At the Bataclan, there were 130 dead. So let’s say it again, this is our home! This is our home! This is our home! Over the past decade, France has been hit by
a series of Islamist terror attacks. In 2020, the beheading of
a high school teacher sparked outrage across the country, prompting the government
to pass a law putting restrictions on
how Islam is practiced in France. We must tackle Islamist separatism. Critics accused
President Emmanuel Macron of using this law
to appease the far right,
which presented
a growing threat to his party ahead of the 2022 elections. The government responded to
these accusations by banning a far-right group
called Génération Identitaire or Generation Identity. Islam, get out! Over the previous ten years, Generation Identity had fundamentally
reshaped far-right activism, not just in France
but across the world. [Closed Border
You will not make Europe home!] [Decade of Hate] My name’s Tim Hume, and I cover the rise of
the far right in Europe for VICE. W
e are the generation
of ethnic fracture, a total failure of coexistence, and the forced mixing of races. In 2012, an ominous black
and white video appeared online. It featured a series of people
railing in French against the so-called
forced mixing of races and what they described as
an explosion of anti-white racism. Don’t think this
is simply a manifesto, it’s a declaration of war. Generation Identity had been born. We are Génération Identitaire. Not long after the manifesto
video was launched
, Generation Identity filmed themselves
on top of a mosque that was still under construction
in the French city of Poitiers, waving flares
and chanting anti-Muslim slogans. Central to the way that
this movement does its business is a thing called metapolitics, and that’s about saying that they
need to capture culture in society, and politics will happen downstream. And so Generation Identity don’t
stand in elections, for example. What they do is they do these stunts
that they think will shock pe
ople but also normalize things like anti-Muslim rhetoric
in the public space. And with that normalization,
with time, they change the culture that allows
Islamophobia to become more normal and more acceptable,
which allows them to change society. Refugees not welcome!
Refugees not welcome! Refugees not welcome! Generation Identity pushes the so-called
great replacement narrative, a conspiracy theory that holds
that Europe is being invaded and its people replaced
by immigrants. The ideology of re
placism is wrong. Once you replace one population
with another, it will not be the same. The phrase was popularized by the French anti-immigration writer
Renaud Camus and has since become a rallying cry for white supremacists
around the world, including those who
carried out mass shootings in El Paso and Christchurch. You will not replace us! You will not replace us! Europe is colonized by Africa in a much deeper way
than Europe ever colonized Africa because the colonization
is now demographical
, so it’s much more serious. In response to
this so-called invasion, Generation Identity turned to
using coded language to mask their dangerous
and racist solution, which they termed “remigration.” Generation Identity says
you have to get active or be replaced. Generation Identity actually
have this really pernicious idea that the way they would do this is essentially make life
in these European countries so difficult for non-white people
that they choose to leave, hence they will “remigrate”
aw
ay from Europe. You want to make life difficult for people that are not
from your culture, forbidding the veil, for instance, forbidding the selling of halal food. We live in a delusional society where the Islamists are able to
infiltrate our highest institutions. In the end, if people are not
living on their own will because you have made
their life here impossible, you end up deporting them. While Generation Identity’s ideas
were simply decades-old far-right narratives
rehashed for the age of
YouTube, what set the group apart was the style in which
they were presented. Generation Identity
deliberately left behind the violent, skinhead associations
of the old far right. They tried to make
its ideology respectable, perhaps even aspirational, with a slick, clean-cut aesthetic. Generation Identity
is a youth movement, right? It consciously targets young people. And to do that, it means
they dress in a certain way, it means their videos
are produced a certain way. They wanted to fend off
all accusations of racism. So basically they turned to culture
to not talk about race because they know that
the accusation of racism or Nazism or fascism could politically
discredit the movement. What brought us together,
what we had in our hearts, was the defense of our country, the defense of French
and European identity. We all understood that it
is threatened today, it faces great danger. You can wave a nice flag, and you can wear nice trainers
and have a nice haircut, but the fact of the m
atter is these are fascistic ideas
being repackaged, right? And they can pretend
that’s not the case, but time and time again,
we’ve seen that is the case. This media-savvy approach, combined with
a series of summer camps that featured a mix of lectures
and self-defense classes, brought Generation Identity
an international following, with chapters forming across Europe. At the end of 2019, early 2020, Generation Identity had branches
in around nine countries, and they actually had
over 63 region
al branches there. It got to the point where actually it became a significant transnational
far-right movement across Europe. In particular, the Austrian branch
and its leader, Martin Sellner, emerged as online stars
of the fast-growing movement. The most important person
was Martin Sellner—and it still is. Every right-wing politician
who is criticizing immigration is “literally Hitler,” and we are fed up with this. We are no racists.
