analysis
Identitarian movement and AfD
Beware poisoners! About the toxic vocabulary of right-wing enemies of the state
Participants in a right-wing extremist demonstration in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
© Imago Images
The extremist Martin Sellner was allowed to spread his expulsion fantasies against migrants in front of AfD people, value unionists and right-wing extremists. He uses terms that are as wrong as they are dangerous.
The folkish-minded gentleman who is currently violently involved with… AfD flirts, doesn’t wear a bald head, probably doesn’t drink any more canned beer than upstanding Democrats and talks like it’s in a university seminar. At least that’s how it sounds at first. But if you take a closer look at the language used by the Austrian Martin Sellner and his right-wing extremist conspiracy buddies, you can see how bad the vocabulary stinks. It is used specifically to gain power.
Language, as Sellner knows, is the sharpest weapon. For him, concepts are “vehicles and carriers of the idea,” as he calls them. They are used to win debates and ultimately gain power. But first come the words. Words like “remigration” that somehow sound like a peaceful return home, but are essentially nothing more than an old neo-Nazi slogan: “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out.”
A whole dictionary of hate speech
The 35-year-old Sellner is a pioneer of the “Identitarian Movement,” whose mostly young followers cultivate new-right ideas with sharp hairstyles. They stage themselves in campaigns for the media. Above all, they want to change the way people talk in Germany in their own way. To do this, they use a whole dictionary of incitement: “Remigration”, for example, which Sellner spoke about at the secret meeting with AfD representatives uncovered by “Correctiv”, is a code name for the expulsion of millions of people living in Germany. AfD extremists like Björn Höcke also use the term.
In the thinking of right-wing ideologists, it is one of the central narratives used to describe the conditions in Germany – in order to mobilize against the democratic state and its institutions. At the beginning of the story there is a description of the supposed “repopulation”, which is also referred to as the “Great Exchange”. According to this, the German population is to be replaced by mass immigration with the participation of left-wing and liberal elites – whereby the migrants come from areas of the world beyond the “Occident” that is worthy of protection, do not have white skin and did not grow up with Christian traditions. “Remigration”, i.e. expulsion, is sold as protection of one’s own identity.
Terms like “remigration”: racism is disguised
How able the conspiracy supporters are to learn is shown by how they deal with the sensitive issue of racism. It always resonates, but needs to be camouflaged a little. For example, as “ethnopluralism” – i.e. the idea that “peoples” and “cultural identities” are so fundamentally different that it is best for everyone to stay to themselves.
In principle you could also simplify this to “Germany for the Germans”. But then it would no longer serve the purpose that a good story has. Namely, to reach people who are not actually on the side of those who advertise with it. Of course, everyone who makes politics tries to give their goals positive names. But it is quite different when the family minister invents the “good daycare law” than when the enemies of democracy and law shroud the plans to abolish them in a pleasant-sounding mist of words. And hope that their fighting terms, which seem to be bourgeois, become a normal part of the debate.