“The Great Replacement” Is White Supremacy And Nothing Else

In my article on the recent shooting in Buffalo, I said that I did not think it was fair to call the conspiracy theory known as “The Great Replacement” anti-immigrant in nature, because it isn’t — it’s white supremacist. This is not to say that the rhetoric used by believers in it has no similarities to those of anti-immigrant, nativist, and isolationist political figures, but those groups have very different goals.

For those unaware, the concept of a “great replacement” was thought up by Renaud Camus, a French writer and political figure who published his ideas in the form of two books, one released in 2010 and one released in 2011.

Camus has claimed two major inspirations for his ideology: The first one being the 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which is about the collapse of western civilization occurring as a result of massive amounts of third world immigration. The second inspiration is an anti-immigration speech given by British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell on 4/20/1968, which many have dubbed the “Rivers of Blood speech,” due to the following line:

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

The speech was primarily given in response to the Race Relations Act of 1968, which banned discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, or national origin in Great Britain. The speech also contains lines that are very similar to what would later become great replacement ideology, such as this:

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is…