What is the great replacement theory?
Guardian answer:
This
article is more than 3 years old
A deadly
ideology: how the ‘great replacement theory’ went mainstream
This
article is more than 3 years old
The
alleged Buffalo shooter was said to have been inspired by the racist
conspiracy, which has been embraced by rightwing politicians in the US and
Europe – as well as Fox News
Steve
Rose
Wed 8 Jun
2022 07.00 CEST
On 14
May, in Buffalo, New York, 10 Black people were shot and killed in a grocery
store. The 18-year-old alleged shooter is said to have endorsed the “great
replacement theory” – the racist premise that white Americans and Europeans are
being actively “replaced” by non-white immigrants. For a brief moment in the
aftermath, it seemed the horror of the latest tragedy would be enough to ensure
that the conspiracy theory would be consigned to the fringes of the far right
whence it came. Instead, the opposite has happened.
The Fox
News host Tucker Carlson had mentioned replacement theories more than 400 times
on his show before the shooting. Afterwards, he initially sought to distance
himself from it. “We’re still not sure exactly what it is,” he claimed on his
show on 17 May. In the next breath, though, he doubled down. “Here’s what we do
know, for a fact: there’s a strong political component to the Democratic
party’s immigration theory … and they say out loud: ‘We are doing this because
it helps us to win elections.’”
In
Hungary, two days after the shooting, the newly re-elected prime minister,
Viktor Orbán, was also doubling down. In a televised speech to mark the start
of his fourth term, he claimed he was fighting against “the great European
population exchange … a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European,
Christian children with adults from other civilisations – migrants”.
A week
later, Orbán was discussing the theory with American allies at a special
meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee (Cpac), a rightwing
American group, in Budapest. Cpac’s chairman, Matt Schlapp, even suggested
outlawing abortion as a solution: “If you’re worried about this ‘replacement’,
why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”
So where
did the great replacement theory come from – and how did it become so
prevalent?
It is not
a new concept or a fringe concern. Rather, it is a fringe concern and a
mainstream one – espoused by “lone wolf” mass shooters and prominent
politicians. According to a recent YouGov poll, 61% of Trump voters and 53% of
Fox News viewers believe it is true.
The name
could be one factor. Neither overtly offensive nor racist, it has the ring of a
respected academic proposition and slips easily into mainstream discourse. It
is also vague enough to accommodate a spectrum of views from extreme to
moderate, yet tucked within its three words are centuries’ worth of racist and
white‑supremacist ideology.
Viktor
Orbán claims to fight against ‘a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of
European, Christian children with migrants’
Prof
Matthew Feldman, a writer and specialist on rightwing extremism, explains that
there are two versions of the theory. “One, we might call it ‘great replacement
lite’, is saying: ‘There’s a huge demographic shift and these people tend to
vote Democrat in the US or Labour in the UK.’” Then there is what Feldman calls
the “full-fat” version, which says: “‘This is a conspiracy organised by elites
– they’re deliberately undermining white majorities.’
“Both of
them are, in a sense, conspiracy theories, saying this isn’t just patterns of
immigration and demographic change, but this is being engineered. But who is
engineering it, and for what, is something the further fringes of the far right
are all too keen to speculate on.”
Even on
the “full-fat” far-right fringes, the great replacement theory accommodates a
variety of conflicting ideas. The accused shooter in Buffalo claims to have
been “radicalised” by online message boards such as Reddit, 4chan and 8chan,
which he began browsing during the pandemic. These boards have become a gateway
for white-nationalist extremism, through the sharing of racist memes,
conspiracy theories and extremist literature and manifestos. His manifesto
borrows heavily from that of the Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 people in
New Zealand in 2019. That manifesto was titled “The Great Replacement”. It was
full of racist, white nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments, railing
against declining white birthrates, “white genocide” and immigration policies
supposedly injurious to people of European descent.
Replacement
themes were also invoked by mass shooters in Utøya, Norway, in 2011, at the
Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018 and in El Paso,
Texas, in 2019. Yet each of these shooters – all white men – targeted a
different group of people. The Buffalo shooter killed only Black Americans. The
Christchurch shooter terrorised Muslims leaving Friday prayers. In El Paso, it
was Latinos. In Utøya, it was young, mostly white Norwegians at a leftwing
summer camp. In Pittsburgh, the shooter attacked Jewish people and blamed a
not-for-profit refugee group, founded in the 19th century to support Jews
fleeing persecution in eastern Europe, for permitting “invaders … that kill our
people”.
