The Hidden History of The Great Replacement Theory
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 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. 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.” Now with fears of a declining population due in part to climate migration this 100 plus year old myth is lifting its ugly head once again.
Historically Italians, French, Spanish and Greeks flocked to North Africa not the other way around, fleeing poverty and overpopulation in their own countries. They sought their fortunes on fresh soil, in Maghreb and in the trans-Atlantic colonies. We read tales about this in Books with titles incorporating terms like the Orient Express. For Europeans the term Oriental was synonymous with North Africa and The Middle East. This was the place where they believed great fortunes could be made.
Prior to the fall of the Ottoman Empire North African (rather than European) countries were also a landing point, not only for African slaves forced to cross the Sahara but also, for centuries until the mid-19th century, for Caucasian, Georgian and Greek slaves, European slaves were prized possessions up until their uprisings against the Ottoman Sultans in the 1820s.
Europe put the might of their armies behind the former caucasian slaves. The French had taken Algiers two years earlier, and also conquered a number of cities on the Algerian coast in a series of violent attacks between 1830 and 1832.
The rest of North Africa was either ruled by the Alawite dynasty a semi-Ethnic group that speaks Arabic. Arabic is a language, not a race. Everyone who speaks Arabic is Arab. Races and genes are irrelevant here. Arabs come in all races. People in Sudan are black Arabs. In Lebanon there are blond haired blue eyed Arabs. There are Arabs in more than 20 countries and 2 cities in Iran. Such was the case in Morocco, or as in Tunis and Tripoli, under the authority of a governor appointed by the Ottoman Empire.
Men who came from afar, like Muhammad Khaznadar and his master Shakir, climbed prodigiously high in the social ranks: Shakir was the Vizier, the chief advisor to the Ottoman governors of Tunis. Italians, Maltese, British, French and other Europeans rushed to Tunis and Algiers and Tripoli to make money though more or less legal means, in trade, coral fishing and sometimes smuggling (tobacco, arms, coffee, etc.).
The Great Replacement’
If we just take a look back at the 19th century, we see all the transformations in this part of the world started with the slow takeover of African markets and economies by European powers; the official abolition of slavery from the late 1840s onwards, in Tunisia and Algeria, and the gradual disappearance of slave trafficking, first in the Mediterranean and then from West Africa to Maghreb; the advent of colonization, first in Algeria in 1830, then in Tunisia as early as 1881, and Morocco and Libya in the early 1910s, just prior to the outbreak of World War I; the immigration of European colonists, whose number in Algeria would reach 1 million, against 9 million “Muslims” Algerians are lighter than Moroccans simply because they kept their original color and did not mix with black Africans.
Ethnic groups in Algeria include Arabic speaking Berbers, who represent 99% of the population, though according to The World Factbook "only a minority identify themselves as primarily Berber, about 15% of the total population". Berbers are the controlling indigenous ethnic group of Algerians Berbers hate being reminded that they are either the products of racial whitening through European women or the descendants of white slaves or converts. when the country became independent in 1962, they gained power when the pieds-noirs left the country en mass for mainland Europe; and, finally, the economic immigration of North African workers, and workers from other African nations, after World War II, to help rebuild and bolster the economies of the former colonial powers.
Taking into account all these historical events, migration from the South to the North cannot possibly be described as an “armed invasion” as part of the great replacement theory, as some would have us believe. It is the result of constructed economic dependence, by European labor migration, exploitation, and colonial and post-colonial domination of those visibly of non European lineage. From a simple treasurer, Muhammad the slave became Prime minister at the beginning of the 1880s, when France took over Tunisia. His life, like that of millions of other European lineage migrants, was also shaped by the many transformations that transpired in the Mediterranean. Now Fast forward to 21st century USA.
In a recent survey, one in three Americans said they believe immigrants are being brought to the country for political gain. This so-called “great replacement theory” holds that an effort is underway to intentionally replace Ethnically European born Americans. It’s been perpetuated recently by right-wing media. But it’s nothing new.
"These arguments have been made since before the Constitution was signed, and they're made for the same purpose today that they were then, to maintain the (white) status quo in power," says Documentarian Jeffery Robinson. "We were passing laws in colonial America that said, If an enslaved woman has a child, that child is an enslaved person. And that law was required. Because white men would rape Black women. And it wasn't a crime. But not only was it not a crime when those children were born, the law wanted to make clear, don't go thinking blue eyes or freckles makes that a human being, that is an enslaved being.
"Virginia passed more than 130, quote-unquote, 'slave statutes.' And I'll end by saying this. 1619, we have reports of 20 and odd people being brought to America. There were enslaved people here before that. But the numbers we're understanding are just beginning. By 1790, that number was 700,000.”
In some periods of American history, paranoid narratives of “white extinction” have appeared to exist only on a radical fringe of racist political movements. In other periods, some of the nation’s highest political officeholders have repeated these ideas, leading to forced sterilization programs at the state level and a racial quota system becoming federal immigration law for four decades. No longer on the fringe, such narratives now have currency among some of the most powerful and influential actors in right-wing media and politics. The theory also infers that for one reason or another white populations are physically incapable of maintaining a large homogeneous population in proximity to other races.
The “great replacement” theory is inherently white supremacist. It depends on stoking fears that a non-white population, which the theory’s proponents characterize as intellectually “inferior,” but physically and in the case of fertility superior, will easily displace a white majority unless oppressed or incarcerated. It is also antisemitic. Some proponents of the “great replacement” do not explicitly attribute the plot to Jews. Instead, they blame powerful Jewish individuals such as financier and philanthropist George Soros or use coded antisemitic language to identify shadowy “elites” or “globalists.” It was French writer Renaud Camus that came up with the term.
Great Replacement Theory: The Destruction of Minorities in Society
is a book by Kenneth Corbin about the Great Replacement (French: Grand Remplacement), often known as the Replacement Hypothesis. It asserts that the white population of France is being displaced by non-European people as a result of mass migration, demographic expansion, and a European birth rate decline. Renaud Camus, a French novelist, popularized the word. According to Renaud Camus's (a marginalized Gay man whose first book Tricks was about his one night stands with gay men many of them black) thesis on the Great Replacement (or "conspiracy theory"), the indigenous French people are being demographically displaced by non-European peoples via a process of "peopling immigration" facilitated by a "replacist authority." According to Camus, the phrase "great replacement" is not a notion but a "phenomenon."
Albert Camus regularly refers to the time of Nazi-occupied France (1940–1945) in his writings. This comparison to the French resistance to Nazism has been seen as an implied appeal to hostility, direct action, and even violence against what Camus refers to as the "Occupiers," or immigrants.
Comments