Review | ‘White genocide’ and ‘the great replacement’: a primer on the US alt-right movement
- Part glossary, part who’s who, George Hawley’s book The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know traces the roots of the US far-right movement
- He looks at white supremacists in the context of American political conservatism, and reports the internet has given racists new cohesion and a public voice
The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know, by George Hawley, Oxford, 3.5/5 stars
“The great replacement” is a term popularised by the French author Renaud Camus to denote the gradual destruction of Western civilisation by mass immigration. Given the differences in birth rates between white people and the non-white population, so the argument goes, it is only a matter of time before the latter outnumber and crush the former.
The concept has been a touchstone for European far-right groups such as Pegida, a Germany-based anti-Islam movement, and was cited recently by the alleged gunman in the recent mass murder in Christchurch. These groups’ counterparts in the US subscribe to the “white genocide” theory, which is pretty much identical. This deranged credo is unmistakably an incitement to violence, and there is every reason to believe that the threat is real.
In recent years a number of deadly attacks have been perpetrated by avowed white supremacists in the Anglo-Saxon world.
These include the murders of nine African American parishioners in a church in Charleston, in the US state of South Carolina, in 2015, of the British politician Jo Cox in 2016, of an anti-fascist activist at Charlottesville in the US state of Virginia in 2017, and allegedly of 11 Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in the US city of Pittsburgh in 2018.
