France bans pro-White group Generation Identity
Marine Le Pen remains a leading contender for next year’s French presidential election – indeed (as reported in the latest edition of H&D) recently a supporter of incumbent ‘centrist’ President Emmanuel Macron sought to outflank Mme Le Pen and her Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN – formerly the National Front) by portraying her as having a more moderate line on Islam than the French government!
However, a different section of the French anti-immigration movement – the youth movement Génération Identitaire (‘Generation Identity’) – is now facing official banning orders.
Interior minister Gérard Darmanin – the same man who sought to outflank Marine Le Pen by positioning himself as even more anti-Islamic in last month’s debate – began proceedings in that very same week to ban GI for “incitement to discriminate against a person or group because of their origin”.
The banning order has now been confirmed – see an update by American Renaissance.
GI has frequently gained media attention with stunts, beginning in 2012 when its activists occupied the roof of a mosque under construction in the city of Poitiers. In August 2019 three members were imprisoned for impersonating police officers during GI’s most successful stunt which involved blocking the Franco-Italian border on Alpine roads.
Whereas Marine Le Pen and the RN have concentrated on winning White working class support and have toned down explicit ‘racism’, GI support tends to come more from middle-class students: the organisation blatantly campaigns against a cultural and implicitly ethnic threat to French identity.
The type of banning order being sought against GI was most recently used in November 2020 against the French arm of the ‘far right’ Turkish paramilitary organisation Grey Wolves, who had been involved in militant anti-Armenian and anti-Kurdish campaigns, as well as conflict with the Gülen movement, a controversial sect that was allegedly behind the 2016 coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Several French ‘far right’ groups have been banned in recent decades, including former paratrooper Mark Fredricksen’s national socialist FANE, eventually banned for good in 1987; the PNFE, once closely linked to the Tyndall-era BNP and banned in 1999 after years of legal persecution; and the Third Positionist group Unité Radicale, banned in 2002. To some extent GI grew out of this latter group.
Generation Identity targeted in latest Twitter purge
The international ‘Alt Right’ group Generation Identity – which grew eight years ago out of the French Bloc Identitaire and its Scandinavian allies but now has branches in many White countries – has been targeted in the latest social media purge.
During the last 24 hours accounts belonging to several GI linked groups have been banned from Twitter, as has GI’s highest-profile leader Martin Sellner. NBC News claims that around fifty accounts have been removed following a hostile report by an ‘anti-racist’ group.
So far Mr Sellner’s American wife Brittany (née Pettibone) has escaped the purge, but is likely to be caught in a further wave of expulsions from Twitter during the next few days.
Defenders of European values – ranging from the ‘non-racist’ ‘Alt Lite’, through varying shades of civic nationalist, identitarian, Islam-obsessed, racially conscious and fully racial nationalist – have been removed from social media channels (notably YouTube, Twitter and most recently Facebook) at different stages during the past year.
(Generation Identity was analysed in H&D Issue 83 by Tony Paulsen.)
