Peter Pomerantsev writes:

“The powerlessness of our enemies is they are still trying to describe and fight us as if we were the old right-wing fringe groups that they faced decades before,” Martin Sellner, a figurehead of the European Identitarian Movement, told me, speaking from his flat in Vienna, Austria. “Our job as the avant-garde from the right is to show the people that the normality of tomorrow doesn’t have to be what is considered normal today. Political normality is something very volatile, dynamic, and relative.”

He sent over his recorded answers for a BBC radio documentary I was making, which in turn drew on ideas from my new book about how propaganda is changing in the twenty-first century. My BBC producer and I fretted whether we risked abetting Sellner’s strategy of normalizing the far right by having him in the program. In the end, we decided to include him because we judged that the strategies he advocates need to be understood for what they reveal about certain pathologies in the formation of public opinion. And these have implications that reach well beyond his personal ambitions and those of the far right.

Sellner is known for his promotion of the “great replacement” theory, the idea that global elites are purposefully diluting ethnicity, an idea that was invoked this month in the manifesto released online by the mass-shooter in El Paso, Texas. The El Paso shooter also shared with Sellner a penchant for using the language of liberal rights for illiberal aims. The shooter described his desire to stop intermarriage between races as a way to protect “diversity,” comparing ethnic integrity of whites in the US to that of American Indians. By exploiting the language of progressive causes, the El Paso shooter was simultaneously trying to smuggle taboo racism back into accepted discourse while hollowing out the language of the far right’s purported opponents—pastiching it into meaninglessness. [Continue reading…]