I wrote a week ago of the extraordinary detention and deportation by British authorities of three law-abiding middle-class persons from Austria, America and Canada - for the crime of wanting to speak at a free-speech event. This in a country where, as Douglas Murray explained to me last week on TV, Ahmed Hassan, an Iraqi teenager who informed immigration officials that he'd been trained by Isis "how to kill", was nevertheless fast-tracked into Britain, and its public welfare system, and went on to detonate a nail bomb on the London Tube.
Martin Sellner, Brittany Pettibone and Lauren Southern have no wish to detonate nail bombs, or blow up pop concerts, or mow down pedestrians in rental cars, or decapitate British subjects. All they want to do is speak - and, for that very reason, they are deemed more dangerous than Mr Hassan. The pen is a greater threat to public order than the scimitar.
During his confinement at Heathrow, Martin Sellner wrote the speech the UK "Border Force" would not permit him to give. It was read by Tommy Robinson at Speakers' Corner in London last Sunday. I can see nothing in it that in a free country should attract the attention of the authorities - although I appreciate that its message is unsettling: the preferred tone in the respectable prints is that of Harry Mount here, marveling that the world of his witty, civilized, North London dinner parties can co-exist with the world of Somali stabbings a mere seventy yards away, and that these two worlds somehow never intersect. Which is not something a white English working-class schoolgirl in Telford would be quite so breezy about.
Herr Sellner's speech is plainer-spoken, yet temperate and sobering. It is also withering about the state of free speech in a land that did much to spread the concept around the globe and is now in the forefront of destroying it. As evidence of that, a fourth person was deported from Britain merely because a copy of this speech was found in his luggage. So I reproduce it here because I think our UK readers should be interested to hear what an allegedly conservative government will not allow them to hear. Perhaps one day it will be as famous as, say, Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail. Or perhaps the enablers and appeasers of Islamic supremacism will do such a thorough job that no trace of Herr Sellner's existence will remain in Austria or anywhere else in Europe:
Dear Friends, dear Britons, dear lovers of free speech.
I assume you all are lovers of free speech because you have come to Speakers' Corner.
You might not understand all the fuss happening today around this speech. Honestly, I don't understand it either.
My name is Martin Sellner. I am an Austrian patriot, and at the moment, I'm sitting in a detention cell in Colnbrook Bypass near Heathrow. My smartphone was taken and my girlfriend Brittany was separated from me. I currently don't know where she is. We will be deported on Sunday.
Five minutes ago, they unlocked our cells and my fellow inmates are gathering in the prison wing. They are mostly illegals and eastern European criminals.
What brought me into this situation? What was my crime?
My crime was that I wanted to be here with you, to speak at Speakers' Corner.
But let's start with the beginning. I was invited by UKIP to present my movement at an event last Autumn. I represent Generation Identity — a patriotic European youth movement that is raising awareness about mass immigration and Islamisation.
Far-left people call us right-wing, people who want to shut free speech down call us "fascist," and folks who hate their own culture call us "racist."
In reality, we are just a group of young patriots fed up with the system, the mainstream press and lying politicians. We use peaceful activism to make our voices heard, and contrary to our friends on the radical left, who are probably swarming you right now, we never wear masks.
From Paris to Rome, from Vienna to London, we fight peacefully but without compromise for our freedom, our homelands, and our identity!
This is what I wanted to speak about in Autumn. But the conference was cancelled due to threats from the radical left. The venue would not take the risk. So they rescheduled it for March, this time keeping the venue secret — but again the terror of the left prevailed, and the venue dropped out.
But this time I did not want to let them win! It was about principles! (Also, our flights were already booked.)
My last refuge was Speakers' Corner. I remembered my mother telling me about that special place when I was a child. It seemed almost magical to me. A place where everyone, without exception, could just stand on a box and start to speak to those who wanted to listen. I have always loved this tradition of Speakers' Corner, which seemed very British to me.
But I came only to see that this tradition — the tradition of freedom of speech in the United Kingdom — is dead.
Your Country is blocking you from challenging ideas from the outside. This is a disgrace to our democracy!
I should be speaking in a neat, warm conference room right now, and you should be sitting in comfortable chairs. Instead, I'm in my cell and you are on the street in a standoff with the enemies of freedom of speech.
And this is very telling! Today there is a war going on for our freedom of speech. This war is being fought on the streets, by you!
