The Politics of Replacement From “Race Suicide” to the “Great Replacement”

On May 14, 2022, a white supremacist terrorist entered a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and assassinated ten African Americans and wounded three more. He livestreamed his attack and posted a manifesto with the motivations behind his deadly political violence. This white supremacist violence was, in the view of the perpetrator, retaliation and a call for arms against the “great replacement” of white populations. The perpetrator saw “Jews” as orchestrating a nefarious plot that would eventually wipe out white populations, and, accordingly, his attack was “intended to terrorize all non-white, non-Christian people and get them to leave the country” (Associated Press, 2022). Like the growing list of white supremacist terrorists inspired by fears of being replaced, the Buffalo perpetrator considered nonwhite migration and higher fertility rates as tantamount to “white genocide”, believed in a eugenicist-Malthusian ecofascist worldview, and understood sexual diversity to be a threat to the white nation. Moreover, he was an avid visitor of 4chan/pol/, carved his weapons with racial slurs and symbols of white supremacy, livestreamed his attacks, and posted a manifesto in which he recycled the racial arguments of what he deemed his forebearers (and notably the Charleston, Christchurch, and Utøya terrorists who have made global headlines in the past decades). Both the modus operandi and the ideology behind this kind of white supremacist violence have, unfortunately, become more common. Contemporary population replacement conspiracy theories are on the rise: from Eurabia fantasies to Camus’ The Great Replacement , from “Jews will not replace us” (a rallying cry at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017) to “It’s the birth rates” (the opening of the Christchurch killer’s manifesto), white supremacist discourses are thriving and increasingly broadcasting in mainstream venues. They have been mobilized by political parties and (anti)social movements such as Generation Identity, Counter-jihad, and Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA) and are proliferating through imageboards, blogs, chat-rooms, messaging servers, and memes.