Young Martin Sellner certainly seems to be enjoying the atmosphere of free speech in Europe!
After Britain won one of its greatest historical battles, we must never forget The Few. Yes, although 52-48 is a score we like to contemplate, let us be gracious to the losers, the 48-ers, the new Mensheviks, the beaten Remainers. They have shown a doughty reserve, fighting against the very nature of reality itself, to overturn the result of the purest form of democracy; the referendum.
The Remainers tried everything. They told the ‘Brexiteers’ that they didn’t know what they were voting for, which is like telling the winner of a coin toss that they don’t know the difference between heads and tails. They told us that the economy would collapse, that food would run out, that a super-dooper-strain of venereal disease would lay waste our youth and that World War III was about 20 minutes away.
They believed. They believed in Europe, the dream of a united continent, where Serb dines happily with Croat, Frenchman kissed the rosbif Englishman on both rosy cheeks, and Greeks and Turks linked arms and danced on tables together. And, better still, once this powerhouse economy, this continent of all the talents, consolidated the fact that it has 27 different product directives for toothpaste, the EU could be turned into a giant welcoming committee for Islam, a camp of the saints for the religion of peace. Must they not have wanted what we all wish for? Must they not have wanted freedom?
Once you get wise to the machinations of the Alt. Left, once you have taken your red pill like a good boy, you see that freedom is the last thing they want. Even after the vote, Britain – and England in particular – is fast becoming the Soviet Union with marginally better dental care. Now, I am assuming a level of knowledge here that informs you just what the Soviet Union thought about that whole concept of freedom there. Let’s just say it didn’t really fly.
Britain may think it has left the EU, but there are ties and links you can’t see for looking. A newscaster is not free to Tweet Shakespeare without an uppity black man manufacturing offence via a text whose literary source he never will have read and will likely not read. A dying philosopher is hounded from a government post, costing the country some beautiful buildings along the way, because he has some [past quotes decontextualised by a flash little twerp who is pictured on social media swigging champagne following the grand old man’s defenestration. A black anti-race campaigner is humiliated by the opposition party – his own – for speaking truth to power (isn’t that supposed to be a good thing? It always used to be. Who changed thatlight-bulb?). A man at a swimming baths confronts a Muslim man who self-confessedly, and on CCTV, squeezes his eight-year-old daughter’s buttocks. The father of the girl is the one arrested, purely because of who he is. The Muslim man is free to go. Freedom.
So let’s turn to Europe, the burgeoning utopia, the unstoppable Shangri-La we have purportedly left. How is freedom faring in this brave new world?
Let’s visit Austria, the home of Martin Sellner. Herr Sellner is a young law and philosophy student who founded a non-violent political organisation called Generation Identity. In the midst of the Leftist promotion of identity politics, Sellner flipped the script;
‘Being identitarian meant for us rebelling against the deracination of our identities, as international consumers, as “world citizens” of a limitless globalisation. We wanted to find a new relationship to identity, heritage, culture and tradition… We wanted to strengthen a sense of our own, free of self-hatred or self-aggrandisement’.
What Sellner found was the strength of the state when it snuffles out dissident thought. His apartment was raided and computers seized, never being returned despite a court order to do so. His four domestic bank accounts have been closed without notice. His social media platforms have been gutted. He was not allowed access to the USA to marry fellow activist Brittany Pettibone (the couple are now wed). He has been harassed, traduced and subject to a new European inquisition. There is no pretense about what is happening. Employees of one of the 17 international banks who have closed accounts of Sellner’s openly admit to ‘political’ decisions. Welcome to Europe!
Austria is also home to Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, human rights and anti-shariah activist who, like Sellner, has been hounded by the authorities for speaking the truth about Islam. The daughter of a diplomat, Sabaditsch-Wolff was exposed to Islam at an early age, and saw its deleterious effects first-hand. Her treatment shows that, in Europe, human rights are not now part of a natural order, but have become a gift of the state and are conditional on certain behavior.
Westward ho to France! Marine Le Pen was destined to be in the public eye as the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, notoriously linked with Nazi and far-Right affiliations. When Madame Le Pen re-Tweeted videos of ISIS atrocities in 2018, she was charged, and it was seriously suggested that she undergo psychiatric testing. Have a little think about that.
To Holland, land of tulips, windmills and van Gogh although not, sadly, of free speech. Geert Wilders is a notorious politician who has long campaigned against Islamic immigration, as he should have every right to do in a free society. He now changes residence on a nightly basis, and has been endlessly hounded by the Dutch authorities.
Italy has long been in the game of closing down criticism of Islam, with the late Oriana Fallaci the subject of several prosecutions as long ago as 2005. ‘Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam’, she wrote in one of her best-selling books. An undeniable truth which led to her exile before her death. She was compared by some to Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, a descendant of the painter, who made a film called Submission, the word being the correct translation of ‘Islam’, and not ‘peace’ as Obama and other shills for Islam would have you believe. Van Gogh, who made a film critical of Islam, was beheaded by a Muslim in an Amsterdam alleyway in 2004.
In tolerant, liberal Denmark, in 2013, free-speech journalist and Islamic scholar Lars Hedegaard answered his front door in Copenhagen to take delivery of a package. Instead, he was confronted by an Arabic man who fired two shots at him – both missed – before his gun jammed.
Then there is Finnish blogger Tomashot, convicted and fined for writing critically about Islam, Dahn Pettersson, a Swedish local politician convicted and fined for pointing out that the vast majority of heroin trafficking in Northern Europe was the trade of Kosovan Muslims, Gregorius Nekschot, a Dutch cartoonist warned by police over cartoons of Mohammed. After a while, the list becomes monotonous. It is the litany of a constant hum of repression of dissident writing about Islam. Part of the European project is to codify and strengthen this repression, passing it into law and making criticism of Islam illegal.
The Alt. Left, of course, strongly support this wave of repression and silencing of free speech. A combination of Jew-hatred, hatred of the political Right, an almost erotic yearning – particularly among women – for the advent of European Islam, and a wish to live in a unfree state (their prime motivation being that they actually believe they will be running it) means that Europe is ripe for conquest by a revanchist Islam.
This is what the UK voted to leave, and the Schengen agreement on freedom of movement is one of the key reasons it did so.
There is one litmus test that will show whether Boris Johnson is a Conservative or a globalist. If he took the whole freedom of speech, woke, transgender, language policing, race-garbage, ‘Islamophobic’ nest of vipers and torched it with an ideological flame-thrower, he would be in power for a decade to come and maybe more, one of the most popular prime ministers ever. He knows this. And this is because even many on the Left are tired of the circus. But we don’t expect this to happen. This is not his brief from higher up, whoever ‘higher’ up is.
And so, unfortunately, just as a post-Brexit UK will still be full of Dutch cheese, French wine, and Danish bacon, it will also, it seems, not be cutting its ties with an ideology of state suppression of free speech and the right to criticise.
Photo credit: Bwag