speech measures more
balanced and comprehensive.
Not all
harmful content is illegal or breaks platforms’ policies, however, and groups
like Austria’s Generation Identity expertly uses these legal loopholes to its
advantages. To close these gaps, we will have to invest in upscaling our
digital resilience initiatives to shield users from harmful content that falls
into legal gray zones.
If we
fail to act, or take seriously the threat these networks pose, we risk allowing
them to inspire a spate of new violent attacks.
Julia
Ebner is a research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London
and author of “The Rage: The Vicious Cycle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism”
(IB Tauris, 2017).
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