The Politics of Replacement: Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right) 103230619X, 9781032306193

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THE POLITICS OF REPLACEMENT The Politics of Replacement explores current demographic conspiracy theories and their entanglement with diferent forms of racism and exclusionary politics such as sexism. The book focuses on population replacement conspiracy theories, that is, those imaginaries and discourses centered on the idea that the national population is under threat of being overtaken or even wiped out by those considered as “alien” to the nation and that this is the result of concerted eforts by “elites”. Replacement conspiracy theories are on the rise again: from Eurabia fantasies to Renaud Camus’ The Great Replacement, white supremacist discourses are thriving and increasingly broadcasting in mainstream venues. To account for their rise and spread, this edited volume brings together research on various dimensions of population replacement conspiracy theories: diferent theoretical and methodological approaches, diferent social scientifc and humanities (inter) disciplinary backgrounds, diferent geographical case studies (across Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and Oceania), diferent time periods (medieval archives, colonial archives, Nazi archives, postcolonial migrations, post-9/11), and diferent forms of racialization and racisms (Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism against migrants and refugees). It also explores the entanglement of population replacement discourse with gendered violence. The book is organized into four sections: (1) exploring the historical background of the current rise of demographic conspiracy theories; (2) tracing the (neoliberal) governmentalities in and through which replacement discourse operates; (3) analyzing the particularly intense focus on the threat of Muslims in contemporary replacement conspiracy theories, and (4) investigating the connection between replacement conspiracies, gender, and violence. This title is essential reading for scholars, journalists, and activists interested in the contemporary far right, conspiracy theories, and racisms. Sarah Bracke is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is the principal investigator of the research project EnGendering Europe’s “Muslim Question”, funded by the Dutch Research Council. Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar is an associate researcher at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder, Germany. He holds a PhD in sociology by the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. His research interests focus on racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism, conspiracy theories, and the far right.

Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right Series editors: Nigel Copsey Teesside University, UK and Graham Macklin Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo, Norway

This book series focuses upon national, transnational, and global manifestations of fascist, far right, and right-wing politics primarily within a historical context but also drawing on insights and approaches from other disciplinary perspectives. Its scope also includes anti-fascism, radical-right populism, extreme-right violence and terrorism, cultural manifestations of the far right, and points of convergence and exchange with the mainstream and traditional right. Global Heating and the Australian Far Right Imogen Richards, Gearóid Brinn and Callum Jones Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities History and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe Edited by Anders Ahlbäck and Kasper Braskén Argentina’s Right-Wing Universe During the Democratic Period (1983–2023) Processes, Actors and Issues Gisela Pereyra Doval and Gastón Souroujon The Politics of Replacement Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars Edited by Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-inFascism-and-the-Far-Right/book-series/FFR

THE POLITICS OF REPLACEMENT Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars

Edited by Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar

Designed cover image: © Minahil Munir Hamdani 2023 First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bracke, Sarah, editor. | Hernandez Aguilar, Luis Manuel, editor. Title: The politics of replacement : demographic fears, conspiracy theories, and race wars / edited by Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge studies in fascism and the far right | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2023033609 (print) | LCCN 2023033610 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032306193 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032304069 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003305927 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration—Public opinion. | Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. | Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | Immigration opponents. | Demography—Social aspects. | White supremacy movements. | Conspiracy theories. Classifcation: LCC JV6255 .P653 2024 (print) | LCC JV6255 (ebook) | DDC 325—dc23/eng/20230926 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033609 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033610 ISBN: 978-1-032-30619-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-30406-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-30592-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Contributors The Politics of Replacement: From “Race Suicide” to the “Great Replacement” Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar

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1

PART I

Genealogies of Replacement

21

1 Malthusian Fears in Current Migration Debates: Contemporary Manifestations of Malthusianization Soumaya Majdoub

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2 Das Boot ist voll, The Boat Is Full: Genealogy and Policy Consequences of an Ecological-Nativist Paradigm Esther Romeyn

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3 Birth Rates and the Cleansing of Impure Blood: Shaping the “Muslim Question” in the Balkans Dino Suhonic

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4 “Reverse Colonization”: Early Narratives of Decline in the French New Right Lou Mousset

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Contents

5 European Histories, Australian Anxieties: The Christchurch Killer in Context Jack Wilson and Louie Dean Valencia

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6 Ecofascism and the Politics of Replacement in the Discourse of the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) Sindre Bangstad and Maria Darwish

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PART II

Technologies of Replacement 7 Colonial Census and Safron Demography: The Shaping of Numerical Communities and Contestations in India Sayan Das 8 The Majority Oppressed? On the Legitimacy of Majority Rights Tamar de Waal and Jan Willem Duyvendak 9 The Afordances of Replacement Narratives: How the White Genocide and Great Replacement Theories Converge in Poorly Moderated Online Milieus Emillie de Keulenaar and Marc Tuters 10 Mainstreaming the Great Replacement: The Role of Centrist Discourses in the Mainstreaming of a FarRight Conspiracy Theory Nik Linders 11 From Clashing Civilizations to the Replacement of Populations: The Transformation of Dutch AntiImmigration Discourse Merijn Oudenampsen

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125

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PART III

Islamophobia and Replacement

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12 The Body Never “Falls Out” of Islamophobia Sahar Ghumkhor

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Contents

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13 The Gastro-Politics of Replacement: How Imaginations of a Muslim Takeover Become “Real” Through Food Margaretha A. van Es

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14 Striving for Transparency: Mosques as Sites of Public Interrogation in Contemporary Germany Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla

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15 The Great Supersession: Racialization and Replacement in American Evangelical Islamophobia S. Jonathon O’Donnell

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PART IV

The Gendered Violence of Replacement

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16 Fascism and the Violent Replacement of The People Mattias Gardell

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17 “A Victory for White Life”: Reproduction, Replacement, and a Handmaid’s Tale Sarah Bracke

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18 The King of Tars: A Medieval Rendition of Replacement Theories Anya Topolski

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While every book takes a village, this book is a collective efort in more ways than we can tell. This volume grew out of an international conference which we organized as part of the research project EnGendering Europe’s “Muslim Question”, funded by the Dutch Research Council. The conference, titled The Politics of Replacement: Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars, was initially scheduled to take place in June 2020. The global COVID-19 pandemic decided otherwise – in conditions of uncertainty we remained in touch with the speakers as we were trying to assess if, when, and how we would be able to bring all these scholars together. Eventually, we were able to organize the gathering on June 28–29, 2021, in a hybrid manner, and with the immense joy of having physical encounters in Amsterdam. We are profoundly grateful to our keynote speakers, Mattias Gardell, Falguni Sheth, and Jasmin Zine, who shared their brilliant and incisive insights and whose scholarship has been crucial to us to think about the current conjuncture, as well as the great respondents who generously and perceptively engaged with them, Nadia Fadil and Anya Topolski. We are thankful to all the speakers who presented their important and timely work: Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla, Sayan Das, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Sahar Ghumkhor, Nikolaus Hagen, Yuliya Hilevych, Ajmal Hussain, Emillie de Keulenaar, Aleksandra Lewicki, Nik Linders, Leo Lucassen, Soumaya Majdoub, Paul Mepschen, Annelies Moors, Lou Mousset, S. Jonathon O’Donnell, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Esther Romeyn, Gerwin van Schie, Dino Suhonic, Paula Thompson, Waqas Tufail, Marc Tuters, Louie Dean Valencia, Tamar de Waal, Jack Wilson, and Anna-Esther Younes. They were fortunate to have awesome respondents to whom we remain indebted: Saskia Bonjour, Margaretha A. van Es, Martijn de Koning, Jan-Therese Mendes, Merijn Oudenampsen, Lana Sirri, and Josias Tembo.

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This scholarly gathering would not have been possible without the labour of Pilar D’Alò, Sherilyn Deen, Roxane Kroon, Lou Mousset, Aslıhan Öztürk, and Berna Toprak, who not only chaired the panel sessions with care but also represent a next generation of scholars to whom we look with awe and hope. Throughout the process of setting up scholarly exchange and conversations, we have felt, and continue to feel, the support of the Race, Religion, and Secularism Network, hosted at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, which is a precious intellectual community, initiated by Anya Topolski and doing what she does best, weaving connections. Institutions have supported all this work: the research was fnanced by the Dutch Research Council through a Vici grant (016.Vici.185.077) and hosted by the University of Amsterdam, and notably by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). We are grateful to Routledge and in particular Craig Fowlie, Nigel Copsey, and Graham Macklin, series editors of Studies in Fascism and the Far Right, for their keen interest in producing this book. The anonymous reviewers who engaged with the manuscript and Elizabeth Hart, who supported us in preparing the manuscript for publication, are much appreciated. The making of this book is difcult to imagine without the intelligence, care, and dedication of Iza Munir Hamdani: a collection of research papers became a book in her capable and magic hands. We were very fortunate that Minahil Munir Hamdani was willing to create artwork for the book cover – a striking image entitled Identity Dissolution. Last but not least, as editors of this book, we are grateful for the joy that writing and thinking together bring us. This is a book about devastating racial politics and forms of dehumanization and the violence and death they bring about, which are deeply entrenched in our societies. Many of the following pages were hard to write and to edit and are hard to read. In this light, and with a yearning for fnding the cracks where the light comes in, we wish to dedicate this book to the young ones whom we, within our Vici research team, have the privilege to parent. As they learn how to navigate this complex world, we wish them the knowledge and confdence that mestizaje not only ofers a greater chance for breathable futures but also another way of looking at this world, which has been entangled and interdependent all along. For Amélie-Hanan, Rafael, Amelia, Yunuen, Destan, Ali Ruhi, and Souraya Mae. Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar Amsterdam and Berlin, March 2023

CONTRIBUTORS

Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla is based in Berlin, Germany. He studied flm, history, and Islamic studies. He is currently a doctoral fellow at the Berlin Graduate School for Muslim Cultures and Societies at FU Berlin, Germany. His research interests encompass Islam in Europe, queer theory, and flm in the Arab world. Sindre Bangstad is an anthropologist, a research professor at KIFO (Institute for Church, Religion and Worldview Research) in Oslo, Norway, and the 2022–2023 Stanley J. Kelley Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Teaching of Anthropology at Princeton University, U.S.A. Sarah Bracke is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She was the director of the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality between 2019 and 2022. She is the principal investigator of the research project EnGendering Europe’s “Muslim Question”, funded by the Dutch Research Council. Maria Darwish is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Örebro University, Sweden. She examines how positive emotions structure gender, race, and human-nonhuman relations within ecofascist thought and how this production of meaning serves to construct a Nordic ecofascist narrative and mainstream ecofascist ideas. Darwish holds a master’s degree in gender studies from the University of Oslo, Norway. Sayan Das is a research scholar at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He is a medical graduate with

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further qualifcations in occupational health and public health. He is currently engaged with complexity theory, health systems research, and sustainability studies for his doctoral research at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health (CSMCH), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India. Emillie de Keulenaar is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Open Intelligence Lab and Digital Methods Initiative, and a research consultant for the UN DPPA Innovation Cell. Her research lies on the formation of speech norms in platform content moderation and their impact in the formation of online counter-spheres. Tamar de Waal is assistant professor of legal theory at the Amsterdam Law School, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is director of the Amsterdam Honours College of Law. She is the author of Integration Requirements for Immigrants in Europe: A Legal-Philosophical Inquiry (Hart, 2021). Jan Willem Duyvendak is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). In 2022 he was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book is The Return of the Native: Can Liberalism Safeguard U.S. Against Nativism? (Oxford University Press, 2022). Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar is an associate researcher at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder, Germany. He holds a PhD in sociology by the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research interests focus on racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism, conspiracy theories, and the far right. He is the author of Governing Muslims and Islam in Contemporary Germany: Race, Time, and the German Islam Conference (Brill, 2018). Mattias Gardell is Distinguished Professor in Comparative Religion and senior researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism, Uppsala University, Sweden. An awarded expert on religion, politics, racism, and violence, Gardell has explored felds such as black and white radical nationalism, esoteric fascism, political nostalgia, Islamophobia, torture history, and the entangled history of racism and religion. He has published eleven monographs and more than a hundred essays and book chapters. His latest publications include Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide (2021), “‘The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire’: Violence and Passion in Contemporary Swedish Fascist Fiction”, Fascism (10:1, 2021); and “Esoteric Nordic Fascism: The Second Coming of Hitler and the Idea of the People”, Nordic Fascism (Routledge, 2022).

