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08-17-2019

Thomas Chatterton Williams on The Great Replacement

Lauretta Charlton interviews Thomas Chatterton Williams about the “Great Replacement” theory that lies behind the Manifesto published by the shooter in El Paso, Texas. Chatterton Williams profiled Renaud Camus, who is often thought to be the intellectual originator of the “Great Replacement” theory last year.

One very clever move these identitarians make — and, it has to be said, this is an exploitable opening provided to them in part by the progressive left — is to cynically proclaim their “whiteness” as just another form of diversity that is in danger of erasure. “The great replacement is very simple,” Mr. Camus has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.” He also stresses that the specific identity of the new population is less important than the act of replacement itself. This lets him claim that he would be equally devastated if the Japanese were to be replaced by the Chinese. The idea is not new, though. Charles de Gaulle and Enoch Powell, the right-wing British politician, both famously and publicly fretted over reverse colonization. What Mr. Camus did was to take a familiar concept and rebrand it in a catchy way….

This is why you see in the El Paso manifesto a disdain for “shameless race-mixers” who “destroy genetic diversity.” 

The manifesto acknowledges the impossibility and even the immorality of trying to send all nonwhites away and instead supports the idea of separate territories for racial groups. This allows the writer to avoid saying that whites are superior, but rather that they must be preserved just like everyone else. The reason this is clever is because many more people can be persuaded by such seemingly egalitarian logic than by hysterical-seeming terms like “white genocide.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a National Endowment for the Humanities / Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow and will be speaking at the Arendt Center’s Annual Conference, “Racism and Antisemitism” on Oct. 11-12.