We are no anti-Semites or neo-Nazis. We just want to preserve
our own ethnic cultural identity. And from the beginning, there was this
big fascination with him because he was young,
he was charismatic. What you're fighting now,
first and foremost, is a free and open and fearless
debate about the great replacement. As Sellner’s star began to rise
in the mid 2010s, a series of brutal jihadist terror
attacks in Europe shocked the world. After the terror attacks, they changed their discourse, and they linked immigration
to terrorism. All of a sudden, migrants
are all presented
as a potential terrorist threat. We are calling for remigration for
all binational and foreign jihadists, we are calling for the closure of
all Islamist mosques. This is even how they framed,
for instance, the refugee crisis. And that's why they demanded
that European countries close their borders. Generation Identity
sought to exploit the attacks to justify their ideology
and recruit more members. The group crowdfunded
to charter a boat, which they planned to sail
around the
Mediterranean, harassing NGO ships which were trying to
rescue migrants from drowning. We will confront the NGOs
on the open sea and tell them what
the majority of Europeans think about their activities. And here was a huge new step
in far-right activism because actually this was
putting people’s lives at risk. And, of course, it got
a huge amount of press. Martin Sellner was
at the front of this. But despite their grand name,
Defend Europe, the stunt ended up as
an embarrassing failure. The shi
p’s equipment broke down, leading to them
having to be rescued by one of the very NGOs
they had come to harass. But for Generation Identity, actually blocking migration to Europe
was only ever a secondary concern. If you want to follow us,
you can do it on Twitter, on Facebook, or on YouTube. The real point of the mission
was to generate publicity— and in that, they succeeded. The stunt got Generation Identity,
and Sellner in particular, on the radar of
the American far right, creating crucial n
ew opportunities
for fundraising. At the time, the alt-right
was a big movement in America, and you saw a lot of
the key figures in that movement, including really extreme neo-Nazis
like the Daily Stormer website, the biggest and most extreme
neo-Nazi website in the world, threw its weight behind
Defend Europe. David Duke, the former
Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, said, “You need to donate to this.” We’re talking about
the ethnic cleansing of America and the destruction of
the American way of life.
In 2018, Generation Identity
tried to build on this publicity by launching another
Defend Europe operation. This time they threw on
matching uniforms and trekked into the Alps to try and stop migrants
from crossing from Italy into France. Pro-border, pro-nation, stop immigration! If a migrant tries to break through,
it’s quite simple— we’ll call the Gendarmerie,
and they will be forced to intervene and take charge of
the illegal migrant, and the judicial system
will do the rest. It’s doubtful wh
ether the mission actually stopped a single migrant
from moving anywhere. But, once again,
that was never really the point. The idea was simply to capture
strong images for social media. But the problem with
creating a movement focused on courting publicity is that eventually the authorities
started to pay attention. It did make lots of people
who weren’t taking them seriously, especially from a security
perspective, say, “Actually, hang on a second. This isn’t just people
dropping banners. This
is a big far-right movement
that’s coming across Europe and doing pretty extreme activism.” But when Generation Identity's
downfall did arrive, it was triggered by events
on the other side of the world. This is CNN breaking news. Police in New Zealand are urging
people to stay off the streets and to avoid mosques
in the coming hours after mass shootings at two mosques
in the city of Christchurch. On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant murdered
51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Tarrant was a white supremacist who had disseminated a manifesto
titled The Great Replacement. It gradually emerged that
in the lead up to the attack, he had donated money
to Generation Identity and exchanged emails with Sellner, who had invited him to meet
for a beer if he was ever in Austria. This link with Tarrant
exposed the lie that they were supposedly
a peaceful, law abiding organization. The terrorist of Christchurch
had money to give and singled out the Austrian
identitarians for his do
nation. This goes back to the idea
is if indentitarians say, “Get active or be replaced,” he decided to get active. And the way he got active
was to get weapons and go and kill 51 people. And this is what’s so dangerous
about identitarianism. In the wake of
the Christchurch attacks, social media organizations began a slow process of deplatforming
Generation Identity, pushing them onto smaller,
more obscure platforms and severely impacting
the way they operated. It affected them deeply because,
e
specially YouTube and Facebook, they had such a broad audience that it was always very easy
for them to fundraise. In January 2021,
Generation Identity in France tried to regain some of this momentum by launching another
anti-migrant mission, this time in the Pyrenees. We call on the youth
of France and Europe to revolt against
the massive immigration and the destruction of our identity. It begins above all
with the protection of our borders. But instead of generating
YouTube clicks or stopping
any migrants, the stunt only contributed to
their eventual demise. A couple of months later,
in March 2021, the French government
slapped a ban on the group. With this decision, we are putting an end to
the sometimes violent activities of a group that had long since
cut its ties with the Republic. Génération Identitaire
no longer defended ideas, but was the armed wing
of extremism and xenophobia. The activists cannot organize
any kind of demonstration under the name or symbols
of Generation Iden
tity. What the government attacked
by banning Generation Identity was the brand. They can’t use their brand anymore. There is a lot of anger
at this serious attack on freedom of expression
and freedom of association. All we wanted to do
is simply defend our borders. And we will exercise our
right to criticize France’s disastrous
migration policy. Freedom of expression. Freedom of expression. But many people question
how effective the ban will be. I think a ban can be effectful, but we shouldn’t
be naive. The people don’t go away, but they have to regroup,
they have to rethink, they have to try to escape the laws. But despite their decline, the manipulative tactics
and ideas of Generation Identity look set to impact
the far-right scene in Europe for years to come. I think one of the things
it’s been very successful at is they have managed
to find a language that allows them to portray
extreme ideas in a moderate way, they have managed to find
a means of activism which excites some young
people, and they have managed
to present themselves as a movement that gets things done. These ideas are
no longer just talked about on these quite extreme
demonstrations that G.I. do. You could hear it from
far-right political parties and even just
right-wing political parties in various parts of Europe. In the interim, they are under attack
by various governments. They need to kind of lay low, and maybe wait for a second moment. They are really not at the top
of their success right now.
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