Austrian police say that the leader of that country’s Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner, received a €1,500 donation from someone whose name matched that of the accused
Christchurch killer.
The nature of the connection between the alleged killer and Sellner is still being investigated, following a police raid of Sellner’s home in Vienna on Monday.
But what is the Identitarian Movement, and who are the people associated with it?
Identitäre Bewegung Österreichs (IBÖ) is part of a larger far-right Identitarian movement with branches in most western European countries, North America and
New Zealand.
Organisations that affiliate themselves with Identitarianism include Génération Identitaire in France and Generazione Identitaria in Italy. The American Identity Movement in the United States (recently renamed from Identity Evropa and banned from Facebook on Thursday)...
...The movement’s thought derives largely from the so-called European New Right or
Nouvelle Droite (ND), a largely French movement beginning in the 1960s, which attempted to
repackage racist thought in a way which would not alarm Europeans with fresh memories of interwar fascism.
ND thinkers cribbed concepts from the left to present a obfuscated version of blood and soil ethno-nationalism, wherein Europeans would have exclusive possession of their “homelands”. They also promoted the concept of “metapolitics”, hoping to effect political change by seeding ideas and achieving cultural dominance. They were also anticapitalist. They share significant common ground with coat-and-tie white nationalists in the US and elsewhere. Political scientists such as Walter Laqueur
described the ND as fascist.
Indentitarianism in its modern incarnation began in the early 2000s, when Génération Identitaire formed as the youth wing of Bloc Identitaire in
France...