By Nick Miller
London: Martin Sellner likes to call what he does “a kind of patriotic Greenpeace”.
The American Weekly Standard magazine has dubbed it “Nazism for hipsters”.
Critics say Martin Sellner is the spokesman for a racist, extreme far-right group.Credit: www.alamy.com
Anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate says 29-year-old Austrian activist Sellner is the spokesman for a racist, extreme far-right group.
Sellner says it is a “rash exaggeration” to dub his group xenophobic or racist – “actually we love and cherish different cultures”, he says, though he warns the coming “great replacement” of Europeans by Muslim and African immigrants would be a “very bad thing”.
Oh, and his group has sued an Austrian TV station that called them neo-Nazis.
It might sound like a familiar and frustrating debate over fringe European politics.
But Sellner and his political and alternative media allies may also be behind Australia’s new-found interest in the fortunes of white South African farmers.
Protesters lay cross symbols on the ground during a demonstration by South African farmers and farm workers at the Voortrekker monument in Pretoria last October.Credit: AAP/CrowdSpark.com
Sellner is one of the founding and leading (and most media-savvy and camera-friendly) figures in the Identitarian movement, a group of European anti-immigration activists who have gained surprising visibility in recent years for stunts such as putting a veil on a Vienna statue to protest the “Islamisation of Austria”, or putting a boat onto the Mediterranean to harass and surveil refugee rescue ships.
Their messages spread via slick, hugely popular online videos and video blogs: high definition, high-production value meme-ready content set to booming music.
And Sellner says they – and perhaps he – are on their way to Australia.
In a nutshell, the Identitarian theme is that foreigners are probably fine as long as they don’t come to Europe.
In recent months, as migrant numbers ebbed in southern Europe, Identitarians turned to the plight of white South African farmers as their cause du jour. They hammered the claim of an “epidemic of white murders” ignored by a complicit, leftist media.
The issue is far from new. Two decades ago, Nelson Mandela deplored “cold-blooded killings” on farms, adding “killing on farms, like crime in general, have been a feature of South African life for many decades”. Official data show an increase in farm attacks in South Africa in the past year, but in the context of a general increase in violent crime. By one count, only 2 per cent of the attacks had a political or racial motivation.
But in the right-wing’s YouTube bubble it was big new news.
Canadian far-right commentator Faith J Goldy tweeted in February that South Africa had become the “flavour of the month” among like-minded bloggers and there was a “rush to get content out”.
Sellner says they are using it to foretell the future for all of us.
“[South Africa is] a very telling, a very drastic warning to the whole West about what happened to this so-called Rainbow Nation. I think it’s very good that we are talking about it now and it gets into the public awareness.
“When you don’t control the national borders, in the end you will be just like these South African townships and farms, you will be forced to defend your life and your family at ... your fences.
“That’s what could happen if you are creating these multiculturalist societies where diversity reaches a point and a level where it becomes toxic, violent and dangerous.”
Within months of the issue going on high rotation in the alt-rightosphere, Australian politicians spoke up.
“Just imagine the reaction here in Australia if a comparable number of farmers had been brutally murdered by squatters intent on driving them off their land ... we would say this is a national crisis,” said former prime minister Tony Abbott.
He was following trailblazer Peter Dutton: last month the Home Affairs Minister told The Daily Telegraph that white South African farmers deserved “special attention” such as fast-tracked visas because of their “horrific circumstances”.
Dutton, in turn, was apparently reacting to a news report and strident columns in News Corp newspapers.
And for this, Sellner claims credit.
Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton called for special visas for South African farmers.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Sellner says the key to his group Generation Identity’s activism is “becoming our own media”.
“YouTube has been conquered by conservatives,” he says. “This is pressuring mainstream media to report about us, to get into a discussion with us, take these concerns seriously. If they don’t do this it will give rise to a huge network, an empire of alternative media.
“Generation Z, they don’t want TV any more, they have their own TV channel on YouTube … [where] dissident thinkers have the most traction, the best flow, the most interest and the most conversation and interaction going on with the videos.
“That’s a big threat to mainstream media and it will grow and grow until the mainstream media platforms decide to take these topics into their discourse.”
It works exactly the same way with political parties, he says.
“If you are creating a strong and big alternative you are forcing the mainstream to adapt if they don’t want to lose traction, they don’t want to lose interest.”
Sellner – whose voice is almost distractingly Schwarzenegger-like – was a moral philosophy student in Austria five years ago when he saw a viral video of an Identitarian stunt in France: the occupation of a mosque in Poitiers.
Sellner says it was a “declaration of war against this ideology of multiculturalism and the generation of 68, symbolically of course.” (He insists Generation Identity are non-violent.)
He and his study group founded Generation Identity in Austria straight away, he says. “We were fascinated.”
It appealed because it chimed with his concerns, such as the “Islamisation” of Europe, but it was expressed via street theatre activism, banner drops, “stuff that conservatives have never been doing before”.
And he also, he says, appreciated that “it’s a movement that clearly distances itself from any form of racism or chauvinism or actual hatred ... actually we love and cherish different cultures and I think a certain amount of diversity is all the good. But it’s always a question about the amount.”
Many – such as Hope Not Hate – simply do not accept Sellner’s claim that Generation Identity isn’t racist. This view is, apparently, shared by the British government, which last month refused entry to Sellner and his v-logger girlfriend Brittany Pettibone, on the grounds that “their presence in the UK was not conducive to the public good”.
Sellner, who had intended to read a speech about free speech at Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, says he was detained for three days and deported in an “utter failure” of British democracy. He said he was told authorities thought his speech might incite tension between local communities, and that GI was known or accused of inciting racial tensions.
“I think this is the bankrupting of freedom of speech in the UK,” he says.
Sellner insists he and his group aren’t racist. “We don’t want to dehumanise anybody or attack a certain group of people,” he says. “We always direct our activism against decision makers, against policies, against systems not against individuals or groups of people.”
And GI’s websites make sure to put “non-violent” in bold type, and point out it does “not provide a platform for any kind of national-socialist or fascist groups or views”.
But it has “demands” including that “our borders must be categorically defended against mass migration and the Great Replacement”, calling the latter “the process by which the indigenous European population is replaced by non-European migrants”.
One of its three core aims is to “stop and reverse” this process.
On social media GI goes to great pains to highlight crimes committed in Europe by migrants, with a particular focus on sexual crimes against women.
It’s unsurprising that GI-related social media attracts exactly the kind of comments that GI claims to eschew. You don’t have to scroll far down a typical GI YouTube video before finding Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and racist paranoia.
Sellner both accepts and rejects responsibility for this. “In a way it’s guilt by association,” he complains. “[We are] judged not by the thing we promote, but other people who completely, uncontrollably support or like you.
“[In] every political side and every political system ... there are the certain trolls and haters. We don’t even know if they are real ones or just agent provocateurs.”
But he agrees they should be judged by how they deal with unsavoury supporters. “That’s what we always do,” he says. “[We are] fuelling the energies of this justified anger that people have, but in a positive and democratic way. Always in my speeches I don’t just raise problems ... I always give a solution and my solution is peaceful activism.”
Sellner says GI’s “Defend Europe” action last year in the Mediterranean attracted interest from “a lot of people in Australia”. He thinks we’re fertile ground for a similar movement.
“It’s already there, it’s in the air and it’s just a matter of time until a few people take it up and adapt the strategies and bring this kind of activism, this kind of tactics to Australia as well,” he says.
He’s also in talks to visit personally, though he is coy about the details. “There have been invitations, people interested, there’s nothing fixed, nothing public right now,” he says.
As hints go, it’s a heavy one.