What is the ‘great replacement theory’? A scholar of race relations explains
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The “great replacement theory,” whose origins date back to the late 19th century, argues that Jews and some Western elites are conspiring to replace white Americans and Europeans with people of non-European descent, particularly Asians and Africans.
The conspiracy evolved from a series of false ideas that, over time, stoked the fears of white people: In 1892, British-Australian author and politician Charles Pearson warned that white people would “wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by people whom we looked down.” The massive influx of immigrants into Europe at the time fostered some of these fears and resulted in “white extinction anxiety.” In the U.S., it resulted in policies targeting immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century.
In France, journalist Édouard Drumont, leader of an antisemitic movement, wrote articles in the late 19th century imagining how Jews would destroy French culture. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an Italian poet and supporter of Benito Mussolini, argued that war and fascism were the only cure for the world. Fascism, then and now, worked to ensure white dominance.
This was followed by the eugenics movement, an erroneous and racist theory that supported forced sterilization of Black people, the mentally ill and other marginalized groups, who were all deemed “unfit.”
The 1978 book entitled “The Turner Diaries,” a fictional futuristic account of the overthrow of the United States government, further contributed to white nationalist ideas.
Collectively, these gave rise to a global movement that attracted a wide range of white supremacist, xenophobic and anti-immigration conspiracy theories. These theories were formally codified in the work of Frenchman Renaud Camus, first in his 2010 book “L’Abécédaire de l’in-nocence” and elaborated in his 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement.”
Content retrieved from: https://cobbcountycourier.com/2024/03/what-is-the-great-replacement-theory-a-scholar-of-race-relations-explains/.
