At the Bataclan, there were 130 dead.
So let’s say it again,
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.
We 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 people
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 replacism 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!
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” away 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 matter 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 regional 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 ship’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 new 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 whether 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
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 donation.
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, especially 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 Identity.
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.
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.