Until
relatively recently, mainstream political discourse was not all that different.
Racist scaremongering over non-white immigrants supplanting white populations
has been a factor of US immigration policy for more than a century, explains
Reece Jones, the author of White Borders, a history of US immigration policy,
while the ethnic or racial group being scapegoated has shifted over time.
In the
1870s, the first US immigration laws were drafted in response to an influx of
Chinese people. In the 1910s, it was Japanese immigrants. By the 1920s, it was
Jewish refugees from Europe, then arrivals from central and southern Europe.
“As new, different immigrant groups start to arrive, the same sorts of fears
rise to the surface,” says Jones. “The same language was used about the idea
that non-white immigrants were an invasion, that they brought diseases, that
they were going to replace white Americans, that they were going to change the
culture of the place. There really is a through-line in these things.”
Ironically,
of course, it is white Europeans who have done much of the replacing throughout
history. Counterarguments to the great replacement theory would point out that,
if anyone has grounds for complaint, it is the Indigenous people of North and
South America, Australia and New Zealand, Africa and many other parts of the
world, who have been “replaced” by colonial settlers. Native Americans comprise
less than 3% of the US population. Yet, thanks to the great replacement theory,
the people that once forcibly colonised much of the rest of the world can cast
themselves as oppressed victims.
When
conservatives are seduced by rightwing extremism, that’s when the problem
becomes magnified
Matthew
Feldman
In the
early 20th century, even Italians were not considered truly “white” in the US.
Most scientists and academics still subscribed to pseudoscientific theories of
racial difference and hierarchy, according to which “central” and
“Mediterranean” Europeans were separate and inferior to the “Nordic” race of
western and northern Europe.
These
theories were popularised by the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race,
written by Madison Grant, a lawyer, eugenicist and conservationist from New
York. “Grant argues that you can think of white people as an endangered
species,” says Jones. “For him, by preventing non-white people from entering
the protected area of America, you can preserve this ‘great race’ that he
identifies, which is northern Europeans.”
Similar
fears fuelled the suppression of African Americans. Grant and his successors
were staunchly opposed to racial mixing, “mongrelisation” and “miscegenation”.
But the real fear was that liberated Black Americans would eventually outnumber
white Americans, diluting not only white racial “purity”, but also white power.
Grant’s
book was highly influential. It was endorsed by the US presidents Theodore
Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge and referenced in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby (Tom Buchanan says: “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race
will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been
proved”). Grant’s research informed the Immigration Act of 1924, which set
quotas for US immigrants on the basis of national origin, heavily favouring
northern and western Europeans and barring almost all Asians and Africans.
The
Passing of the Great Race had another prominent fan: Adolf Hitler. He called it
his “bible” and held the US’s closed-door immigration policies as a model for
the Third Reich. Hitler synthesised Grant’s ideas with his own antisemitic
conspiracy theories, setting the replacement theory down the “full-fat” path.
In Mein Kampf, he blamed Jewish people for bringing Black people into “the
Rhineland” to “bastardise” the white race and lower it culturally and
politically, so that Jewish people might dominate.
It wasn’t
until long after the second world war that the Immigration and Nationality Act
of 1965 removed the discriminatory “national origin” criteria – yet that law
still favoured immigrants who were relatives of Americans. This provision was
intended to encourage more relatives of white Americans to immigrate, thus
preserving the status quo. Instead, it resulted in more applications from
families of newer immigrants from countries such as Mexico, India and China.
This is now referred to as “chain migration”.
In
postwar Europe, “replacement lite” themes soon emerged. In Enoch Powell’s
notorious “rivers of blood” speech, given in 1968, the Conservative MP’s
central allegation was that immigration from the Commonwealth was making
existing Britons “strangers in their own country” and that, “in 15 or 20 years’
time, the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.
Similar
sentiments emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in France, via Jean-Marie
Le Pen’s National Front and Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite movement. Two
key replacement texts came out of France. One was Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The
Camp of the Saints, an apocalyptic, unashamedly racist scenario in which
migrants from the global south invade Europe. Then, in 2011, Renaud Camus laid
out his anti-Muslim, anti-immigration conspiracy theory in The Great
Replacement, from which the current movement takes its name. In it, Camus
routinely refers to non-Europeans as “colonisers”.
