WaPo: The strange tale of an unlikely racist slogan that went viral -- to lethal effect
"Every wave of terrorism has its intellectual point of departure. For al-Qaeda’s attacks in the West, it was Osama bin Laden’s seminal Declaration of Jihad of 1996; in the case of Islamic State-inspired terrorism, it was the announcement of the Islamic caliphate in 2014. The current wave of white-supremacist terrorism, which recently manifested itself in lethal attacks against mosques in New Zealand and a synagogue near San Diego, can be traced back to a much-less-well-known event.
It was a chilly November day in 2014 when the French writer Renaud Camus addressed an audience of roughly 500 people at a summit organized by the European white-nativist movement Generation Identity in Paris. At this so-called Remigration meeting, Camus warned of the ethnic, cultural and civilizational substitution of the white European people. He blamed what he called (in his eponymous 2012 book) “the Great Replacement” on the actions and policies of the political, media, industrial and intellectual elites.
“The Great Replacement is the most serious crisis that France has witnessed in 15 centuries,” Camus announced grandly in his speech, putting quite the revisionist spin on the Black Plague, Robespierre and Nazi occupation. The gay travel writer turned philosopher of xenophobia has seen his ideas migrate, as it were, across the Atlantic in recent years to lend the pretense of intellectual heft to the alt-right. “You will not replace us,” one of the slogans chanted by white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017, was a variation on a theme Camus started.
In response to the perceived existential threat of white Europeans being supplanted by nonwhite immigrants, Generation Identity vowed “to work on the diffusion of our concepts among our compatriots and the development of tools for those in power tomorrow.” They’ve been busy ever since. Campaigns to disseminate distorted statistics allegedly proving the Great Replacement started, and the Identitarian concept of “remigration” have accelerated in the past five years, as have calls on social media for the mass deportation of nonwhite Europeans — ethnic cleansing, in essence."
More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/14/strange-tale-an-unlikely-racist-slogan-that-went-viral-lethal-effect/?utm_term=.4a7bba48c854
