This week we talk about the AfD, the Freedom Party, and the Identitarian Movement.

We also discuss Martin Sellner, Herbert Kickl, and racialism.

Recommended Book: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Transcript

Racialism, sometimes called scientific racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that groups of human beings are inherently, biologically different from each other based on different evolutionary paths that have carved up the species into different races that are distinct enough from each other to make interbreeding undesirable, and cultural exchange a dangerous hazard.

Said another way, racialism posits, using all sorts of outdated and misinterpreted scientific understandings—like determining intelligence based on the shape of a person’s skull—that black people and white Europeans and folks from Asia are different enough (which is an idea also called polygenesis) that they should stay in their own parts of the world, and that by separating everyone out according to presumed racial background, we would all be able to do as we like, based on our own alleged cultural guide rails, and in accordance with our own, alleged biological destinies; which in some cases would mean invading and killing and maybe enslaving the other, inferior, in our minds at least, races, but in the polite, political telling, usually means something like putting up walls to keep out the racially inferior riffraff, so they don’t pollute our good and pure and obvious superior bloodlines.

Important to note is that different people with genetic lineages in different parts of the world do tend to have distinct collections of biological traits, ranging from skin tone to height to propensities to, or defenses against various sorts of disease.

There’s actual no clean line between groups of people the way this theory says, though: race, the way the word is used today, references a collection of qualities that tend to be found within different groups of people, but every person is a unique collection of genetic mutations and variations, and the old-school concept of biological race has not held up to modern scientific scrutiny—it’s mostly a cultural concept at this point, and even then it’s a fairly fuzzy one.

That said, a lot of very smart people used to believe in the racialism concept back in the Enlightment era, from around the mid-1600s to the late-1700s, as science back then was helping us delineate between all sorts of species, and giving us a hint of the more complete evolutionary understandings that would arrive the following century; but as with many fields of inquiry, this initial glimpse granted us as much new confusion, masquerading as insight, as it did actual, novel understandings.

Today, this concept is almost exclusively cleaved to by folks belonging to various racial supremacist groups, including but not limited to those who are part of the so-called Identitarian Movement, which is a far-right, European nationalist ideology that spans many countries and political organizations, and which aims, among other things, to significantly truncate or end globalization, to do away with multiculturalism in all its forms, to combat what this group sees as the spread and influence of Islam across Europe, and to significantly limit or even completely end immigration of people from outside Europe into European nations.

Folks and parties that subscribe to this ideology are often considered to be ultra-conservative, but also xenophobic and racist—racism being distinct from racialism, as racialism posits there are different, hard-coded biological racial realities that cleanly delineate one group of humans from another, while racism tends to be the belief that one group of people is superior to another, with folks who are racist at times acting on that belief in various ways.

The Identitarian Movement is officially categorized as a right-ring extremist group by the German intelligence agency, and the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a slew of groups that align with this movement to be hate groups.

Though based on the writings and principles of earlier thinkers and politicians, this group is actually fairly modern, only coming into being in its current form in the early 2000s—though the collection of ideas and efforts that informed this movement arose in France in the 1960s as part of a neo-fascist effort to inject out-of-vogue, extremist ideas into respectable, post-WWII political debate.

This was essentially an effort to rebrand Nazi ideology so as to make it seem smart and with-it in the still-stunned, but rebuilding European idea marketplace, and its primary innovation was taking some of those fascist concepts and hiding them under the more palatable label of nationalism—which was experiencing a resurgence following the wave of multiculturalism that began to flourish after the war, though not without imperfections and conflict.

One of the most popular elements of this ideology, though, was introduced a fair bit later, in the early 2000s and 2010s.

Remigration refers to the idea that liberals, people on the left of the political spectrum, want to replace good, hard-working, morally correct, white French people—and later this idea was expanded to encompass all white Europeans—with folks from other countries, especially Muslim-majority countries, but also other places where folks don’t tend to be white.

These lefties are keen to do this for a variety of reasons, apparently, but one of the most popular claims is that they want to give handouts to these new arrivals, and thus get their votes, capturing the government forever by slowly reducing the overall population of the good, wholesome white locals, in order to out-populate them with new arrivals, whose votes will forever be captured by the politicians who gave them all these handouts.

Sometimes called The Great Replacement Theory, this idea serves as justification for the aforementioned, increasingly popular concept of remigration, which basically means rounding up everyone who’s living in Europe, but not originally from Europe, and shipping them elsewhere—even if they are citizens, and even if they aren’t citizens of the countries they’re being shipped to.

Some versions of this idea also say that the descendants of immigrants, folks who were born in their European homes, not elsewhere, should nonetheless be shipped back to where their grandparents came from, due to a lack of sufficient assimilation—which means taking up the culture of the place you’ve moved to, but in this case usually serves as a stand in for “has a different faith, likes different food, adheres to different norms,” and other multiculturalism-linked, distinctions.

This rounding up and shipping would be based on the person’s supposed racial identity, not on their national identity—so in a way, this concept is a means of smuggling racialism into politics, by making it seems as if the modern way of organizing the world and its people—that of nation states, and those nation states granting an identity, a national origin—is not inherent or ideal, and that we should instead force people to stay where we believe other people like them, according to our beliefs about such things, originally came from, and thus, belong.

That underlying concept isn’t one that’s taken seriously by most scientists, philosophers, demographers, or anyone else who’s profession is linked to this collection of ideas, but it’s proven to be a useful narrative and justification for folks who feel as if they’re becoming strangers in what they consider to be their homeland, their culture, their city, and so on. And that’s made it a useful point of leverage for traditionalist and conservative political parties across Europe; and increasingly, in recent years especially, elsewhere around the world, as well.

What I’d like to talk about today is a party in Austria that has leaned heavily into this collection of ideas, and which claimed the most votes in the country’s recent election, as a consequence.

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The Freedom Party, or FPO, is an Austrian political party that’s a founding member of the European-scale Identity and Democracy Party, which recently merged with other, fellow traveler parties from the Czech Republic and Hungary, to become the Patriots for Europe group; though all of these entities share roughly the same ideological platforms and practical, political ambitions.

And among those ambitions is the desire to tackle the issue of immigration across the EU, reducing especially the number of people coming into the bloc from Muslim-majority nations, which large numbers of people in many European countries have complained about, usually because they feel the cultures of their hometowns and home countries are changing rapidly, and they consequently feel like they’re being elbowed out and replaced by these newcomers.

This is not a new complaint, and this isn’t only a European thing; across history, even very modern history, when a wave of immigrants arrive in a new home, that can make the people who were there before them feel like they’re under assault—and if those new arrivals have a different religion than the majority of the people in the place they’ve immigrated to, that can increase the perceived differences and threats, as can a difference in skin color, the clothing they wear, cultural customs, foods, fragrances, language, and just about anything else.

This angle of politicking has become increasingly popular with mostly but not exclusively conservative parties around the world in recent years, though, as some of those parties have gotten pretty good at spreading this message to disaffected people, including disaffected youths, in some of the most immigrated-to places in the world.

So young