These
European currents have been imported into far-right US politics by well-funded
groups such as the late John Tanton’s Federation for American Immigration
Reform and the Center For Immigration Studies, as well as his publisher Social
Contact, which has put out white-nationalist texts including a translation of
The Camp of the Saints. “These groups have used this money over the last 30
years to stealthily reintroduce this replacement idea into the public
discourse,” says Jones. “They often have innocuous names – they present
themselves like regular thinktanks – but what they’re producing is essentially
sanitised versions of the same white‑supremacist ideas.”
These
ideas mingled with homegrown theories such as “white genocide”, as popularised
by the neo-Nazi leader David Lane. Most of Tanton’s organisations are
designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but figures
associated with them, including Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, worked in the
Trump administration. Hence Trump’s complaint of immigrants from “shithole
countries” and his attempts to ban immigration from majority-Muslim countries.
Ethno-nationalist
and anti-immigration politics across Europe have coalesced into what is known
as the Identitarian movement. The great replacement theory is central to this,
says José Pedro Zúquete, a professor of social sciences at the University of Lisbon
and the author of The Identitarians. “What Identitarians did was look at this
demographic transition and say it is not a positive thing, but a civilisational
disaster,” he says, one that could lead to European countries degenerating into
failed states “with higher crime, with increasing ethnic conflicts and
eventually with civil wars”.
But the
Identitarian movement continues to move into the European mainstream. In the
recent French presidential election, the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour said:
“I felt that my duty was to save France from the great replacement.” Rivals
including Marine Le Pen hardened their anti-immigrant rhetoric yet looked
relatively less extreme. Zemmour won only 7% of the first-round vote, “but he
was able to really shift the Overton window [mainstream discourse]”, says
Zúquete. According to a 2021 poll, 67% of French people said they were “worried
about the idea of a great replacement”.
In the
US, the white population fell for the first time in history in the 2020 census.
Proportionally, white Americans are at all-time low, making up 61.6% of the
population, compared with 72.4% in 2010 and almost 90% in 1940. Yet rather than
view the story of the modern US as one of successive waves of immigration – in
the spirit of the Statue of Liberty’s “give me your huddled masses” – the
replacement theorists seek to draw an arbitrary line between themselves and
subsequent immigrants.
Invoking
the great replacement theory enables them to do this without overt racism or
conspiracy theorising, even if it means resorting to clumsy euphemism. Carlson
has spoken of “obedient voters from the third world” posing a threat to “legacy
Americans”, for example. The Republican congressman Scott Perry claimed: “We’re
replacing national-born Americans, native-born Americans.” Today, the supposed
agents of replacement are Democrats, or “elites” and “globalists”, who “plan to
change the population of the country”, as Carlson alleges, “in order to win and
maintain power”. The underlying presumption here is that new, non-white US
immigrants will automatically vote Democratic.
The
situation is not likely to improve any time soon. According to the UN, the
number of international migrants in 2019 was 272 million – 3.5% of the global
population. War, violence, inequality and the climate crisis will exacerbate
the situation. Incidents such as the Buffalo shooting look like an extreme
manifestation – and hopefully a wake-up call – but the real issue is that the
line between the “full-fat” and “replacement lite” versions is eroding,
potentially paving the way for full-blown fascism.
“The
growth of rightwing extremism, by definition, can only happen when
conservatives lose that firebreak, or cordon sanitaire, against the radical
right,” says Feldman. “When conservatives are seduced by rightwing extremism,
that’s when the problem becomes magnified. That’s not to say that rightwing
extremism isn’t always a problem, but it will stay on the fringes unless it’s
invited in.”
The
situation shows little sign of abating. Yesterday, Robert Pape, a political
science professor at the University of Chicago, told a Senate judiciary hearing
on domestic terrorism, that the combination of “volatile capabilities” and
“volatile ideas” was creating a deadly cocktail. “We are now seeing those who
advocate the great replacement receive political benefits and financial
benefits,” Pape said. Politicians and media figures, including Donald Trump,
were becoming more popular as a result of stressing the great replacement.
“That is a very, very worrisome trend.”
Jones is
not optimistic in the short term. “I suggested it’s only going to get worse –
and the Buffalo attack sadly bears that out. In the long term, these ideas are
on the losing side of history, and US history suggests that, over time, we are
moving in a more egalitarian direction. But there have been these hiccups in
the past and they have been quite violent. The civil war was about this exact
thing. I think you can think of the second world war as similarly about
fighting against these fascist ideas. I think we are at one of those moments
right now.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário