Replacing rational thought

Fear of an antiwhite conspiracy, which drove the Buffalo shooter and other mass killers, is being flirted with by mainstream US politicians – and that should worry us all, says David Aaronovitch.

Sometimes when someone tells you why they’ve done something terrible – a mass shooting, for example – the safest thing to do is to take them at their word.

Last weekend, an 18-year-old white male went heavily armed into a shopping centre in Buffalo, New York, and shot dead 10 people he’d never met before. He posted on an online chat app that he’d chosen the killing place because it had the highest percentage of black people living and working in it in close enough proximity to where he lived.

In a 180-page screed written to accompany his massacre, he alluded to his belief that something called ‘‘the great replacement’’ was taking place, in which white Americans were being supplanted by people of other colours and ethnicities. This, he believed, had to be resisted.

I won’t name him – and in any case, he was just the latest in a bloody line of white men who in various countries over the past decade have murdered the innocent in the name of stopping this non-existent threat to the white race.

There was the Pittsburgh synagogue killer in 2018; the El Paso and Christchurch (NZ) mass murderers of 2019; the teenager who killed the worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015. As I write this, in some suburban bedroom somewhere, a young white man is planning his own death spree in the name of preventing white genocide.

As is now the fashion with half-baked or absurd propositions, this notion of ‘‘replacement’’ has been dignified with being a theory, and even attributed to a theorist.

The French author of the 2011 book The Great Replacement, Renaud Camus, is a gay former leftist who underwent a negative epiphany when he saw women in hijabs beside a Gothic church in a 1000-year-old French village. Just because something is written in French by a gay man doesn’t make it intellectual.

Camus’ argument – that foreigners, especially Muslims, were being deliberately imported into Europe by a deracinated global elite to replace the indigenous white, Christian populations – when boiled down, has all the subtlety of a half-brick across the back of the head.

And it’s not new, either. Similarly stripped to essentials, and in all its incarnations over the years, ‘‘replacement theory’’ has this one hypothesis: that ‘‘our’’ values and existence are under threat from a tide of foreign or domestic aliens, deliberately enabled by a treacherous elite.

The values can be various (Christianity, patriotism, the Western way of life). The exact human tide can differ (Muslims, migrants from the developing world, urban blacks), and the elite can be discerned in all kinds of ways (Hollywood, academia, Democrats, Jews), but the underlying structure and appeal of the ‘‘theory’’ is always the same.

It goes back a long way. In 1966, for example, Playboy magazine carried an improbable interview between the black author of Roots, Alex Haley, and George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American nazi party. In it, Rockwell condemned Jewish geneticists. They had, he said, hidden the fact of the black man’s inferiority in order to gull white Americans into ‘‘letting him eat in our restaurants, study in our schools, move into our neighbourhoods’’.

‘‘The next inevitable step,’’ Rockwell added, ‘‘is to take him

into our beds – and this would lead to the mongrelisation, and hence the destruction, of the white race.’’

So where did Rockwell get this from? In fact, it was a staple of the American segregationist far right in the 1950s, which viewed moves for civil rights for American blacks as having been sponsored by urban New York Jews.

Naturally, a version of this, written by you-know-who, had appeared in Germany in 1923. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote of how African soldiers serving with the French occupiers of industrial parts of Germany were impregnating Aryan maidens.

‘‘It was and it is Jews,’’ he asserted, ‘‘who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardisation, throwing it down from its cultural and political height.’’

It has suited some American commentators on the right to

warn against reading too much into the words of the Buffalo murderer. He is, they say, clearly mentally ill.

But why is it that ‘‘mental illness’’ should repeatedly take this particular form? Why is there this common story these killers seem to believe, and which is the reason they give for killing?

Parts of the left can be hugely irritating, many too often intolerant, and a few occasionally violent. But no-one has ever massacred a shopping centre full of ordinary folk because the killer believes we should be taking in more refugees, or shot up an election hustings because of what the evil government is failing to do about poverty or global warming.

But the idea that ‘‘they’’ are conspiring to replace ‘‘us’’ with the other ‘‘them’’? This reason for mass killing happens a lot.

In the past 10 years, threequarters of politically inspired murderers in the United States have been from the far right.

I am not a believer in what

someone once called ‘‘clunk-click determinism’’ – that if someone says X, this automatically leads down the road to a killing. Neither can I possibly accept that there is no link at all.

In Europe to a degree, and in America to an alarming extent, quasi-respectable versions of replacement notions have gone mainstream.

Popular US TV commentator Tucker Carlson has told his millions of Fox News viewers that it is ‘‘true’’ and ‘‘happening, actually’’; that the ‘‘Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World’’.

Carlson is far from alone. To the alarm of Republicans like Liz Cheney (who used to be regarded as being on the centre-right of her party), the GOP seems to have taken replacement ideas to its neo-Trumpian heart.

In New York, one candidate runs campaign advertisements claiming that Democrats aim to let felons vote so as to ‘‘overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington’’. In Ohio, author and Republican US Senate candidate J D Vance talks of how President Joe Biden deliberately leaves border defences weak so as to facilitate ‘‘more Democrat voters pouring into this country’’.

Go back to that boy in his bedroom. At any time, this talk is at best unsavoury, and even dangerous. In an era of war, climate threats and economic dislocation, it feels almost incendiary.

Unless Republicans – who are on target to win the congressional midterms in November – run their own internal Prevent strategy soon, colour me scared.

In Europe to a degree, and in America to an alarming extent, quasi-respectable versions of replacement notions have gone mainstream.