Free Speech, Not Hate Speech: No Platform for Martin Sellner

Submitted by Anonymous on March 6, 2018

On Sunday 11th March, leading European fascist Martin Sellner of Generation Identity will be giving a talk at Speaker's Corner after the embarrassing cancellation of a conference on 'free speech' because of 'left-wing threats'.

A former neo-Nazi, Sellner is now a key organiser within the Generation Identity network and was the poster boy for last summer's "Defend Europe" stunt. Defend Europe spread hatred for migrants and called for NGOs to stop rescuing those drowning in the Mediterranean.

Sellner was on the bill to speak at UKIP's youth wing conference last summer but was forced to cancel after a campaign by anti-fascists to apply pressure on venues hosting this far-right thug. Sellner later returned to the UK and spoke for the Traditional Britain Group, who have hosted Jacob Rees-Mogg and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer in the past.

Sellner helped launch British and Irish branches of Generation Identity, building links with anti-Muslim hate preachers like Tommy Robinson. Generation Identity has roots in France, starting out as a youth movement who sought to establish a white-only Europe yet deny that they are fascists or racists when they are in fact explicitly both.

Join London Anti-fascists this weekend to stand up to this far-right threat. Do not give fascists a platform. Free speech is about democracy - do not let the far-right weaponise free speech as an excuse to spread hate.

FREE SPEECH, NOT HATE SPEECH!

https://www.facebook.com/events/537407219976311/

I_Dont_Like_Yo…

6 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by I_Dont_Like_Yo… on March 7, 2018

Is Tommy Robinson a far-right pundit? I've never seen anything he's said or done directly but he's popped up in youtube recommended videos a few times, but from the title and thumbnail it just looked like he had videos about salafists and foreign funded mosques and madrassas. Feel free to tell me otherwise because I don't know anything about this guy, just that he made videos about some of the shady mosques in Tower Hamlets and elsewhere. Then again I guess if he's linked to the nativist marching band then that about sums it up.

patient Insurgency

6 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by patient Insurgency on March 7, 2018

Well I suppose if you're not from the UK, or if you're very young you may not have heard of him. Essentially he's responsible for organising a massive movement of football hooligans, racists and fascists into a violent large scale street movement in the UK. Ostensibly to counter a perceived "islamization" or "Islamic take over of the UK, the "English defence league" or "EDL" as they called themselves, numbered as high as 35,000 members or more and went rampage of violence, destruction, and general intimidation of communities across the UK. I cannot stress how unpopular these people were in the UK. Some of the polls at the time showed that overwhelmingly, the public were hostile to them, with most people understanding them to be racist. The group became so extreme that the founders of the that movement abandoned it, if only to make a killing on speaking tours and books etc. Overall, I would say that Tommy Robinson is a pretty nasty piece of work, and that it's pretty disgusting that so many of their street presence was effectively unopposed in the uk, aside from some smaller scale pacifist organisations that I heard about on the news. maybe others here can tell you about any work on the ground and if it was sucsesfull against them, as I'm largely in the dark about that sort of thing.

But yeah, fucking horrible people imo. the only thing that stopped it was probably their own internal disagreements, and lack of new membership as fewer and fewer people would turn up due to imense popular hostility, and a general running out of steam.