Every man and woman showing her face today, standing shoulder to shoulder, is standing up against a new totalitarianism that has been growing for far too long. You can be proud of yourself. You might not even agree with me on every point — you are simply giving a statement that I should have the right to speak my mind freely.
I would love to be among you now. They prevented me from it. They locked up the speaker, but I know that the speech will find a way through the iron bars. It will find a way to you and you are going to hear what you government so desperately wants to protect you from.
Those words which they consider more harmful to you than rape gangs or terrorists who are let into your country again and again.
I'm going to tell you something nobody has told you before. It's the biggest, most obvious secret of our media our politicians and our powerholders: People of Britain, you are being replaced.
There has always been immigration in your history. People coming in, assimilating.
But what's happening today is different: You are being replaced by massive Muslim immigration.
You see it everywhere: in London, in Manchester, but also already in the little countryside towns. A big replacement is going on.
And let me tell you: your politicians have no plan, no vision and no idea how to deal with the problems that come along. Problems like you have seen in Telford, Rotherham, and on Westminster Bridge.
All across Europe, there is a shadow hanging over our heads. The French are whispering about in the Metro, the Germans murmuring about it when they feel unwatched, Italians look left and right, and if nobody is listening they tell you: "I don't feel at home anymore in my street. We are becoming foreigners in our own country."
And again and again I hear: "We are not allowed to talk about it."
And that's the bizarre drama of the "Strange death of Europe." We are being replaced, conquered by radical Islam, and we are not allowed to talk about it!
Dear Britons, defenders of free speech. Out of my cell in Colnbrook, I want to ask you something. Be honest and raise your hands.
Who among of you has ever been in the following situation: You grab a beer after work, or you are visiting your girlfriend's parents for the first time, or you meet other children's parents at school — and suddenly the conversation moves to politics: radical Islam, immigration.
Who of you in this very moment was faced with the decision between speaking his mind and facing problems, or complying and staying silent?
Raise your hands and be honest.
I will not be able to see the results, but every single hand is too much. This amount of fear should not exist in a society. Speech that has social costs and severe consequences is no longer free. It has a price — and our Government and the Antifa are working everyday to raise that price.
No freedom of speech means no democracy. In front of our very eyes this country is becoming a tyranny, shutting all debates about immigration down, until demographics solves the issue by replacement. People of the UK. I might be in a cell right now, but you all are in a cell. It's the prison of fear and silence your government and the PC tyranny has locked you in since the days of your childhood.
I ask you, I command you, break free!
Patriots of the UK: come out of the closet. Make your dissent visible by visible acts of resistance that inspire others. I know for certain that millions in the UK think like me. Those millions should be on the street now.
We need a coming out of the silent majority, or Britain is lost. We need a free, open and honest debate about immigration, Islam and demographics, so we can sort these problems out together.
And I know that the force is still in you. With your Brexit vote you stunned the world! The will and the life of the British nation is not broken.
Initially, I asked if freedom of speech is dead in the UK. You, every one of you who came today, is a living sign that the tradition of the UK is not dead! You are the livley tradition of your nation, saving its face before history.
People of the UK — remember who you are! Remember your glorious past, you are sons and daughters of knights, kings, explorers, philosophers and artists. Who is the sovereign in this country?
Is it big money?
The mainstream media?
The politicians?
It's you — the people. You, the silent and invisible majority who said NO during Brexit. You can say NO again — no to Islamisation, no to mass immigration, and no to the great replacement.
And YES to your identity — yes to your security, yes to your heritage and the future for your children.
And all this is impossible without to freedom of speech.
I know, if these words will find their way to the UK and even to Speakers' Corner, it will be victory for our cause.
If they did, and if you are hearing them now, I tell you: go further on that winning street. Don't be afraid because we have an ally that is unbeatable: Truth.
The battle, our battle for freedom of speech, has just begun, and Speakers' Corner will become a symbolic place in that struggle.
When you go home know I want you to bring the spirit of Speakers' Corner with you.
Every single person who raised his hand because he could relate to this moment of fear, when he did not dare to speak his mind.
Promise me: Next time I will overcome my inner fear. Next time I will speak up!
~by Martin Sellner
I have been speaking up for a long time as this tragedy unfolds - in America Alone (2006) and then in Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West (2008). But the hour grows late, and the shadows lengthen.
