Abstract
In recent years, fears of the ‘great replacement’, popularised by Renaud Camus, warning against a supposed Islamist take-over of France, have motivated White supremacist violence and resulted in mass shootings in Europe, New Zealand and the US. The author shows how this conspiracy theory can be traced back to medieval theological doctrines used to justify the conquest of Muslim lands in Al-Andalus and later refined to warrant the European subjugation of the Indigenous nations of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Through papal authority, the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ bestowed a God-given right on Christian nations to take and control lands, wiping out or confining Indigenous people, to then repopulate countries at will − itself the real racial reversal of settler colonialism. The theological argument is now thoroughly secularised in law in the US. ‘A great replacement’, incorporating the Doctrine of Discovery coupled with eugenicist ideas, can be found in the works of Lothrop Stoddard, and echoes are found even today in utterances from US politicians and on Fox News.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Alexander Barder, Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 211.
2.
Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson Tonight , September 22, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_0iFBJPWoY.
3.
Cassie Miller and Rachel Carroll Rivas, “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2021,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/20220309/year-hate-extremism-2021.
4.
Greg Sargent, “A Texas Republican’s Vile Rant Shows ‘Great Replacement’ is Becoming GOP Dogma,” Washington Post , September 17, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/17/dan-patrick-great-replacement-theory/.
5.
Jon Skolnik, “How the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Went from Charlottesville to the GOP Mainstream,” Salon , September 21, 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/09/29/what-is-the-great-replacement-theory-and-why-is-it-gaining-ground-within-the-gop/.
6.
Tawia Ansah, “Violent Words: Strategies and Legal Impacts of White Supremacist Language,” Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law 28, no. 3 (2021): 330.
7.
Robert Papa, “What an Analysis of 377 Americans Arrested or Charged in the Capitol Insurrection Tells Us,” Washington Post , April 6, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/06/capitol-insurrection-arrests-cpost-analysis/.
8.
Skolnik, “How the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Went.”
9.
It should be noted that Camus’s ‘theory’, though extreme, was in line with the expression of racialised ideas in France since the late 1970s (when North African migrant workers began to settle) around Islam and Islamic symbols such as the veil, using France’s emphasis on laïcité (secularism, derived from the division of Church from state in 1905 and echoing sentiments since the 1789 Revolution) as justification. This and the trauma of the relatively recent (1961) war over Algerian independence appear to have opened up lines of racialised notions of Christian France stretching back to the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Shlomo Sand, The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houellebecq (London: Verso, 2018).
10.
James McAuley, “How Gay Icon Renaud Camus Became the Ideologue of White Supremacy,” The Nation , June 17, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/renaud-camus-great-replacement-brenton-tarrant/.
11.
Louis Betty, “Introduction: Renaud Camus, Enemy of the Disaster,” in Renaud Camus, Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings , trans. Louis Betty and Ethan Rundell (Blowing Rock, NC: Vauban Books, 2023), xiv.
12.
Ansah, “Violent Words,” 307. Another perspective is provided by Kathleen Belew who notes that the White Power movement of the 1980s and 1990s originated in the aftermath of the US war in Vietnam, when a narrative of the defeat of Whiteness due to government betrayal provided a basis for uniting disparate far-right groups. See Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 3.
13.
Charles Blow, “Tucker Carlson and White Replacement,” The New York Times , April 11, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/opinion/tucker-carlson-white-replacement.html.
14.
Barder, Global Race War , 17.
15.
Adam Miyashiro, “Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics,” Literature Compass 16, nos. 9−10 (2019): 1.
16.
Miyashiro, “Our Deeper Past,” 5, 3.
17.
Miyashiro, “Our Deeper Past,” 2. Legendary King Arthur would have been Celtic and Pagan and his court would have predated the existence of Islam.
18.
Miyashiro, “Our Deeper Past,” 5.
19.
Miyashiro, “Our Deeper Past,” 6.
20.
Legal scholar Robert Miller has defined the doctrine as ‘an international legal principle’ used by Europeans, and people of European descent, when they ‘set out to explore and exploit . . . lands . . . [to] justify their governmental and property claims over these territories and over the indigenous inhabitants’. Robert Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1.
21.
McAuley, “How.”
22.
Baudrillard wrote about the advent of the simulacra, objects that begin as ‘the reflection of a basic reality’ but ultimately come to replace reality altogether, so much so that they ultimately bear ‘no relation to any reality whatever’. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations , trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 11.
23.
Renaud Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! (Plieux, France: Chez l’auteur, 2018), 11, 15.
24.
Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! , 11.
25.
Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! , 14.
26.
Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! , 17, 16, 17, 16.
27.
Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! , 21.
28.
Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! , 17, italics original.
29.
Camus, You Will Not Replace Us! , 17.
30.
