France Bans Génération Identitaire
A SIGNIFICANT activist group within the French anti-immigration movement — the youth movement Génération Identitaire (‘Generation Identity’) — is now facing official banning orders.
This is taking place while Marine Le Pen’s multi-culti and multiracialist but anti-mass-immigration party 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 by portraying her as having a more moderate line on Islam than the French government.)
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 Génération Identitaire for “incitement to discriminate against a person or group because of their origin”.
The banning order has now been confirmed.
Génération Identitaire 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 Génération Identitaire’s most successful stunt which involved blocking the Franco-Italian border on Alpine roads. https://www.youtube.com/embed/RZKu9GrjXpQ?feature=oembed
Whereas Marine Le Pen and her group have concentrated on winning White working class support and have toned down explicit ‘racism,’ Génération Identitaire support tends to come more from middle-class students: The organisation blatantly campaigns against a cultural and implicitly ethnic threat to French identity [though, to your editor’s knowledge, they never publicly mention Jews as the main source of said threat — Ed.].
The type of banning order being sought against Génération Identitaire 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.
The type of banning order being sought against Génération Identitaire 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 Génération Identitaire grew out of this latter group.
