I dislike the term “the Great Replacement” and I dislike it because it is filled with fear and funk. The slogan is actually democratic at core: it is about a numbers game—we are too few, they are too many. It is a French term and its lineage goes back to Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973)—a novel similar in nature to John Wyndham’s “creepy catastrophes” where the world is overtaken by some alien menace and utterly changed; except, in The Camp of the Saints, the alien menace is not carnivorous alien plants, Wyndham’s triffids, but rather the whole tiers monde on boats on the way to France—the demographic deluge. These books have a nightmare-like quality akin to being caught in a rip tide—you are carried along to catastrophe and there is nothing to do, as when someone chases you in a dream and yet your body becomes like wet sand so that you can hardly move at all. The theme is helplessness—all is lost.
The term “the Great Replacement” was coined by Renaud Camus, who appears to be a great owl—a great owl shut up in his chateau’s tower. However, Camus is also an atheist homosexual; and I think “the Great Replacement” speaks more to the atheist homosexual’s predicament in the world than to normal life—the idea that they will be replaced, utterly replaced; even the atheist heterosexual has the idea that his children will carry on after him—the atheist homosexual dreads old age (“Is that a wrinkle? Dear God, no!”). Twinkle-wrinkle. I think this predicament—the Wyndham-like helplessness it engenders—has seeped into “the Great Replacement”. The idea is that one day people might just start to…disappear…from the streets, ordinary Frenchmen whisked away by the aliens…replaced overnight…by their clones. Uncanny—just like the way your lovers died during the Aids epidemic.
“The Great Replacement” is also a middle-class idea and this is tied to its Wyndhamesque quality. He came from the place where I live now, currently reformed into a suburb but at his time a small railway commuter village—it is still a railway commuter village, and still very middle class (though much less classy than it used to be). The cosy catastrophe is really about a middle-class Englishman’s fear that the genteel prosperity and stability he enjoys could be undermined overnight—it could all sink away. Wyndham’s visions are, as with Camus’s visions, secular and atheistic; he senses that British middle-class prosperity could be undermined and utterly destroyed by an uncanny exterior force that is ineluctable in its movement—in a sense, it has been.
The middle-class spirit behind “the Great Replacement” is very much: “Could someone possibly see their way to doing something about this situation, if it isn’t too much bother?” It is a phrase for people who write letters to The Times or to Le Monde about the “deplorable situation on the RER”. There is a grumpy Daily Mail reader’s suspicion that it is all hopeless—nothing you can do, “This country’s gone right down hill, I can tell you…gone to the dogs. My son’s moved to Australia—and good for him, better off out of it.” In a sense, the left is correct when it says that what Camus wants to do is to unsettle the middle class so that it is so frightened that it seeks a strong man to save it.
Compare Camus’s melancholy vision with Trump: Make America Great Again (MAGA). Bold and optimistic; it is not explicitly racial, yet its crypto-racial aspect (“By ‘great’ he means white, he means white!”) actually makes it more powerful, not less so—it is always necessary to encode messages for effect. Trump is often described as secular, though that is not quite true. He has attended a very practical church based on the philosophy of Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, and Dale Carnegie—How to Make Friends and Influence People; Think and Grow Rich. “He likes the deep philosophers…like Norman Vincent Peale!” so sang the Jewish mathematician-satirist Tom Lehrer in his 1950s satirical song “It Makes a Fellow Glad to be a Soldier”. Actually, Norman Vincent Peale is more profound and useful than anything taught at Lehrer’s Harvard (“These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard / And there may be many others but they haven't been discar-vard.” Groan).
Trump has also praised CG Jung in one of his popular (ghostwritten) books. “CG Jung, great guy. Terrific guy. Archetypes. Powerful. You know a lot of people are talking about archetypes now…”. So Trump is minimally religious, though I would not paint him as a man of profound faith; and so he has more optimism than an atheist French homosexual—hence, MAGA.
Of course, it is true that this is a uniquely American position. America has never been conquered by a foreign power, never lost an empire—in other words, America has never really suffered; and, as Nietzsche observed, you have to suffer if you want to be profound—hence America is not a profound country, she is superficial (everything will turn out alright because it always has done—to date). It is only when the United States fragments into competing states that you will begin to see profundity in Americans—hence only the Civil War offers any real American profundity at the moment.
The Camus attitude really dates back at least as far as Celiné—he already said France was demographically ruined in the 1930s (and perhaps he was right). What we can say is, perhaps, that “demographic doom” is a French speciality—a tradition for their conservatives, much as “little platoons” constitutes an idée fixe for Anglo-Saxon conservatives. For the French, this problem really goes back to the Revolution—the Revolution slit France’s throat and it has taken her several centuries to bleed to death, various writers and thinkers have observed the blood trail along the way.
Ultimately, it is no good to make people afraid and resentful—Camus promotes weakness and learned helplessness; and perhaps this is because he himself is really from the left. If you look at the organisations he supports, they model themselves on “La Résistance”—on an organisation dominated by the Communists that could never have liberated (if it was a liberation) France alone. In short, they are liberals—the Resistance fought its war so that the French could be “replaced”, for the Resistance there were only “citoyens”, not Christians or Jews or Muslims. “The resistance model” explains why “the Great Replacement” is so passive and indulges in learned helplessness—the Resistance could never win alone, it had to wait for the Allies to bail it out (secretly Camus waits for the bail out to arrive).
You can tell that “the Great Replacement” is liberal really because it is often deployed by those men used by Zionism, such as Douglas Murray (another homosexual), with the especial focus on “the Muslim womb”—so who really fears replacement? This comes about because it is a quantitative theory: there are few Jews; therefore, they are safe—yet the Muslims breed like rabbits, so we must fear them. Yet reality is elitist, it is elites that make and remake the world—give me one man from ten thousand if he be the best.
This idea that whites are “an endangered species” or “like the poor embattled red squirrel in England” plays on resentment. The implicit message behind these ideas is as follows: “We need someone to help us, like the World Wildlife Fund, who will swoop down and make a nice safe nature reserve for us.” The white man as giant panda. It is a feminised view—a decadent view. Oddly, to create a nature reserve is an intrinsically European activity: the person who says “whites are an endangered species” has forgotten that the person who makes the nature reserve is himself—he has forgotten himself, waits to be rescued (like a woman). As with the French Resistance, “the Allies” will arrive and beat “the Germans” for us—except they are not coming, Putin will not rescue you (and it was the Allies who instigated the replacement).
So I would say people should reject “the Great Replacement”—reject the sentimental deep twilight sunset wistfully glanced from the window in your study in a chateau’s tower. So crepuscular. “Ah, it is all over…death, replacement. What can you do?” <<Gallic shrug>>. As it happens, you can do rather a lot—and yet it will not be done for you; although people exist within a wider group—a race, a tribe, a nation—this does not mean you are automatically carried. Dry your eyes.