Mohammad Ballan, “Fraxinetum: An Islamic Frontier State in Tenth-Century Provence,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval & Renaissance Studies 41 (2010): 28−30.
31.
Susan Raven, Rome in Africa , 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1993), 129, 132−43, 188; Ronald Heine, Origen: Scholarship in the Service of the Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1, 156.
32.
In Niebuhr’s work the words Africa or African rarely appear at all, occurring just once in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness , twice in The Nature and Destiny of Man , and four times in Moral Man and Immoral Society . When they are used, they are connected either with twentieth-century European colonial politics or the history of chattel slavery, not with Christian theology itself. See James O’Sullivan, “Finding a Proper Political Augustinianism: An Exploration of Reinhold Niebuhr,” The Heythrop Journal LXI (2020): 35.
33.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, Vol. 1 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 243, 244.
34.
Renaud Camus, “The Great Replacement [2010],” in Camus, Enemy of the Disaster , 105.
35.
Camus, “The Great Replacement,” 105.
36.
Camus, “The Great Replacement,” 105.
37.
Camus, “The Great Replacement,” 107.
38.
Camus, “The Great Replacement,” 107, 104, 107; Renaud Camus, “Nocence, Instrument of the Great Replacement,” in Camus, Enemy of the Disaster , 142.
39.
Camus, “The Great Replacement,” 109−10.
40.
Camus, “The Great Replacement,” 129.
41.
Richard Wolin, “‘The Leprosy of the Soul in Our Time’: On the European Origins of the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory,” Los Angeles Review of Books , August 4, 2022, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-leprosy-of-the-soul-in-our-time-on-the-european-origins-of-the-great-replacement-theory/.
42.
Cedric Robinson argues that racial categories were a major category of social organisation in Europe by the sixteenth century as the ‘bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from others; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds’. At first, this racialisation occurred not so much in terms of the White–Black axis but more as the exaggeration of regional differences within Europe into ‘racial’ ones – for example, the Slavs construed as natural slaves. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 26.
43.
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011), ix, 1.
44.
Painter, The History of White People , 5.
45.
Painter, The History of White People , 5.
46.
Miller, Native America , 1.
47.
Steven Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008), 94. There is a growing body of scholarship on the Doctrine of Discovery. Robert Miller and Steven Newcomb, along with Peter d’Errico, can probably be described as the founding figures in its study. In addition to Newcomb’s book see his article: Steven Newcomb, “The Evidence of Christian Nationalism in Federal Indian Law: The Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. McIntosh , and Plenary Power,” New York Review of Law & Social Change 20, no. 2 (1992–1993): 303−42 and Peter d’Errico, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2022).
48.
Miller, Native America , 12.
49.
Papal bulls are documents issued by Popes that specify the official position of the Roman Catholic Church on a given matter. The name derives from the type of seal that was affixed to such documents during the Medieval era. The content of papal bulls varies greatly, ranging from statements of significant theological or legal importance to far more mundane matters such as the appointment of an abbot, the confirmation of specific privileges upon academic institutions, or the granting of safe conduct.For a concise and useful description of papal bulls see Lukasz Orlicki, “Papal Bull of Benedict XIII (1394–1417) from Grodno Castle,” Architectus 4, no. 68 (2021): 84−85.
50.
Joseph O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), xi. Vine Deloria, Jr. made the point that there is a continuity between the Doctrine of Discovery, though he does not use the term, and subsequent European and US imperial enterprises. ‘[T]he Crusades, the Age of Exploration, the Age of Imperialism, and the recent crusade against Communism’ are all rooted in the belief that ‘the peoples of Western Europe’ are ‘the guardians of the world’. Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion , 30th Anniversary ed. (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2003), 62.
51.
Miller, Native America , 12.
52.
For a discussion of the Northern Crusades see Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades , new ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1997).
53.
Miller, Native America , 12−13.
54.
Miller, Native America , 13.
55.
Miller, Native America , 14.
56.
Miller, Native America , 14.
57.
Miller, Native America , 15.
58.
Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 78.
59.
Settler colonialism itself rests upon ‘the logic of elimination’, the belief that ‘discovered’ lands were either empty or its Indigenous peoples were deserving to be replaced and/or exploited. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387.
60.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty , trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005 [1922]), 36.
61.Johnson v. M’Intosh , 21 U.S. 543, 5 L. Ed. 681, 1823 U.S. LEXIS 293, 8 Wheat. 543 (Supreme Court of the United States, February 28, 1823, Decided), https://advance-lexis-com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/api/document?collection=cases&id=urn:contentItem:3S4X-KPV0-003B-H09W-00000-00&context=1516831.
62.Johnson v. M’Intosh (see note 61 above). For a different view in relation to settler colonialism in Canada and Ireland, see Brenna Bhandar’s work, which argues that an ideology of improvement was central to settler colonial property law. ‘Whereas wasteland was free for appropriation, those who maintained subsistence modes of cultivation, for instance, were cast as in need of improvement through assimilation into a civilized (read English) population and ways of living.’ Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 36.
63.
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, https://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/resources/text.
64.
Barder, Global Race War , 42.
65.
Leonora Sansay, Secret History; Or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (Philadelphia, PA: Bradford & Inskeep, 1808), 2. The narrator, a young White woman from the United States, travels to the country following the revolution. ‘She finds it to be “the land of oppression” where society has collapsed, violence reigns, and there appears to be little hope for the future’ (104). In this desolation the natural order, as imagined by white supremacists, has been turned upside down and Black men rule ‘as masters’ (151). They inflict brutal violence upon White men who refuse to capitulate to their demands, enslave White women and drive ‘them forward with whips’, and brutalise and murder those same women if they reject their sexual advances (151).
66.
Raphael Hoermann, “‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic,” Slavery & Abolition 37, no. 1 (2016): 185, italics original.
67.
While Stoddard denied being a member of the Klan for many years, his involvement in the organisation was brought to light in 1923 by Hearst’s International . The magazine revealed that he not only belonged to the Klan but that he advised its leaders and that its members were encouraged to read The Rising Tide of Color. Michael Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 42. It is perhaps worth noting that Stoddard drew much of his inspiration from Madison Grant. Grant’s infamous book The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916) contains similar arguments to The Rising Tide of Color . Ironically, another person Stoddard drew inspiration from was W.E.B. Du Bois whose 1903 claim, ‘The Problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line’, in The Souls of Black Folk , the White supremacist echoed in his own work. Stoddard acknowledged his debt to the great scholar and even agreed to publicly debate with him. Du Bois subsequently demolished Stoddard. Ian Frazier, “When W. E. B. Du Bois Made a Laughing Stock of a White Supremacist,” The New Yorker , August 19, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist.
68.
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3.
69.
“Come Now, Let Us Reason Together,” The Kourier Magazine , March 1925, 5.
70.
Ansah, Violent Words , 313.
71.
Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), vi.
72.
Stoddard, The Rising Tide , vi.
73.
Stoddard, The Rising Tide , vi.
74.
Stoddard, The Rising Tide , 251.
75.
Stoddard, The Rising Tide , 251.
76.
Stoddard, The Rising Tide , 300, 307, iv, 307.
77.
Stoddard, The Rising Tide , 300, 266, 268, 267.
78.
Stoddard, The Rising Tide , 266.
79.
Stoddard, The Rising Tide , 267.
80.
Prescott Hall, “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics,” The Journal of Heredity (March 1919): 126 quoted in Stoddard, The Rising Tide , 259.
81.
Maria Elena Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre , Racial Violence, and Gendered Power,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 483.
82.
James Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 8. The year before the United States entered the second world war Stoddard published Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1940). It was based on his travels in the country during 1939 and 1940. In it he wrote approvingly of the nation’s eugenics courts, policies of forced sterilisation and ‘the physical elimination of the Jews from the Third Reich’, even going so far to complain that the Nazi’s policies were ‘too conservative’ (189, 196).
83.Tucker Carlson Tonight , September 22, 2021.
84.Tucker Carlson Tonight , September 22, 2021.
85.
In 2021 there were approximately 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Of these, approximately 4 million came from Mexico and about another 3.6 million were from the Caribbean, Central America or South America (Jeffery Passel and Jens Manual Krogstad, “What We Know about Unauthorized Immigrants Living in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, November 16, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/). Given the racial make-up of their countries of origin, a large percentage of these individuals can be assumed either to have one or more Indigenous ancestor or be part of an Indigenous community themselves. In Mexico, for instance, the population overwhelmingly has an Indigenous ancestry (Martin Bodner et al., “The Mitochondrial DNA Landscape of Modern Mexico,” Genes 12, no. 9 (2021): 1453). Prior to the European colonisation of the western hemisphere, Indigenous people moved freely between what is Mexico and the United States, a fact also attested by, amongst other things, the nature of numerous Indigenous languages. The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest sets of languages in the hemisphere. It stretches from California to Central America, a testament to the ancient migratory patterns of the peoples who spoke some of the languages that comprise it (Simon J. Greenhill et al., “A Recent Northern Origin for the Uto-Aztecan Family,” Languages 99, no. 1 (March 2023): 81−107).
86.
A significant alternative historiography of Whiteness, which emphasises its forging through historical processes by which different nationalities of settlers in the US, acted to distinguish themselves from Blacks; see David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 2007).
87.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1.
88.
Taylor, A Secular Age , 3.
89.
Dana Lloyd, “City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York,” Doctrine of Discovery Project, October 19, 2022, https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/sherrill-v-oneida-opinion-of-the-court/. See https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/law/ for an overview of the US legal cases since 2005 that have cited the doctrine.