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Contributors

Sahar Ghumkhor is based in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research explores the intersections of race, psychoanalysis, and political violence. Nik Linders is a PhD candidate in gender and diversity studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is currently working on a project investigating the role of gender and sexuality in populist radical-right parties. His research interests include processes of radicalization, the mainstreaming of radical/extremist ideas, and climate justice. Soumaya Majdoub is a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium, Interface Demography, and the Universitat de Barcelona School of Economics, Spain, where she conducts research on Malthusian thinking and the political economy and ecology of migration. Her research is at the intersection of demography, human geography, political economy, and ecology, with a focus on the relationship between population growth and pressure, economic development and international migration, on the one hand, and the political and public discourse on (climate) migration, on the other. Lou Mousset is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she is part of the project EnGendering Europe’s “Muslim Question”, and she is also a PhD candidate at the University Paris 8, France. She studies nationalism and sexuality among French contemporary political thinkers. S. Jonathon O’Donnell, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom, specializes in researching the intersection of religious demonologies and material systems of dehumanization. They are the author of Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare (Fordham University Press, 2021) and a dozen articles in journals such as Religion, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Political Theology. Merijn Oudenampsen is a political scientist and sociologist specialized in the study of political ideas. He wrote The Rise of the Dutch New Right (Routledge 2021) on the ideas behind the Dutch swing to the right. He is currently a Marie Curie fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, writing a book on the Dutch neoliberal turn. Esther Romeyn is an associate instructional professor at the Center for European Studies, University of Florida, United States. Romeyn’s research and publications converge around an interest in the importance of narratives in ordering political realities and forging collective identities. She deciphers the discourses embedded in collective memory practices and the representation

Contributors

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of migrants and refugees in migration debates, media, and flm and traces the intellectual genealogies, ideational fault lines, and contestations of which they are the expression. Dino Suhonic completed his master’s of science in sociology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is currently developing a PhD project from his master thesis in sociology of gender and sexuality, titled Queering the “Muslim Question”. He is interested in the intersection of race, religion, gender, and sexuality. Anya Topolski is an associate professor at Radboud University, the Netherlands. Her research is on race-religion, dehumanization, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. Her recent books include Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality (Rowman & Littlefeld, 2015) and Is There a Judeo-Christian Tradition? (De Gruyter, 2016). She is the principal investigator of the Race-Religion Constellation and the Racial Quotas projects, funded by the Dutch Research Council. Marc Tuters is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Media Studies, the Netherlands. His current research concerns radical political subcultures online, which he explores through digital methods in afliation with researchers at the Open Intelligence Lab and the Digital Methods Initiative. Louie Dean Valencia is an associate professor of Digital History at Texas State University in the United States. He earned a PhD in European history from Fordham University in New York City, United States, and is interested in countercultures and how they afect society at large, particularly through the cultural production of avant-garde, popular, queer, digital, and youth cultures. His books include Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing With Fascism (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories (Routledge, 2020). Margaretha A. van Es works as an assistant professor of religious studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has studied anti-Muslim sentiments in Europe for over ten years. Her current research focuses on the emergence of trendy, alcohol-free halal restaurants in Rotterdam through the lens of cosmopolitanism and the politics of belonging. Jack Wilson is a cultural theorist and PhD researcher at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, UK. He is interested in the variegated articulations of far-right and conspiracy-theorist extremism as well as questions of memory, temporality, and technological form. He is based in Bristol, UK.

THE POLITICS OF REPLACEMENT From “Race Suicide” to the “Great Replacement” Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar

Aims of the Volume1

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 Bufalo 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 DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-1

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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, chatrooms, messaging servers, and memes. This book ofers insight into such conspiracy theories as well as their current traction. It engages questions like: what histories do we need to consider for understanding contemporary population replacement conspiracy theories? What are the relevant geopolitical contexts that give rise to them? Which diferent shapes and contents do replacement conspiracy theories take? How can we understand the circulation of these conspiracy theories, both over time and in between national spaces? The Politics of Replacement takes on these and many other questions as we explore current demographic conspiracy theories and their entanglement with diferent forms of racism and sexism. We do so with the aim of providing a solid cartography – which, following feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2002), we understand as a theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present – that enables a deeper understanding of what is at stake in contemporary population replacement conspiracy theories. We approach population replacement conspiracy theories as those imaginaries and discourses centred on the idea that the national population is under threat of being overtaken or even wiped out by those considered as “alien” to the national body as well as the idea that changes in population dynamics are not the outcome of organic processes but rather the consequences of plots devised by powerful actors. While population replacement conspiracy theories have taken diferent forms and signatures – such as Umvolkung/omvolking, white genocide/suicide, Eurabia, Islamization, The Great Replacement, Safron Demography, Love Jihad, Demographic Jihad, Bevolkerung verdunnung, or the Kalergi Plan, to name but a few – the imaginaries and discourses of such conspiracy theories consistently rely on the production of ontological distinctions between those who belong to the nation versus those who are “alien”. Such distinctions are both rooted in long embodied histories, with notably “the Jew” and “the Muslim” as aliens par excellence in European history, and are also versatile, operating along the lines of how Stuart Hall has conceptualized race as a foating signifer (Hall 1997; see also Laclau & Moufe 2001). Replacement conspiracy theories, in other words, are entangled with questions of race and racialization. While they have been developed in the context of the demonization of the “non-European Other” and the closing of the Western borders, they have not been confned to that context: they are extremely preoccupied with delineating the racial makeup of the national body, also beyond European/white contexts (see, for instance, Safron Demography in India, explored by Das in this volume). In this vein, they are invariably concerned with policing the crossing of the material and symbolic borders of the

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racialized nation and, notably, with discussions about migration. At the same time, the imaginaries and discourses of population replacement conspiracy theories are preoccupied with the reproduction of that nation and, notably, with questions about who should procreate more and whose procreation is alarming and should be halted, thus implying racially diferentiated visions on the regulation of women’s bodies and sexual practices. As a result, population replacement conspiracy theories are as much about the regulation of gender and sexuality as they are about race and racialization. In this sense, engaging with the multiple histories and articulations of population replacement conspiracy theories means undertaking an analysis of the convoluted relations between gender, sexuality, race, and the conceptualization of the nation. This book aims to account for (the rise and development of) contemporary replacement conspiracy theories by bringing together new and variegated scholarship that addresses population replacement discourses or engages relevant topics for understanding these conspiracy theories. The volume consists of case studies from diferent social scientifc and humanities (inter)disciplinary backgrounds, working with diferent geographical case studies (across Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and Oceania), focusing on diferent time periods (medieval archives, colonial archives, Nazi archives, postcolonial migrations, and post-9/11), engaging with diferent forms of racialization and racisms (Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism against migrants and refugees), and drawing on diferent theoretical and methodological approaches.2 Eighteen chapters analyze the convoluted history, formation, and spread of conspiracy theories that postulate that there are concerted eforts to replace populations, notably white populations, by Muslims, migrants, refugees, and generally racialized Others. These contributions provide an interdisciplinary critical engagement with the theoretical foundations, entangled histories, and empirical manifestations of contemporary conspiracy theories fuelled by racism. Taken together, they ofer an understanding of where these conspiracy theories come from, how they travel, how they work and gain traction, and how questions of race, gender, and sexuality are (re)fgured in the process. The Palimpsest of Population Replacement

Population replacement conspiracy theories come in many diferent versions. Their transnational and versatile character, moreover, can pose scholarly difculties in the systematization and analysis of a discourse that is so dispersed, uneven, and continually morphing. Specifc dimensions of population replacement discourses are mobilized in some contexts and at certain moments, while others remain in the background or are absent. On far-right channels on the internet, for instance, Jews are often constructed as the evil masterminds behind the global replacement of white populations, while this feature of conspiracy theories fades or is absent in more mainstream

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articulations such as the books authored by Bat Ye’or or Thilo Sarrazin. While the former relies heavier on the structure of conspiracy theories, the latter draws on eugenics, Islamophobia, and neo-Malthusianism. This begs the question of whether, in efect, these discourses should be understood and studied altogether. We approach this broad and variegated feld as discourse and incitement to discourse, in a Foucauldian sense (Foucault 2010). These conspiracy theories can be seen as articulations of racialized knowledge built upon other historical archives and narratives aspiring to become regimes of truth, entangled with and marshalling various subject positions and subjectivities, while being embedded in and crafting power relations and calls for action. Elsewhere (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020) we have proposed the metaphor-concept of the palimpsest to account for the continuous shifting dimensions, or layers, of the population replacement discourse. The palimpsest of population replacement stands in as a piece of writing in constant re-making while keeping the core ideas intact: the white (masculine) Western world is declining, and such decline is not accidental but rather the outcome of a nefarious plot deploying migration and birth rates as warfare tactics. The material upon which the population replacement discourse is written and rewritten is made of conspiratorial parchment, so to speak. The structural narrative of the palimpsest, in other words, has been modelled on the structure of conspiracy theories; that is, a discourse operating under the assumption that “the fate of governments, institutions and society as a whole is secretly determined by a small group of individuals bound by a common purpose and interests” (Soyer 2019, 5). Accordingly, the replacement of whites by nonwhites is explicated as the outcome of diferent actors, acting in varying degrees of secrecy, plotting, and commitment to fulfl this process. Very often, population replacement discourse identifes Jews as the main actors in this respect, and one key characteristic of the palimpsest is the recycling and reworking of antisemitic conspiracy theories. The palimpsest as a metaphor-concept allows us to approach the population replacement discourse as a historical and contemporary archive that is expanded in real time, enlarging and acquiring new meanings in every novel iteration while leaving enough blank space to remain an unfnished palimpsest open to be re-inscribed. Every new iteration of population replacement discourse, either in the form of a meme, a blog, a book, a political platform, or a manifesto, thus reveals itself as a bricolage of older and new scripting. When reading Renaud Camus’ Le grand remplacement, it is, for instance, possible to decipher Guillaume Faye’s La colonisation de l’Europe (see Lou Mousset in this volume) as well as Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des saints. And similarly, when reading Thilo Sarrazin’s (2010) Deutschland schaft sich ab, one can detect the scribbles of Francis Galton, as well as the Malthusian archive being overwritten by the pen of an author who resents the presence of Muslims in Germany.

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It is possible to discern shared layers or inscriptions in this palimpsest. In this volume, and at the conference from which this volume emerged, we have made sense of the variety of contributions through three concepts: race wars, demographic fears, and apocalyptic visions. First and foremost, these conspiracy theories are centred on a “race war” frame (Foucault 1997; Sheth 2011): the palimpsest of population replacement invariably rests upon an ontologically binary understanding of social and political reality where one front seeks to destroy-replace the other. As mentioned, this Other can be feshed out in diferent ways: the motility and polyvalent mobility (Stoler 1995) of this discourse can craft racialized enemies out of migrants and refugees, Muslims and Jews, or Latinxs and African Americans. These conspiracy theories, moreover, are animated by demographic fears. The concern with demography revolves around two population processes: population migration and natural population growth. Population replacement conspiracy theories problematize migration and, notably, nonwhite/ Muslim migration to the West, which is constructed as a strategic warfare tactic (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2022). At the same time, these conspiracy theories are centred on questions of fertility and birth rates. Within its frame of war, the population replacement palimpsest posits birth rates, and, in particular, Muslim birth rates, as a combative strategy to replace populations. The framing of “demographic jihad” necessitates at least two further discursive elements: Muslim male hypersexuality and Muslim female hyperfertility (de Hart 2017; Bonjour & Bracke 2020; Bracke & Hernandez Aguilar 2020; Hark & Villa 2020). Many versions of the population replacement discourse, moreover, articulate a deliberate critique of feminism, as it is conceived of as an ideology proselytizing European women to not have (white) children, thus negatively afecting birth rates (Hark & Villa 2020; Roth 2021) and the reproduction of the white nation. Finally, weaving together issues of race, migration, and sexuality/fertility, population replacement conspiracy theories present apocalyptic visions of the imminent destruction of the racialized nations and, in particular, the white/ Western nation. The conspiracy theories seek to describe the upcoming rapture of the West; the destruction of its values, ideas, norms, culture and whatnot; and the replacement of “native” European and Western populations, for which this hostile takeover (Sarrazin 2018) stands in for the end of times (see O’Donnell in this volume). This apocalyptic impulse, moreover, contains a call for solutions: as a discursive problematization, the population replacement discourse calls for politics to solve, in a myriad of ways, the upcoming destruction of the West. These “solutions” range from harsher migration policies, positive and negative eugenics techniques, and targeted terrorist violence. This approach to population replacement conspiracy theories, moreover, enables us to contribute to the existing knowledge in at least three ways. First, while there are informative and critical analyses of diferent versions

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of the population replacement discourse, the metaphor-concept of the palimpsest allows us to think about the diferent signatures and versions of the discourse together, within the context of a transnational Western discursive formation on white decline mounted on white supremacy. Second, the study of diferent signatures of population replacement has been compartmentalized by disciplinarian approaches. Most of the scholarship dealing with Eurabia and Islamization comes from Islamophobia studies (Carr 2006; Fekete 2012; Larsson 2012; Bangstad 2012, 2013, 2019; van Buuren 2013; ZiaEbrahimi 2018), whereas studies delving into “the great replacement” have emerged mostly from the study of conspiracy theories and populism (Davey & Ebner 2019; Ekman 2022). Both the concept of the palimpsest as well as the interdisciplinary character of this volume enable us to draw upon different disciplinary insights and approaches. Finally, the existing scholarship on the population replacement discourse necessitates a deeper analytical engagement with gender and sexuality as categories of analysis, especially with respect to how these categories shape and structure conspiracy theories (Thiem 2020). This is a crucial analytical gap to be explored and researched, especially given the increased visibility of questions of gender in relation to far-right politics, such as the instrumentalization of gender issues for racial propaganda, the backlash against feminism, and the underlying understandings of racialized masculinity and femininity part and parcel of population replacement discourses. This volume contributes to these explorations. A Genealogy of Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories

This multilayered understanding of what population replacement conspiracy theories consist of brings us to a complex genealogy with many articulations of diferent strands of thought. In ideological terms, the population replacement discourse is nurtured by a wide range of bodies of literature such as Malthusianism, eugenics, social Darwinism, Orientalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and overall racism, the clash of civilization thesis, ecofascism, and some versions of evangelical eschatology, to name only some of the most important strands, which are further discussed in the following chapters. As this book aims to provide a solid framework for understanding contemporary population replacement conspiracy theories and where they come from, we fnd it important to not only conceptualize what population replacement conspiracies are but also to (re)construct a genealogy that enables an analytical grip on the emergence and development of these conspiracy theories – in other words, to reconstruct a history of the present (Foucault 1995). Genealogies are always situated, in the sense that they are particular ways of organizing and presenting histories that are invariably more complex and messier than a clear-cut or linear scheme allows for and that could also be organized and presented in diferent ways (Foucault 1995; Stoler 2016).

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The genealogy we work with here is shaped by an analytic which attends to two dimensions, that is, making visible relevant geopolitical forces that shape discursive articulations and providing the outlines of an intellectual history that connects diferent recursions of these conspiracy theories centred on the gendered and sexualized white fears of racialized Others and the desires for white supremacy. Our genealogy, moreover, is also informed by three characteristics of our own scholarship: a focus on the study of Islamophobia and the “Muslim Question”, the study of Europe, and the study of the contemporary era. In this genealogy, we discern four crucial junctures. First, versions of population replacement conspiracy theories as we know them today emerged at the turn of the 19th century when the establishment of modern nationalism in the West concurred with the high days of European colonialism and imperialism. Such versions of replacement conspiracy theories are articulated in relation to a modern understanding of the nation as ethnically and racially homogenous and relying on the insights from scientifc racism. Some of the most well known intellectual references for this early moment of population replacement conspiracies are written in the context of the British and French empires. In 1893, Charles Henry Pearson, who taught at both Oxford and Cambridge before emigrating to Australia, published his book National Life and Character: A Forecast. Pearson argued that the so-called “higher races” were in decline and would be overpowered by the so-called “Black and Yellow races” through their population increase and, in the case of China, through industrial development. The book, with its “white man under siege” theme, became very infuential. Similar ideas were developed within French nationalism of the early 1900s, particularly in the work of Maurice Barrès, who believed the French national character was harmed by immigration and miscegenation, made various claims in favour of racial purity, and propagated antisemitism and antisemitic conspiracy theories – all of this in the frame of the unfolding European “Jewish Question”. The point is not simply that these forms of nationalist thinking were articulated in increasingly racist ways but that the fantasies of racial purity and fears of white people becoming a minority – “under siege” – were cultivated during a time of colonization.3 Fears of being “taken over” haunted colonial projects that efectively took over and often wiped out native populations and societal structures. As Anne McClintock (1995) argues, the colonial enterprise was branded by the unresolved entanglement between white male megalomania and anxious paranoia; violent colonial expansion entangled with deep-seated fears and anxieties of being replaced by the Other. National Life and Character was, indeed, shaped by the colonial context, as it was written a few decades after Pearson had frst settled in the Australian colonies. Moreover, the “deep American roots of replacement thinking” (Lucassen 2022, 20) also point to the signifcance of (European) settler colonialism for the historical development of these conspiracy theories. As Leo Lucassen

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(2022) lays out, from the 1880s onwards, the ongoing immigration from Europe, and, in particular, migration from Eastern and Southern European countries, increasingly became a matter of concern among scholars, politicians, and journalists. In 1891, the economist and statistician Francis Amasa Walker, who served as commissioner of Indian afairs and led the U.S. Census twice before becoming the third president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was the frst to compile a comprehensive statistical case for what soon would be known as “race suicide” (Weinbaum 2004). The term race suicide itself was coined in 1900 by the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, who further developed the concept in his 1901 essay “The Causes of Race Superiority”, in which he warned of the degeneration of Anglo-Saxons in the U.S., notably if Chinese and Japanese labour migration was allowed to continue. The essay made a case, as Weinbaum (2004, 71–72) puts it, that the “immigration of unassimilable elements must cease; meanwhile, AngloSaxons must reproduce a racially superior nation with haste”. The concept of “race suicide” gained signifcant traction in the following years; it was, for instance, mobilized by Theodore Roosevelt in diferent speeches and essays. Its best known usage is perhaps in Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History published in 1916. The U.S. was a “Nordic country”, according to Grant, populated by what he considered as the superior “Nordic race”, which was committing “race suicide” as it was “outbred” by immigrants and the other so-called “inferior races”, including “inferior white races”, such as the “Alpine and Mediterranean races”. The book was infuential in various ways, including its impact on the racist immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 that would restrict immigration from Asia and Eastern Europe and, notably, of Jews from Eastern Europe (Lucassen 2022, 16). In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard, a follower of Grant, member of the American Eugenics Society and the Ku Klux Klan, and a founding member of the American Birth Control League, articulated one of the most pristine historical examples of population replacement with The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy, in which he postulates the demographic growth of people of “colour” as an existential threat to white supremacy. The second juncture of our genealogy is marked by the rise to (totalitarian) power of such racist worldviews and the development of these strands of nationalism into fascism. In the aftermath of the First World War, European nationalist conficts as well as struggles over colonies continued to brew, while scientifc racism had become the dominant episteme (Gilman & Thomas 2016). In Nazi Germany, Hitler referred to The Passing of the Great Race as “my bible” (Lucassen 2022, 18), and Albert Brackmann, nationalist German historian and Nazi ideologue, developed the idea of Umvolkung (which would literally translate to “ethnic/national inversion”). Originally, Umvolkung was a concept-proposal to “Germanize” what Brackmann

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deemed as “German-friendly” populations, that is, Eastern Europeans at the border, which also included expelled Eastern Jews. In subsequent years, however, the term Umvolkung would be reworked to explicitly denote the fear of white (German) populations being replaced by others. This intellectual labour was notably done by demographer Friedrich Wilhelm Burgdörfer in three crucial books for the intellectual elaboration and propagation of population replacement discourses: The Decline of the Birth Rate and its Combat – The Vital Question of the German People published in 1929, Are White People Dying: The Future of White and Coloured People in Light of Biological Statistics published in 1934, and German People in Need published in 1935.4 Here, the re-articulation of birth rates as a warfare strategy and as a key arena for the life of the nation was solidifed, from a position of power, scripted in a racial Weltanschauung. As Gisela Bock (1983) has brilliantly documented, it is also from this position of power that concrete governmental policies were developed and implemented to incite white reproduction while curtailing the reproduction of “lives unworthy of life”. At the same time in France, René Binet, a fascist who later joined the SS, laid the grounds for thinking in terms of “the end of the white world” and “white genocide”.5 Notably, Jews fgure prominently as the main threat in population conspiracy theories. As these theories both radicalize and gain political power, their ideas are put in practice with the organization of extermination camps and mass killings, resulting in the genocide of the Shoah. The third juncture is marked by yet another shift of power: after the Holocaust, fascist political projects were pushed to the margins and scientifc racism was delegitimized, at least in the public sphere. In Europe, this also entailed an interruption in race talk as the main episteme, insofar as the previously existing language about race was largely avoided and discourse on race had to take diferent forms and shapes (Chin et al. 2009; Lentin 2008). The postwar context also presented a momentum for decolonization struggles that resulted in political independence for former European colonies and the dismantling of the European empires as well as postcolonial migration to the former metropoles. Other emancipatory and liberatory political projects were pursued in terms of civil rights struggles in the U.S. and around the globe, such as the rise of feminist and LGBT movements. These shifting balances of power, towards more egalitarian power relations, continued to fuel conspiratorial fears of “white genocide”. One (infamous) high-profle articulation of such fears in that postcolonial moment is represented by the anti-immigration speech by the MP Enoch Powell in relation to the proposed Race Relations Act 1968 in the UK – a speech which became known as the “Rivers of Blood speech” (see Lucassen 2022). Yet it also appeared that the political space for such conspiracies had shrunk in an era of decolonization and emancipatory movements, and it might not have been a coincidence that two of the most popular expressions of population replacement discourses at the time took

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the form of fctional accounts. In 1973 Jean Raspail published Le Camp des saints, a dystopian novel in which the shores of France are “swamped” by endless ships flled with brown bodies, in this case from India, that herald the end of French civilization. The English translation announces the book as “a chilling novel about the end of the white world”. In the U.S., The Turner Diaries by Andrew Macdonald (William Luther Pierce) was published as a book in 1978. The book is set in the United States around the end of the 21st century and depicts a violent revolution instigated by a white revolutionary movement that waged a race war leading to the systematic extermination of Black and Brown people, Jews, and “liberal actors”, who are framed as a threat to the survival of white people. The current juncture of this genealogy emerges with a signifcant geopolitical restructuring of the world at the turn of the 21st century, when the Soviet Union is dismantled and the Cold War frame loses its encompassing grip to the new “clash of civilizations” frame. The new frame, consolidated by the “War on Terror”, comes with a new prominent threat to the survival of white nations and European civilization: the fgure of the Muslim (Kundandi 2014; Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2022). In 2006, Bat Ye’or published Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, a full-fedged conspiracy theory in which Europe is purportedly turned into an Islamic continent with Muslims in power. The book travelled widely: it was used to justify the Utøya massacre in 2011 and is a point of reference for many diferent far-right populist political parties, such as the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) in Germany and the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands (Mudde 2019). In 2011, Renaud Camus published Le grand remplacement, an internationally infuential book, which left us with the popular terminology for these demographic conspiracy theories, that is, conspiratorial “replacement thinking”. While invoking a history harking back to the medieval Iberian Peninsula, the conspiracy theory of “Islamization” became a cornerstone of Western Islamophobia as it accompanied the unfolding of the “War on Terror” (Zine 2022, 2008), gaining its most intellectual elaboration in 2011 with the writings of Thilo Sarrazin in Germany. A signifcant development in the current formation and articulation of population replacement conspiracy theories pertains to how social media, instant messaging, and the internet have infuenced both the dissemination of these discourses as well as the diferent shapes and forms these conspiracy theories take (Davey & Ebner 2019; Ebner 2019; Hernández Aguilar 2023; Tuters 2020; Tuters & Hagen 2020). The digital world has become a key arena not only for the re-articulation and dissemination of population replacement discourse but also for population replacement political violence. It has been the virtual location where perpetrators of replacement white supremacist violence consume ideologies and express their views, where they announce their plans and post manifestos, and even livestream their deadly violence (van

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Buuren 2013; Gardell 2014; Davey & Ebner 2018; Fielitz & Thurston 2019; Schwartzburg 2019; Wilson 2019; Tuters 2020; Rose 2022). Outline of the Chapters

This book consists of eighteen chapters that explore a particular dimension, case, or national context within the wide landscape of population replacement discourse that we have laid out with broad strokes. Most of these chapters were frst presented at the Politics of Replacement conference that we organized at the University of Amsterdam in June 2021. In this volume, we have organized the chapters into four sections. The frst section, Genealogies of Replacement, further delves into various archives of the current population replacement discourse. Perhaps inevitably, we begin with Malthusianism as a key component in the formation and articulation of the population replacement discourse. From the racist and sexist writings of Jean Raspail in France, linking overpopulation in the Global South (India) to the destruction of the West (France), passing through Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s infuential The Population Bomb, coupling overpopulation in the “Third World” and India, in particular, with the survival of the “First World”, to informing one of the most infuential contemporary proponents of the population replacement discourse: Thilo Sarrazin in Germany. In the frst chapter of this volume, Soumaya Majdoub unravels how Malthusian fears continue to shape demographic concerns and conceptualizations of population. To account for the persistence of Malthusian thinking, Majdoub introduces the concept of Malthusianization, understood as the powerful frame linking population dynamics to scarcity and population reduction to climate change policies by means of racial fearmongering and anticipating calamities. Majdoub argues, moreover, that current (climate) migration debates, in fact, mask a fear of underpopulation. This chapter is followed by a critical engagement with a powerful metaphor drenched in Malthusianism, which is deeply infuential in the formation and articulation of the population replacement palimpsest: “The boat is full”. Esther Romeyn demonstrates how, in political terms, the metaphor-image of the full boat has been inverted in order to show not the sufering of people feeing but rather the (Western) nation under siege. Romeyn traces some of the earliest usages of the image metaphor to Eduard von Steiger, a Swiss Council member, who invoked Das Boot ist voll as a justifcation to close Swiss borders to Jewish refugees from Germany. Since then, in a recursive way (Stoler 2016), the metaphor-image continues to be deployed, as Romeyn feshes out, to advance anti-refuge and migration policies as vital politics for an imagined national self-preservation understood in racial terms. The next chapter brings us to the Balkans and investigates how Bosnia and Kosovo became prominent tropes of the Islamization myth, which

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holds that Islam poses a threat to a Christian, white Europe. Dino Suhonic unpacks the ways in which Muslims in this part of Europe are posited as a problem to European civilization, either as “the Turks” or “Turkifers” who must be assimilated or removed and, in any case, prevented from further “penetrating” Europe. Tracing the systematic character of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments, Suhonic draws the contours of “Balkan’s Muslim Question”, centred on “replacement” and birth rates anxieties. The expulsion of Muslims in the Balkans, he argues, serves as a model for white nationalist and supremacist ideologies worldwide. Subsequently, we move to the French archives, from where, more recently, the signature term “replacement” originates. Lou Mousset traces how some of the key concepts and reasonings within Camus’ Le grand remplacement and, notably, the concept of “reverse colonization” are not novel combative strategies but hark back to the ideological intellectual production of the GRECE (Groupement de Recherches et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne), a French far-right group that emerged in the wake of the Algerian War of Independence and pioneered a myriad of cultural and political strategies to advance the discourse of French national decline. Mousset notably explores diferent meanings that were attached to concepts such as nation, race, and Europe in the intellectual dispute between Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. The next chapter brings us to a “frontier of Europe” outside of the continent, with an examination of the Christchurch killer. Jack Wilson and Louie Dean Valencia argue that the killer is not solely an avatar of chan culture and its hazards of radicalization but deeply and idiosyncratically embedded in a historical imaginary that invokes an “alt_history” of the West driven by the fght against an always-expansionary Islam – from the attempted expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate into central Europe in the 700s to ISIS and fnally “the great replacement”. The killer inserts himself in this history as a “great actor” defending “Europe” in its “frontier” settlercolonial territories of Australia and New Zealand. Wilson and Valencia discuss how this historiography can be interpreted as an extension of anxieties and discourses of invasion and replacement that are a motif of Australian history. Finally, Sindre Bangstad and Maria Darwish bring us back to the “Nordic” dimension and explore yet another key, but understudied, layer in the discursive formation of the population replacement discourse, namely, ecological thinking in its articulation with fascism, or ecofascism. By taking a historical-conceptual approach to unravel the early formation of fascist preoccupations with the environment in Norway as well as the contemporary political violence enacted in the name of halting “population replacement” while protecting the environment, Bangstad and Darwish make a compelling argument to take seriously the fascist ideological engagement with environmental concerns, not only due to their historical trajectories but also as a means to understand the ways in which such concerns go beyond the far-right spectre.

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The second section of this book is entitled Technologies of Replacement. Loosely relying on the Foucauldian concept of dispositif (often translated as “apparatus” rather than “technologies”), we understand this section to focus on some of the institutional, political, administrative, epistemological, and other mechanisms or infrastructures that produce the conditions facilitating current articulations of population replacement discourse. The frst chapter in this section attends to the terrain of scientifc knowledge production and, notably, the discipline of demography, which has been heavily mobilized in replacement discourse as one of the main mediums through which the fear of replacement has been advanced and pandered. It’s precisely the demographic “calculation” and “prospective” of being outnumbered that serves as the bedrock of ideological formulations of this discourse as well as the formation of “solutions”. The political and racial production and instrumentalization of demographic knowledge have indeed been at the heart of population replacement conspiracy theories. Sayan Das examines the construction of Saffron Demography, that is, the strategic use of demography by the Indian far right in order to both problematize and demonize the presence of Muslims in the country as well as a powerful discourse to imagine and strive towards a racially homogeneous Indian nation based in Hindu communalism. Contrary to commonsensical views taking demography as a neutral academic discipline, Das takes a sociohistorical approach in order to trace the political uses of censuses and demographic knowledge production. While continuing to engage with practices of knowledge production, the chapter by Tamar de Waal and Jan Willem Duyvendak adds yet another layer of “technologies”, that is, a specifc deployment of liberal rights to what is delineated as the majority and is increasingly seen as in need of legal protection through “majority rights”. In their critical examination of the rise of this concept, including in academic publications, de Waal and Duyvendak fnd that this new usage of “majority rights” rests on erroneous depictions of multiculturalism; denies the empirical realities of the integration processes of immigrants in liberal democracies; relies upon nativist normative premises or are even explicitly racist; advocates practices of unequal citizenship; and aims to hamper social, cultural, and political change triggered by immigrant minorities. The third chapter considers the “technologies” of online spaces and milieux, which are interrogated in the public debate about the extent to which new forms of social media, internet fora, and private messaging services enable the dissemination of replacement discourse while also becoming sites of recruiting and the planning and livestreaming of violence. Emillie de Keulenaar and Marc Tuters trace the convergence of replacement narratives and, notably, the French “great replacement” and North American “white genocide” variants in poorly moderated online milieux such as 4chan and YouTube. They show how such convergence is based on specifc speech afordances, where vernaculars, ideas, and tropes associated with extreme ideologies efectively meet and converge ideologically. The fnal two chapters of the section engage

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with the fraught relation between the political mainstream and the extreme right fringe; they explore diferent ways to conceptualize this relation and interaction in the Dutch context. While discourses on population replacement have become a cornerstone of the far right, Nik Linders argues, some of the main tenets or discursive strands of population replacement have efectively become mainstreamed. Linders grounds his argument in a detailed analysis of a campaign ad run by Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte in 2017, which shows that key narratives and ideas of population replacement, for example, “the alien Other” within the nation as an existential threat, are frmly embedded within the acceptable political vocabulary. Merijn Oudenampsen makes a diferent argument: the rise of population replacement discourse, Oudenampsen argues, must be understood against the background of the decades-long development of the clash of civilizations discourse, which frst rose to prominence in the 1990s and which heralded a new Western selfunderstanding in opposition to Islam and Muslim immigrants. In the Netherlands, the tenets of the population replacement discourse were already present and discernible in the rise of the liberal right, notably the mainstream fgure of Bolkestein in the 1990s, and it is this clash of civilizations discourse that cleared the way for population replacement conspiracy theories. Read together, these chapters push us to reconsider the complexities and, indeed, dynamics of “mainstreaming”, or, in other words, the interaction between the political mainstream and the fringes. The third section of the book is dedicated to Islamophobia and Replacement. While this focus is informed by how we have come to the study of population replacement discourse through the study of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism, it also refects the centrality of Muslims and Islam within the contemporary rise of population replacement conspiracies, both in Europe but also beyond (see the chapters by Das, Wilson & Valencia, and O’Donnell). This section opens with Sahar Ghumkhor’s acute exploration of how racial imaginaries were elaborated and symbolic and material boundaries were drawn in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. Ghumkhor’s chapter brings us back to the body – ruptured skin and vulnerable fesh among debris and bodies that matter for Islamophobia, both in terms of what body it expulses as well as the body it exalts as the one whose enjoyment alone matters. The chapter by Margaretha A. van Es keeps us close to the body: taking a material approach, van Es looks at food and traces the widespread concern with a perceived “alimentary replacement” that is taken as a harbinger of a Muslim takeover and inspires all sorts of “gastro-political battles” to save Western civilization. In these battles, van Es points out, pork is often made into the “totem” of (post-) Christian Europe. The contribution by Iskandar Ahmed Abdalla addresses yet another dimension of daily life subjected to the phantasmagoria of “take-over”, namely architecture, and specifcally

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the establishments of mosques. Abdalla takes a closer look at how Der Moscheereport by Constantine Schreiber, a German author and journalist, not only panders to the fear of Islamization but most importantly articulates a call for Muslim “transparency” which, following Abdalla’s analysis, is a call to further govern Muslims in Germany. Finally, S. Jonathon O’Donnell’s chapter explores the connections between the demonologization of Islam and Muslims, on the one hand, and the evangelical fears of supersession of Christianity by Islam, on the other (see also: O’Donnell 2020). They argue that such linkage is well-mobilized to advance the fear of demographic replacement in the U.S. and demonstrate how the fears of replacement can also be articulated in a religious evangelical frame, thus adding another layer to the population replacement palimpsest, namely the evangelical demonologization of Muslims and Islam. The last section of the book, The Gendered Violence of Replacement, attends to the question of gender in its intersection with violence. The chapter by Mattias Gardell puts the gendered fgure of the “white lone wolf” at the centre of analysis. One of the most pressing issues related to the burgeoning of population replacement conspiracy theories has been the infuence they have exerted in justifying deadly white supremacist violence across the globe. Thinking about Eurabia and the Great Replacement almost immediately recalls the Utøya and Christchurch massacres. Gardell situates white supremacist lone wolves against the background of fascism and white supremacy in its intersection with masculinity. Sarah Bracke’s chapter revisits the recent white supremacist attack in Bufalo, NY, that this introduction opens with and makes an argument for bringing such killings in the same analytical space as the overruling of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, which occurred merely a month later and which was qualifed, in a purported slip of the tongue, as a “victory for white life” at a MAGA political event. Bringing reproductive rights and population replacement conspiracy theories to bear upon each other in an analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale, Bracke shows that this popular culture dystopian story of the absence of reproductive rights was instigated by population replacement discourse. We close the volume with a chapter by Anya Topolski – a chapter that also serves to open further horizons in relation to the question of how to approach contemporary population replacement discourses. Topolski explores medieval archives and ofers a close reading of the medieval tale of the King of Tars as a medieval rendition of population replacement narratives, which already in this early formulation postulated simultaneously the inferiority of women and of non-Christian bodies. Without claiming to be exhaustive and, indeed, with leaving many open questions, such as the possibilities of longer and more diverse genealogies, all these chapters together ofer a wide range of insights and a variety of diferent approaches into a kind of thinking and action that, unfortunately, has gained traction in our times.

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The palimpsest approach to replacement discourse as well as the thematic and disciplinary variety of the chapters in this volume do not allow for a succinct conclusion – replacement thinking encompasses all the layers and complexities raised in these chapters and many more that have not made it to the book. Yet some words in this palimpsest are inscribed again and again on the conspirational parchment, to the extent that they might shine through the diferent layers by the sheer force of repetition. Sahar Ghumkhor ofers us a powerful articulation of some of these more forceful inscriptions: What of a greater terror than white people who have historically been in a position of privilege – imagined in full recognition – seeing themselves as no longer superior to others but as equals? The paranoid fear of losing privilege is decried as replacement, being rendered irrelevant, or equating it with being extinguished. A death by equality. It’s the actual possibility of changing power relations, of dismantling (white) supremacy and its patriarchal foundations, coupled with the imaginary impossibility to conceive of new, more equal social relations in a way that is liveable, that animates conspiratorial replacement thinking – its fears and anxieties, its worldview flled with demons, and its violence. Notes 1 This work is part of the research programme EnGendering Europe’s “Muslim Question” with project number 016.Vici.185.077, which is fnanced by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). 2 There’s another diference between the chapters that we wish to fag: some authors in this volume have opted not to name those who have perpetrated violence and massacred other human beings in the name of replacement discourse, while others have opted to use the names of these killers. Authors who have refused to name the killers have done so to refuse the killers the recognition and fame that they sought and to not contribute to the popularity, infamy, and “martyr” status of some of these killers in online environments. Not-naming as a refusal to contribute to ongoing “hagiographies”. Other authors have deliberately named the killers as a form of witness to the erasures that have occurred, notably by states (including states who have taken an ofcial stance not to name the mass murderers, like New Zealand) and within public debates at large, by ongoing refusals to frmly situate the inficted violence within the (ongoing) histories of racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia, thus seeking to contain the problem of racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia within singular events and individuals. Naming as a witness to such erasures. 3 Jasmin Zine’s book Under Siege (2022) poignantly shows how in the context of global Islamophobia and the “war on terror”, that “white populations” are not the ones under siege but rather Muslim communities and individuals through a plethora of discriminatory practices, racial and gendered violence, and hate speech. 4 Translation by the authors, these are the original book titles: Der Geburtenrückgang und seine Bekämpfung – Die Lebensfrage des deutschen Volkes (1929); Sterben die weissen Völker: die Zukunft der weissen und farbigen Völker im Lichte der biologischen Statistik (1934) and Deutsches Volk in Not (1935).

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5 Binet’s concept of the “genocide” of white people is further elaborated in his book Théorie du racisme (Theory of Racism), published in 1950.

References Associated Press. (2022, May 16). Online Diary: Bufalo Gunman Plotted Attack for Months. US News. https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-05-16/ bufalo-shooters-prior-threat-hospital-stay-face-scrutiny Bangstad, S. (2012). Terror in Norway. American Anthropologist, 114(2), 351–352. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01430.x Bangstad, S. (2013). Eurabia Comes to Norway. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 24(3), 369–391. https://doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2013.783969 Bangstad, S. (2019). Bat Ye’or and Eurabia. In M. Sedwick (Ed.), Key Thinkers of the Radical Right (pp. 170–184). Oxford University Press. Bock, G. (1983). Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State. Signs, 8(3), 400–421. https://doi.org/10.1086/493983 Bonjour, S., & Bracke, S. (2020). Europe and the Myth of the Racialized Sexual Predator: Gendered and Sexualized Patterns of Prejudice. EuropeNow. https:// www.europenowjournal.org/2020/12/07/europe-and-the-myth-of-the-racialized -sexual-predator-gendered-and-sexualized-patterns-of-prejudice/ Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12742 Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2022). Thinking Europe’s “Muslim Question”: On Trojan Horses and the Problematization of Muslims. Critical Research on Religion, 10(2), 200–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044430 Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity Press. Camus, R. (2011). Le grand remplacement. David Reinharc. Carr, M. (2006). You are Now Entering Eurabia. Race & Class, 48(1), 1–22. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0306396806066636 Chin, R., Fehrenbach, H., Eley, G., & Grossman, A. (2009). After the Nazi Racial State. Diference and Democracy in Germany and Europe. University of Michigan Press. Davey, J., & Ebner, J. (2018, July 18). We Analyzed How Dangerous Far Right Ideas Spread Online. Time. https://time.com/5627494/we-analyzed-how-the-great -replacement-and-far-right-ideas-spread-online-the-trends-reveal-deep-concerns/ Davey, J., & Ebner, J. (2019).“The Great Replacement”: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism. Institute for Strategic Dialogue. de Hart, B. (2017). Sexuality, Race and Masculinity in Europe’s Refugee Crisis. In C. Grütters, S. Mantu & P. Minderhoud (Eds.), Migration on the Move (pp. 27–53). Brill. Ebner, J. (2019). Counter-Creativity: Innovative Ways to Counter Far-Right Communication Tactics. In M. Fielitz & N. Thurston (Eds.), Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right, Online Actions and Ofine Consequences in Europe and the US (pp. 169–182). Transcript Verlag. Ekman, M. (2022). The Great Replacement: Strategic Mainstreaming of Far-Right Conspiracy Claims. Convergence, 28(4), 1127–1143. https://doi.org/10.1177 /13548565221091983

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Fekete, L. (2012). The Muslim Conspiracy Theory and the Oslo Massacre. Race and Class, 53(3), 30–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396811425984 Fielitz, M., & Thurston, N. (2019). Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right, Online Actions and Ofine Consequences in Europe and the US. Transcript Verlag. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Vintage. Foucault, M. (1997). Society Must Be Defended. Picador. Foucault, M. (2010). The Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse on Language. Vintage Books. Gardell, M. (2014). Crusader Dreams: Oslo 22/7, Islamophobia, and the Quest for a Monocultural Europe. Terrorism and Political Violence, 26(1), 129–155. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2014.849930 Gilman, S. L., & Thomas, J. (2016). Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity. NYU Press. Hall, S. (1997). Race, The Floating Signifer [Transcript]. https://www.mediaed.org/ transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifer-Transcript.pdf Hark, S., & Villa, P. (2020). The Future of Diference Beyond the Toxic Entanglement of Racism, Sexism and Feminism. Verso. Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2023). Memeing a Conspiracy Theory: On the Biopolitical Compression of the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theories. Ethnography, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221146983 Kundnani, A. (2014). The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. Verso. Laclau, E., & Moufe, C. (2001). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso. Larsson, G. (2012). The Fear of Small Numbers: Eurabia Literature and Censuses on Religious Belonging. Journal of Muslims in Europe, 1(2), 142–165. https://doi. org/10.1163/22117954-12341237 Lentin, A. (2008). Europe and the Silence about Race. European Journal of Social Theory, 11(4), 487–503. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431008097008 Lucassen, L. (2022). Roots of a Murderous Idea: “Replacement” Thinking in the Atlantic World since the Early 19th Century (Research Paper No. 55). International Institute of Social History. https://iisg.amsterdam/fles/2022-10/The%20roots%20 of%20replacement%20thinking_fnal.pdf McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge. Mudde, C. (2019). The Far Right Today. Polity Press. O’Donnell, S. J. (2020). Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare. Fordham University Press. Rose, S. (2022, June 8). A Deadly Ideology: How the “Great Replacement Theory” Went Mainstream. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ jun/08/a-deadly-ideology-how-the-great-replacement-theory-went-mainstream Roth, J. (2021). The Gendered Politics of Right-Wing Populism and Intersectional Feminist Contestations. In M. Oswald & E. Broda (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Populism (pp. 291–301). Palgrave Macmillan. Sarrazin, T. (2010). Deutschland schaft sichab. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Sarrazin, T. (2018). FeindlicheÜbernahme, Wie der Islam den Fortschrittbehindertund die Gesellschaftbedroht. Finanzbuch Verlag. Schwartzburg, R. (2019, August 5). The “White Replacement Theory” Motivates Alt-right Killers the World Over. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2019/aug/05/great-replacement-theory-alt-right-killers-el-paso

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Sheth, F. A. (2011). The War on Terror and Ontopolitics: Concerns with Foucault’s Account of Race, Power Sovereignty. Foucault Studies, 12, 51–76. https://doi. org/10.22439/fs.v0i12.3337 Soyer, F. (2019). Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World. Brill. Stoler, A. L. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire. Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press. Stoler, A. L. (2016). Duress. Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Duke University Press. Thiem, A. (2020). Conspiracy Theories and Gender and Sexuality. In M. Butter & P. Knight (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (pp. 292–303). Routledge. Tuters, M. (2020). Esoteric Fascism Online: 4chan and the Kali Yuga. In L. D. Valencia-García (Ed.), Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History (pp. 286–303). Routledge. Tuters, M., & Hagen, S. (2020). (((They))) Rule: Memetic Antagonism and Nebulous Othering on 4chan. New Media and Society, 22(12), 2218–2237. https://psycnet. apa.org/doi/10.1177/1461444819888746 van Buuren, J. (2013). Spur to Violence?: Anders Behring Breivik and the Eurabia Conspiracy. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 3(4), 205–215. https://doi. org/10.2478/njmr-2013-0013 Weinbaum, A. (2004). Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Duke University Press. Wilson, J. (2019, March 28). With Links to the Christchurch Attacker, What is the Identitarian Movement? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ mar/28/with-links-to-the-christchurch-attacker-what-is-the-identitarian-movement Zia-Ebrahimi, R. (2018). When the Elders of Zion Relocated to Eurabia: Conspiratorial Racialization in Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Patterns of Prejudice, 52(4), 314–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2018.1493876 Zine, J. (2008). Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Muslim Women and Feminist Engagement. In K. Hunt & K. Rygiel (Eds.), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camoufaged Politics (pp. 27–49). Ashgate. Zine, J. (2022). Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

PART I

Genealogies of Replacement

1 MALTHUSIAN FEARS IN CURRENT MIGRATION DEBATES Contemporary Manifestations of Malthusianization Soumaya Majdoub

Introduction

The Malthusian worldview and its anxiety about overpopulation are alive and kicking in contemporary debates on migration, climate change, and even degrowth. The idea that climate change would cause signifcant South-North migration has gained popularity as concerns about climate change–induced migration have surfaced in the context of discussions on global warming. The arguments used in these debates are Malthusian pure sang, as will become clear in this chapter. Malthus’ simple assumption that population will always outstrip food serves as an explanation for poverty and environmental degradation, abundantly used in environmentalist, eugenicist, and anti-immigration arguments. When referring to Malthus or Malthusianism, we mainly allude to the core premise that introduced population into political economy in the late 1790s: any population increase will push people into poverty, and the way to respond to higher food demand is to be found in population control and not by correcting inequality since that is the natural societal order. Malthus began with two undeniable assumptions: human beings need food, and the sex drive is a fundamental characteristic of humankind. He stated that food production worldwide would increase at an arithmetic sequence, whereas the population would increase at a geometric rate (Malthus 1982 [1798], 6–7), harming both society and economy. Increasing food production is not an adequate solution, Malthus argued. These ideas have played a key role in shaping demography as a discipline as well as in hegemonic political views on population dynamics. Malthus’ worldview has been foundational to the discursive parameters of modern social discussion, bringing population, economics, resources, and politics into one frame of DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-3

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reference (Mayhew 2016, 18). Population as an object of policy has never been free of ideology. According to Michel Foucault (2007, 67), the object of population transformed the meaning of politics and economy in modernity. The way Malthus conceived of the world continues to have an undeniable impact on socioeconomic theory. Our very framework of thinking about social or environmental issues, as Mayhew asserts in his intellectual biography of Malthus, is a legacy of Malthus. But when and why did we become so fearful of overpopulation? Why is it that, even with scientifc evidence to the contrary (Mihanovich 1952; Hartmann 1995; Majdoub 2021), we still desperately cling to the image of an earth swallowed by its own inhabitants? Recurring images of refugee fows and overloaded boats in the Mediterranean reinforce this fear of overpopulation and scarcity, consolidating negative feelings about migration. The terms (illegal, refugee, (climate) migrant) used to describe people trying to cross borders also evolve in an efort to shape the narrative. This fear is further fuelled by certain political parties using an unmistakably Malthusian argument: migration must be restricted, not only to avoid overpopulation but also – and especially – to preserve the lifestyle of the better-of. The argumentation used in current (climate) migration debates is driven by what I call Malthusian fears: fears of the scarcity of resources, the deterioration of the planet, climate change, the Other, and Die Umvolkung. It is more productive, however, to understand the problematization of overpopulation as an apprehension of underpopulation, which accounts for the undercurrent logic behind migration policies (Soloway 2014). In analyzing the components of Malthusian thinking that justify a stratifed society – which I show to be antihumanist, anti-social, and anti-democratic – I have demonstrated how these are linked with debates on migration and why the concept of population in itself is responsible for so many problems we face today (Majdoub 2021). In this chapter, I extend my argument by drawing a genealogy of the problematization of overpopulation and by introducing the concept of Malthusianization to explain the persistence of Malthusian assertions, the way they shape (climate) migration debates, and their persistence as a common explanation for social ills and environmental degradation. A Genealogy of Malthusian Fears

Current perspectives on migration are profoundly infuenced by, and oriented towards, a Malthusian worldview (Deboosere & Majdoub 2021; Dziewulska & Ostrowska 2016; Majdoub 2021). The negative sentiments towards migration can be traced back to the early discussions between Malthus, Godwin, de Condorcet, and others about the perfectibility of humanity, progress, and the improvement of society. In the 19th century, the neo-Malthusianist ways of thinking ensured that population growth came to be viewed as a

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threat to human continuity and “no longer imagined and addressed within nations but across them” (Hodges 2010, 120). A genealogical analysis of texts stretching from those of Godwin and de Condorcet in the 18th century up until the second half of the 20th century reveals a deeper discursive history of the idea of overpopulation, Malthusianism, and the fears and concerns behind the narratives of the migration debates. We can discern three key themes within those negative discourses: population and poverty, population and national security, and population and the environment. Those are the themes that Dean (2015, 26) associates with “the recurrent problematization of human fertility and procreation given limited resources and confned spaces”. These are precisely the themes upon which neo-Malthusian discourse evolved into a paradigm that has marked the governance of people since the beginning of the 20th century. Some clarifcation on the used terminology is pertinent. When referring to Malthus or Malthusianism, we mainly allude to his key tenets, presented as a law of nature, deriving from the main premise that introduced population into political economy in the late 1790s: any population increase will push people into poverty and the way to respond to higher food demand is to be found in population control. Based on this assumption, the claim that correcting inequality is futile, since that is the natural societal order, becomes unchallenged. Neo-Malthusianists add to this the necessity to advocate control of population growth, especially by contraception, which accounts for the strong connections with the birth control movement. This strand of neo-Malthusianism developed out of the discipline of demography and focuses on the economic consequences of population growth. However, as John Perkins (1990) showed, we need to engage another strand in the analysis to fully grasp the entanglement of diferent ideologies into one paradigm. This second strand, which developed predominantly post-WWII, focuses on ecological relations. This differentiation enables the demonstration of how the evolution of Malthusianism into neo-Malthusianism is overtly, yet in a subtle way, infuenced by debates on race, eugenics, class, sex, and morality. As Kolson Schlosser (2009, 468) argued, “Malthusianism and neo-Malthusianism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were often deployed in competing claims about the moral condition of society with respect to reproduction”. Malthusianism was “based on a moral critique of sexual instinct”, informing “ensuing population-resource discussions to the extent that population growth was discussed in terms of an immoral, unsuppressed sex drive” (Schlosser 2009, 468). With birth control at the centre of this evolution, it is noteworthy to mention that the birth control movement in the U.S. was a grateful ally of neo-Malthusianists and, more specifcally, the eugenicists among them. Schlosser ofers us several striking examples of this tight marriage, such as Guy Irving Burch, who was both the president of the American Eugenics Society while writing for the American Birth Control League and

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contributing to postwar population resource theory via Population Roads to Peace and War (2009, 469). Founder of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), Burch was an anti-immigrant eugenicist who was also very much into the protection of the environment. By the second half of the 20th century, “Burch and the PRB facilitated the uptake of environmental Malthusianism by natural scientists, philanthropists and businessmen”, Merchant (2022, 541) points out. Well-known advocates for birth control, such as Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, chose to align with ideologies and organizations that were explicitly eugenicist and white supremacist and saw women as the biological procreators of the nation and contraception as a means of coercion (see Roberts 2009). To avoid generalizations about the birth control movement, I emphasize the following. The confuence of diferent currents of ideas caused certain historical fgures, such as Sanger, to change their positions or recycle ideas with or without the negative connotations of the past. Each strand within Malthusianism has its own development and dynamics and may or may not converge (although they all organically converge in debates on migration). Nevertheless, harmful eugenic ideas were embraced by Sanger such as the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that states could forcibly sterilize people deemed “unft” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge, as Chesler (2007) documents. The acceptance of this decision by Sanger and other leading fgures laid the foundation for tens of thousands of people to be sterilized, often against their will (Chesler 2007, 485). Already in 1921, Sanger emphasized, “The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the fnal aims of eugenics”. She argued: The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective . . . Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism. (Franks 2005, 72) Planned Parenthood (formerly American Birth Control League) has acknowledged that these policies targeted people with disabilities and people broadly labelled “feebleminded” or “mentally defective” by the state. Sterilization policies were violently ableist and were applied in deeply racist ways. In 2021, the organization issued a formal statement confrming that Sanger’s belief in eugenics undermined reproductive freedom and caused irreparable damage to the health and lives of generations of Black people, Latino people, Indigenous people, immigrants, people with disabilities,

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people with low incomes, and many others. Planned Parenthood denounces Margaret Sanger’s belief in eugenics. (Planned Parenthood 2021) In this intertwining of race, eugenics, class, sex, and morality, the diferent strands of neo-Malthusianism are characterized by the deployment of crisis narratives and metaphors concerning alleged threats. Whether posed by demographic pressures, resource scarcity, environmental degradation, or climate change leading to migration, all threats would provoke political instability and disassemble the social welfare state. Nira Yuval-Davis (1993) has expanded this logic by stating that those narratives are “expressions of various ideologies that can lead controllers of national reproduction towards diferent population control policies”. However, she underlines that these policies are rarely, if ever, applied in a similar manner to all members of the civil society. While class diferences often play a major role in this, membership in diferent racial, ethnic, and national collectivities is usually the most important determinant in being subject to diferential population policies. (1993, 630) Not diferent from the original form, neo-Malthusianism saw measures of control and not social justice as the solution to inequality – plain biopower to normalize injustice. Worthy of mention is that all strands operate in a way that justifes and afrms the established order of inequality. Emery Roe (1995) coined the term “crisis narrative” to describe this process. These narratives, although debunked, keep on emerging. Understanding their persistence requires looking at the diversity of interests they serve, their institutional rootedness and reproduction, the deep well of colonial and neo-Malthusian stereotypes on which they draw, and the role of private and public funding streams in rewarding their purveyors. The narratives, and colonial and racial stereotypes at their root, will continue to wield undue infuence as they assume new forms and names (Hartmann 2013). These re-emerging narratives need to be understood as deliberative tactics that are part of a coherent ideology – an ideology that feeds on ethnomorphosis, a concept that refers to the historical process of ethnicity (Hu 2013, 372) and the understanding that “the genesis, maintenance, and disappearance of ethnic identity are all manifestations of the same process” (Kohl 1998, 232). The fear of resource scarcity also spreads through discussions about declining birth rates and, notably, declining domestic fertility rates, which seem to make the threat from immigration more likely. In several Western countries, the scarcity of white births is then often juxtaposed against a surplus of immigrants and the supposed hyperfertility of immigrant women

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(Hartmann 2010, 55). Unsurprisingly, anti-migration actors willingly make use of scarcity narratives. The population pressure of migrants is presented as the cause of environmental degradation and even climate change and is a common theme for many white supremacist mass shooters. These are shooters with a conservative worldview of the family, concerned about white birth rates, and inspired by replacement conspiracies that feed into the current outpouring of anti-abortion activism (Schwartzburg 2019; Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020). The use of science in the ecosystem of white supremacists is paramount and can, indeed, be traced back to how Malthus drew on scientifc discourse. In late 18th-century England, Malthus’ “science” justifed why charity and helping the poor were not only unnecessary but even counterproductive, thereby liberating the ruling classes of all moral constraints. Malthus was very clever in combining persistent prejudices (like the idea that poverty exists by the will of God) with scientifc argumentation and the use of statistics (Deboosere & Majdoub 2021, 49–50). In the next section, I elaborate on the importance of the deployment of science for the persistence of Malthusian ideas. The “meme-ifcation” of fgures from scientifc papers plays a crucial role in the mainstreaming of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory (Bogerts & Fielitz 2019; Hernández Aguilar 2023; Tuters & Hagen 2021; Thorleifsson 2022). As Jedidiah Carlson (2022), who began investigating how genetics research gets appropriated and integrated into white supremacist ideologies, puts it: “violence directly linked to misappropriation of research is no longer hypothetical, it’s an actualized harm”,1 and this should alarm the scientifc community. Ethnomorphosis and The Climate Migrant: Persisting Malthusian Problematizations

In her analysis of contemporary debates on climate change, Schultz (2021) observed a neo-Malthusian refex in the use of statistical calculations linking population growth to climate change all while suggesting strategies for birth control. Ojeda et al. (2020) drew the same conclusion from their analysis of discourses linking climate change to the idea of the Anthropocene. Their fndings demonstrate that these discourses advance neo-Malthusian thinking, which positions population control as an urgent response to the challenges of climate change, leading to “troubling policy prescriptions” (Ojeda et al. 2020, 2). The authors advance the example of a 2015 report from the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development, and Reproductive Health that promotes family planning as the number one policy recommendation to address resource scarcity, migration, and climate change as well as to reduce confict. As Schultz (2021, 485–489) puts it: “the undead Neo-Malthusian ghost is being revived”. Moreover, she adds, “counter-statistics do not make much diference. The neo-Malthusian

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self-assurance is too deeply anchored in the scientifc and everyday mind with respect to a variety of linkages”. What is problematized – and formulated in hyperbolic terms – in these debates are not the root causes of climate change but the migration fows that could potentially be a consequence of droughts, wildfres, and fooding. Thus, migration is cast both as an environmental and security threat, as Hartmann (2010) argues. This is a very gendered fear since a distinction is made between young African men as potential terrorists, while young women are characterized as overly reproductive (Vergès 2020). Moreover, African hyperfertility is identifed as the source of environmental degradation to which young African men respond with violence. Furthermore, pictures of dark-skinned people in distress are systematically used to illustrate climate change as a threat. As the Migration Observatory at Oxford University stresses, discourses on migration consist not only of words but also of images (see Schmolz 2019). The classic book The Population Bomb by Anne and Paul Ehrlich is a case in point – a book that Farhana Sultana has characterized as causing damage to public discourse and knowledge and leading to the creation of “entire platforms to control women’s fertilities [and] choices – weaponizing the overpopulation narratives – instead of the promotion of reproductive justice, women/girl’s access to education [and] empowerment”.2 Media representations of what “migration” entails shape people’s concerns and expectations of policy interventions. In this vein, neo-Malthusian assumptions are deeply unsettling. Through the premise of given resource boundaries, they naturalize scarcity, inequality, and confict. More than this, they misdiagnose the causes of climate change, often placing blame on marginalized populations who have done little to cause the problem in the frst place (Ojeda et al. 2020, 3). Fear-inducing metaphors and crisis narratives colour the lens through which climate change is rearticulated, opening the door for militarized international strategies. This “greening of hate”, as Hartmann (2010, 55) puts it, when immigrants are blamed for climate change, is also to be found in numerous think-tank reports. Kolankiewicz and Camarota conducted a study in 2008 for the Washington, DC–based Center for Immigration Studies that indicates that future levels of immigration will have a signifcant impact on eforts to reduce global CO2 emissions. Their problematization proceeds unimpededly from CO2 emissions to immigration. This threat of “unwanted starving immigrants” pressing at our borders is what Hartmann demonstrates to be a policy priority in her analysis of U.S. national security scenarios about global warming. Although these degradation and scarcity-security narratives do not hold up under scrutiny (Hartmann 2010, 55), overpopulation remains the key element of defection strategies building on the colonial blaming of the socalled Global South. But why does Malthusianism have such remarkable staying power despite criticism and ample evidence to the contrary?

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Schultz (2021, 1) correctly discerns three dimensions of neo-Malthusianism in current debates on climate migration: the abstract statistical construction of overpopulation; the historically deeply rooted racist and classist attribution of this excess to Others; and the totalitarian visions of global “fertility” management. What Schultz omits in her analysis is a functional description of the interaction, dynamics, and possible frictions between the respective dimensions notwithstanding her argument that the dimensions strongly fow together and reinforce each other. An attempt was made by Lohmann (2005, 81) earlier, wherein he points to the great scare “darkness and terror”, “us versus them” narratives, and the werewolf side of Malthusianism but also a “daylight Malthusianism”, both appealing to somewhat diferent audiences but serving many of the same interests. The arithmetical Malthusianism “more visibly underpins a scafolding of two centuries of productive thinking about private property, ‘free markets’, government policy, development, and biology” (2005, 81). He continues to describe this side of Malthusianism as the foundation of “a political regime featuring a zero-sum game between humans and nature, economic scarcity (scarcity due to pressure exerted by abstract humans), enclosure, market-allocated food and labour, inequality and sharp divisions between owners and non-owners of land and sexuality” (2005, 82). The two sides can arduously be dissociated; they occur in the same places and reinforce each other. I argue that the “enlightened” establishment side reinforces the racist, scarcity narratives and that the latter needs daylight political economy Malthusianism to naturalize inequality as an inevitable product of capitalist activity and present it as civil common sense. I do follow Lohmann in his conclusion that “the common objective of the two Malthusianisms has expanded to include a defence of technocratic management of peoples and their reproductive organs and genes in the service of (our) economy and environment” (2005, 83). This same technocratic management of people and their reproductive rights is to be found in climate mitigation strategies. Policies for mitigating climatic changes “require prior discursive work to construe the targeted populations or territories as ‘in need of improvement,’” Andreucci and Zografos (2022, 3) argue, and this occurs “through narratives that stress vulnerability, underdevelopment, and victimhood” (2022, 3). The Commonalities, Mobilization, and Persistence of Malthusian Framings: The Need for a Comprehensive Concept

Even a rigorous dissection of the diferent dimensions of Malthusianism, however, cannot fully explain the enduring success of Malthusian problematizations. Therefore, drawing from Lohman (2005), Hartman (2010), and Baldwin (2016), I propose the concept of Malthusianization to grasp moments and phenomena where a Malthusian framing is mobilized. Especially in the

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context of climate migration debates, I argue that intentional and strategic framing arises, organized around what could potentially, but not necessarily, take place. Those debates follow a logic characterized by overemphasizing the role of demographic pressures and naturalizing what is a social, political, and economic confict by deploying categories, concepts, and discourses to distract from the root causes. This is enabled by an oversimplifed and empirically incorrect framework based on limits. Its efectiveness is to be found in the panoply of disciplines and institutionalized structures that integrated the Malthusian worldview of limits; a fundamental illustration has been given earlier in this chapter where I demonstrated the allyship between the birth control movement and the eugenicists, later joined by environmentalists. Inequality deriving from policies countering those social, political, and economic conficts is presented as TINA (There Is No Alternative), a given fact with no possible alternative to cope with the evident tension between population pressure and available resources. Most importantly, “by presenting the challenge as a natural law with dire consequences for humanity, neo-Malthusianism has introduced a fundamental and erroneous pessimism concerning our common future” (Deboosere & Majdoub 2021, 51). Relying on the use of the same metaphors and contested terminology in both “dark” and “daylight” Malthusianism working simultaneously, this common future is depicted as threatened by a common enemy. As argued by de Haas et al., “one of the most important developments with regard to migration policies in the post–Cold War period has been the linking of migration to security”. This securitization of migration, he adds, “has a mass psychological dimension and in the absence of a real threat, politicians are tempted to manufacture an imaginary threat” (2019, 232). In their analysis of the population debate in U.S. popular magazines, Wilmoth and Ball (1992) conclude that framing the population issue in environmental terms was decisive in convincing the public opinion of the threat of overpopulation. The defection-and-blame game mentioned previously in this chapter materializes in this creation of a climate of fear where support is sought to unite behind a common enemy, with the use of computational models. That is, a “fear and a perception of threat to ontological security far exceeding actual developments” (Faist 2006, 630). A fear for migrants “fgured as alien to some already apparently cohesive social body, which means that the discourse trades on a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Baldwin 2016, 80). I argue that this fearmongering is the cornerstone of Malthusianization. Throughout modern history, migrants were cast as “the enemy ‘from within’” (de Haas et al. 2019, 232). Baldwin proceeds to argue that “although the grammar of climate change and migration discourse bears the trace of colonial modernity, the discourse on climate change and migration is written almost exclusively in the future-conditional tense” (Baldwin 2012, 634), suggesting that the climate migrant is not yet amongst “us”.

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This temporality is another operation of Malthusianization along with premeditation, “the kind of media logic that actively proliferates the number of possible future scenarios that may arise out of a given event”, regardless if these anticipated futures are correct (Grusin 2010, 46). This is the case for climate migration. For Baldwin, premeditation makes the future actionable and “is centrally concerned with managing collective afect in a way that ensures that the future will not be experienced as a disruptive force but as a fully expected, even logical, outcome of the present” and “whatever form migration might take in the context of climate change, it will not materialize as an unexpected emergency or disruptive event, but as a fully anticipated outcome of the present” (2012, 634). I concede with Baldwin’s conclusion that this suggests that in this framing, “the climate migrant is best conceived as the excess of the state, or more accurately that which exceeds the social order that the state is empowered to enforce” (2016, 80). In addition, Malthusianization is expressed within the registers of race and Othering. Baldwin (2016, 78) demonstrates that “the discourse on climate change and migration generates a particular orientation to climate change called ‘white afect’”, which he substantiates by linking racial neoliberalism – naming the condition of racism without racism – and the relationship between afect and power. He proceeds in describing “white afect” as “a form of racialization specifc to the cultural context of climate change, an afective condition of ‘whiteness’ that emerges out of the relation between present and future, actual and virtual” (2016, 78). I argue that the racial connotations in climate change debates are subtly manifested through polished “daylight” Malthusianism – albeit racism is not understood here in a literal sense – while “us versus them” narratives are deployed in the darker Malthusianism. An interpretation inspired by Foucault is more appropriate when it refers to biopolitical racism as a technology of government with a nonexhaustive exclusionary targeting of both racialized populations and other “deviant” groups (Andreucci & Zografos 2022, 2). The Malthusianism that alludes most to a right-wing audience portrays, in its use of alarmist rhetoric, the loss of an imaginary equilibrium, while the fip side reinforces this nostalgic sentiment with the use of science to justify unscientifc data. This nostalgia for some sort of cohesive social body – which empirically or historically is not to be found – is the essence of ethnomorphosis in its claim that ethnically homogeneous populations (particularly in European nations) are bound to be replaced by nonwhite people originating from outside Europe. A peculiar operation and the fnal characteristic of Malthusianization is the presence of this double-sided Malthusianism in more liberal and progressive circles which advances the credibility of populationist policies. The normalization of right-wing discourse is a voluntary outcome. The continued prevalence of population control ideologies as well as population alarmism in sustainable development and climate change policy and

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programs is problematic (Hendrixson et al. 2020). According to Hartmann (and as I illustrated with the example of the American Birth Control League), this is “partly due to the confusion of neo-Malthusianism with women’s rights and environmentalism” (Hartmann 2010, 55). The history of the environmental movement, and especially those initiatives aimed at population control, is laced with racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. Today, in the use of metaphors and images, migrants turn into collateral damage of progressive climate activists. Unwillingly, Malthusian narratives become omnipresent. Consequently, the monstrous fgure of the climate migrant succeeds in mobilizing diferent audiences for different political programs and the fear of underpopulation, alongside the social and genetic impact of immigration, is never far away. The French NGO Démographie Responsable (2018) expresses its (ecological) concerns explicitly: “Alors que les pays les plus pauvres ne parviennent pas à freiner leur natalité galopante, l’Europe, elle, n’en fnit pas de vieillir” (While the poorest countries are unable to curb their soaring birth rates, Europe continues to age). Conclusion

To conclude, I want to argue that Malthusianization and the mainstreaming of populationist discourses pose a threat to democratic institutions and societies. It is of paramount importance to challenge scholarship that simplistically links population dynamics to scarcity and population reduction to climate change policies. Not only is there a need for a new imaginary, but we must also relentlessly continue to deconstruct the neo-Malthusian worldview. In addition to detecting the demographic eschatological narratives, this also implies ceasing to uncritically teach debunked misconceptions (such as the work of Hardin and Ehrlich) to students. At our disposal lies a rich scholarship from a variety of disciplines. In the past few decades, feminist scholars have, unsurprisingly and to a great extent, contributed to refuting these neoMalthusian ideas that – uncritically – have been passed on. In this regard, we cannot avoid debates on population pressure and the evident relationship with the availability of resources. The challenge lies in how we should talk about what comes under the frame of “population” and is statistically relevant in ways that are not based on Othering and don’t contribute to blaming historically disadvantaged populations. Notes 1 Carlson, J. [@JedMSP]. (2022, May 18). Violence directly linked to misappropriation of research is no longer a hypothetical – it’s an actualized harm that should factor into every decision made by IRBs, funders, and journal editors [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/JedMSP/status/1526987964466843649?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

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2 Sultana, F. [@Prof_FSultana]. (2022, April 3). Twitter [Tweet]. Thread. https://twitter.com/prof_fsultana/status/1510681491596099588

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Hartmann, B. (1995). Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. South End Press. Hartmann, B. (2010). The Ghosts of Malthus: Narratives and Mobilizations of Scarcity in the US Political Context. In L. Mehta (Ed.), The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation (pp. 49–66). Earthscan. Hartmann, B. (2013). Climate Chains: Neo-Malthusianism, Militarism and Migration. In C. Methmann, D. Rothe & B. Stephan (Eds.), Interpretive Approaches to Global Climate Governance (pp. 105–118). Routledge. Hendrixson, A., Ojeda, D., Sasser, J. S., Nadimpally, S., Foley, E. E., & Bhatia, R. (2020). Confronting Populationism: Feminist Challenges to Population Control in an Era of Climate Change. Gender, Place & Culture, 27(3), 307–315. https://doi. org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1639634 Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2023). Memeing A Conspiracy Theory: On the Biopolitical Compression of the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theories. Ethnography, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221146983 Hodges, S. (2010). Malthus is Forever: The Global Market for Population Control. Global Social Policy, 10(1), 120–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468018109354494 Hu, D. (2013). Approaches to the Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Past and Emergent Perspectives.  Journal of Archaeological Research,  21(4), 371–402. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10814-013-9066-0 Kohl, P. L. (1998). Nationalism and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past. Annual Review of Anthropology, 27, 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.27.1.223 Kolankiewicz, L. J., & Camarota, S. A. (2008). Immigration to the United States and World-Wide Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Center for Immigration Studies. https://cis. org/Report/Immigration-United-States-and-WorldWide-Greenhouse-Gas-Emissions Lohmann, L. (2005). Malthusianism and the Terror of Scarcity. In B. Hartmann, B. Subramaniam & C. Zerner (Eds.), Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (pp. 81–98). Rowman & Littlefeld. Majdoub, S. (2021). Consumeren als konijnen: De mythe van overbevolking. ASP. Malthus, T. R. (1982). An Essay on the Principle of Population. Penguin (Original work published 1798). Mayhew, R. J. (2016). New Perspectives on Malthus. Cambridge University Press. Merchant, E. K. (2022). Environmental Malthusianism and Demography.  Social Studies of Science, 52(4), 536–560. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221104929 Mihanovich, C. S. (1952). Myth of Overpopulation. The Linacre Quarterly, 19(2), 50–53. https://epublications.marquette.edu/lnq/vol19/iss2/5 Ojeda, D., Sasser, J. S., & Lunstrum, E. (2020). Malthus’s Specter and the Anthropocene. Gender, Place & Culture, 27(3), 316–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663 69X.2018.1553858 Perkins, J. H. (1990). The Rockefeller Foundation and the Green Revolution, 1941–1956. Agriculture and Human Values, 7(3), 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF01557305 Planned Parenthood. (2021, April 14). Opposition Claims About Margaret Sanger. https:// www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/fler_public/cc/2e/cc2e84f2-126f-41a5-a24b -43e093c47b2c/210414-sanger-opposition-claims-p01.pdf Roberts, D. (2009). Margaret Sanger and the Racial Origins of the Birth Control Movement. In B. Baum & D. Harris (Eds.), Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels and Transformations of American Identity (pp. 196–213). Duke University Press.

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2 DAS BOOT IST VOLL, THE BOAT IS FULL Genealogy and Policy Consequences of an  Ecological-Nativist Paradigm Esther Romeyn

The Boat Is Full/Das Boot ist voll!

In the summer of 2015, at the height of the refugee “crisis”, a photograph began circulating on social media platforms. The image featured a rusty cargo ship crammed with thousands of people, some desperately clinging to ropes of the sides, as the ship was leaving a pier crowded with thousands of others left behind. It supposedly captured the desperation of Syrian refugees escaping from Libya to Italy. This attribution, however, was soon to be corrected. The image, as online commentators pointed out, was not of Syrians but of Europeans desperate to get to North Africa during World War II and highlighted the hypocrisy of a contemporary Europe ensconced behind securitized borders while Syria burned and refugees drowned. However, neither attribution was the correct one. The actual image was taken in August 1991 and showed the Albanian ship the Vlora, en route to Bari, Italy, packed with 20,000 Albanian refugees desperate to escape the economic chaos that followed the collapse of communist rule. After arriving in Bari, the refugees were transported to an empty stadium to be eventually returned to Albania. These connections, between the current refugee crisis and the refugee crises of the early 1990s and World War II, underscore the continued resonance and visual impact of the image of the “full boat” as a contested metaphor, depicting migrant desperation or, alternatively, the supposedly “flled capacity” of receiving nations. In 2015, in Germany, Das Boot ist voll served as a favourite fgure of speech in opposition to Angela Merkel’s Wir schafen das (We’ll Do This), with which she had declared Germany a refugee haven. The metaphor of a “full boat” circulated in Hungary to legitimise the refusal to comply with EU-mandated refugee quotas. In Austria, Heinz-Christian DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-4

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Strache, the leader of the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ), declared that “The boat is full – and so we pull in the plank” (Birnbaum 2015; Gadermann 2016; APA-OTS 2015). In the 1990s, the image of a “full boat” featured on the covers of Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), and other media outlets, capturing the politicization of refugees in Germany and in a reconfgured Europe in the wake of the collapse of communist regimes and the eruption of the Yugoslav Wars. In 1991, the photograph and other representations of full boats were turned into media events, which moulded popular perceptions and served to signifcantly reshape border and asylum policy and the contours of political and social belonging in Germany and throughout the European Communities, soon to be the European Union (Rosenthal 2000). But the origin of the “full boat” slogan as an inverted metaphor, referring not to the imperilled refugees on packed boats but to the imperilled nation-state faced with a perceived onslaught of refugees, lies in the Nazi era. Its frst recorded use was from the mouth of Eduard von Steiger, a Swiss Council member, in a speech held in Zürich in August 1942, in which he defended the decision of Switzerland (ofcially neutral) to close its border to Jewish refugees from Germany. In his speech in 1942, von Steiger used the following reasoning to argue for the Swiss decision to ruthlessly enforce border controls and to refoul any Jewish refugee that was apprehended: Someone who has command over an already packed rescue vessel with limited capacity and resources, while thousands of victims of a shipwreck cry for help, must appear heartless when he cannot take them all in. But he is human, in that he warns early of false hopes and seeks at least to rescue those already taken aboard. (Kreis 2006, 339) Lifeboat Ethics, Neo-Malthusianism, and Ecological Nativism

In von Steiger’s speech, the metaphor of the nation as the proverbial “full boat” evidenced the articulation of an anti-refugee stance, territorial instinct and ethics, and anti-migration politics as a moral imperative for national self-preservation. It was informed by the mix of eugenics, social Darwinism, ecology, eco-nativism, and neo-Malthusian calculations that had thrived in the 19th-century context of imperial expansion, emergent conservationism, and rapid urbanization and had galvanized the anti-immigration, eugenics, and racist logics that called for population controls on people deemed less ft for reproduction (Turner & Bailey 2021). In the German-speaking environment, this mix eventually culminated in National Socialism and genocide. A similar logic, however, was widely shared in pre-war Europe and the U.S., as

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evidenced by the Evian conference of July 1938, convened by President Franklin Roosevelt with the intent of developing a collective response to the Jewish refugee problem in the lead up to World War II. While national delegates efusively embraced humanitarian appeals and proposed the establishment of safe havens, the consensus was one of opposition to the importation of a “racial problem” that large-scale Jewish migration would naturally engender, a notion that was supported by the concept of “over-saturation”. The British delegate opposed the admission of Jewish refugees on the grounds that “Britain . . . being fully populated and sufering unemployment was . . . unavailable for immigration” while the French delegate stated that France had reached “the extreme point of saturation as regards admission of refugees” (Head 2016). Postwar, this overlap of conservationism, population restrictionism, econativism, and eugenics regained momentum during the 1950s and took centre stage on the public agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s when, in the U.S., Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), and Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (published in 1968 in Science) made population control a credible concept. In particular, the work of Garrett Hardin was harvested for farright talking points. Hardin’s neo-Malthusian argument homed in on the “carrying capacity of the land”, which was overburdened by the pressure of overpopulation. In a subsequent essay, “Living on a Lifeboat” (published in 1974 in Bioscience), Hardin steered his argument towards an ecologically informed anti-migration agenda. Here he introduced the idea of lifeboat ethics, which calculated the “carrying capacity” of conservationism on a national scale and attached it to neo-nativist ethics of migration control. The American boat, metaphorically representing a rich nation, is “at sea with no land in sight” and surrounded by other, much more crowded, lifeboats. The poor, falling out of their own boats, swim around hoping to be admitted to a rich lifeboat. Hardin argued that the American boat is morally obligated to protect itself from the encroachment of swimmers invading from other boats. He went on to promote his ideas as a board member of the nativist organization Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group founded by John Tanton, which laid the foundation for a new phase in American anti-immigration activism (Normandin & Valles 2015, 98–99). Coinciding with the emergence of the Reagan-era New Right, FAIR built its argument for immigration restrictionism on the basis of a social nativist ideology of protecting “Anglo-European” U.S. identity, an eco-nativism that impressed upon the need to safeguard the environment from the pressures of population growth and an eco-communitarianism that constructed national communities as organically intertwined with unique ecosystems (Hultgren 2014, 65; Normandin & Valles 2015, 96–97; Taylor 2019; Turner & Bailey 2021).

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The New Right, Integralist Cultural Ecology, and Ethnopluralism

In Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, the topic of population growth gained traction especially after a report by the Club of Rome entitled The Limits of Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) based its dire predictions about an overtaxed planet on extended computational modelling of rates of population and economic growth. In the European New Right, this was translated in nationalist terms. The connection between territorial instinct, ecology, neo-nativism, and an anti-migration agenda became a signature of the French New Right under the intellectual leadership of Alain de Benoist. De Benoist revamped the right-reactionary concept of culture as rootedness, tying it to territorial instinct and a people’s natural desire to protect the “integrity of natural environments”. In de Benoist’s “integralist” cultural ecology (Holmes 2000), the supposedly natural desire for a national identity rooted in an already established, historically sanctioned, ethno-culturally rooted “way of life” yielded a diferentialist racism based on the ideas of “cultural incommensurability” and the “right to diference” (Holmes 2000; Bar-On 2007, 207; Lee 2000, 214; Spektorowski 2000). It was de Benoist’s “multiculturalism of the right”, or “ethno-pluralism”, and his defence of “diferent ways of life” that, in the 1980s and 1990s, provided the intellectual basis for the resurgent radical right-wing, populist, and neo-Fascist parties such as the French Front National, the Italian Lega Nord, the British National Party, and the German Republikaner Partei (Holmes 2000, 68, 78–79; Woods 2007, 27). The German Neue Rechte (New Right) deployed a similar strategy to establish an intellectual basis for a far right that did not draw explicitly on National Socialist ideas. They found inspiration in the work of ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Irenäus Eibel Eibesfeldt (both active in the nascent Green movement), who interpreted national identity ecologically and who linked their opposition to migration to a concern about the environmental and social consequences of exploding populations. Social scientist Henning Eichberg advocated for an ethnopluralist approach to cultural diference and argued that immigrants were defcient in environmental stewardship because they were uprooted and lacked a substantive relationship to the land. The intersection of neo-Malthusianism and conservationism also informed the preoccupation with overpopulation in conservative politician and co-founder of the Green Party Herbert Gruhl’s Ein Planet wird geplündert (1975, The Plundering of a Planet) (Forchtner & Özvatan 2019, 220). With the foundation of the extreme right-wing Republikaner Partei (Republican Party), the framing of anti-immigration politics in terms of an ethical obligation of environmental stewardship and a patriotic duty of protecting the ecological integrity of the national whole was made explicit. The rhetoric of a “full boat” was back in currency after the release of the 1980 flm Das Boot ist voll, based on Alfred Häsler’s novel of the same name. This flm and novel

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depicted the fate of a group of refugees at the Swiss border during World War II. Unsurprisingly, the Republican Party made this “full boat” rhetoric a key rallying cry in the racialization of the politics of immigration and asylum. The issues of asylum and migration had assumed centre stage in Germany and the EU as the refugee “crisis” of the 1990s unfolded against the backdrop of German reunifcation and the political and economic collapse of East European communist regimes (Pagenstecher 2008; De Genova 2010; Chin 2007, 146). Germany and the Refugee Crisis of the 1990s

Behind the scenes, the economic and political collapse of East Germany was carefully orchestrated by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had embarked (in a strategy which was replicated in the dismantling of other Eastern Europe communist regimes) on a course of systematic destabilization, creating rumours of an impending collapse, withholding funds necessary to secure East Germany’s economic stability, and prematurely imposing the West German DM currency regime (De Genova 2010). One consequence of this generalized political, economic, and social instability was an immediate surge in the number of refugees heading towards West Germany. These refugee streams were composed of so-called Aussiedler, ethnic Germans from Poland, Romania, and Gorbachev’s Soviet Union (with whom Chancellor Helmut Kohl had negotiated exit permits for German Russians); Übersiedler, or Germans from the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR); and asylum seekers, especially from Poland, Turkey (where the Turkish-Kurdish confict had turned particularly violent), and Yugoslavia (where Germany’s Ost Politik and its overtures towards Croatia further infamed the separatist momentum). The combined number of refugees from the East reached 350,000 in 1988. In the beginning of the 1990s, numbers climbed even higher, reaching a peak in 1992, when Germany received 350,000 civil war refugees from the former Yugoslavia and a total of 438,200 asylum applications (Faist 1994, 2). The German constitution rooted citizenship in the ethnonationalist principle of ius sanguinis, and thus legitimated the political disenfranchisement of the majority of guest worker migrants and their children on the basis of “lack of Volkszugehörigkeit”, or membership of the German ethnic group. Further, the constitution declared the Aussiedler, by defnition, to be political refugees and Germans based on the principle of ethnic descent and extended eligibility for “return” to all Eastern European citizens who were born after 1945 and could show proof of German ancestry (Senders 1996). The migration of ethnic Germans to the Federal German Republic (FDR) was framed as an instrument of national revitalization. In the words of the leader of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU/CSU), just as Israel was the “homeland of all persecuted

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and repressed Jews”, the FDR was the “homeland for all persecuted and discriminated Germans” (Spiegel 1989a). The same parties emphatically declared that Germany was “not a country of immigration” and blocked eforts by the Social Democrats (SPD) to grant voting rights in local elections to guest workers with more than fve years of residency in the regions of Hamburg, Bremen, and Schlesweig-Holstein. This step was taken using the argument that foreign residents do not belong to “the people” (Das Volk) – a decision upheld by the Federal Constitutional Court (Faist 1994, 19). But, if in the dominant biopolitical rhetoric, the “return Germans” were envisioned as revitalizing the German nation, in the popular perception, especially in cities with a high number of migrants and rising unemployment rates resulting from the heavy economic cost of reunifcation, Aussiedler counted not as longlost “blood relatives” but as just another group of “foreigners” competing on the housing and job market (Mattson 1995). As Spiegel (1989b) noted, most Germans sufered from a “confusion of the foreigner concept”, in which the asylum problem and the foreigner question became entwined with the German returnees, whose claims to authentic Germanness were suspected of being fake and whom many German citizens regarded not as Volks Deutsche but as Schein Deutsche, or fake Germans, who in reality were “economic refugees”. This “confusion”, according to SPD leader Oscar Lafontaine, was the result of the decade-long Christian Democratic vilifcation of refugees. “Whoever campaigns against the arrival of 100,000 asylum seekers per year with the slogan that ‘The boat is full,’ but meanwhile claims the need to take in 300,000 ‘Aussiedler’ should not be surprised at the harvest he reaps”, Lafontaine argued (Spiegel 1989b). What was needed, then, in the context of German reunifcation and the absorption of ethnic Germans from the former East, was a consolidation of boundaries of German national belonging on terms that would legitimate the diferentiation between Germans and “other” refugees but would retain a distance from problematic racial theories and the legacy of the Nazi past. That solid ground was articulated in a liberal nativist discourse that constructed a homogeneous inside of the nation through a supposedly natural desire for a national identity rooted in an already established, historically sanctioned, ethno-culturally rooted “way of life”. This natural desire, coupled with an instinct for self-preservation, was captured in the rhetoric of “the full boat”. The repetitive staging of the image of the Vlora in the German press was designed to clear up the “confusion of the foreigner concept”. Natural Communities, Liberal Nativism, and the German Asylum Compromise

Thus, the ideology of “natural communities” and “organic belonging” came to defne the cultural bedrock of German belonging. It evoked notions of Überfremdung (or “over-estranging”) and of a “natural absorption capacity” whose limit could not be overcharged without serious repercussions,

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and it racialized the discussion about asylum, citizenship, and social rights (De Genova 2010). As Michelle Mattson poignantly puts it, it made xenophobia not only natural but also “necessary for ethnic well-being” (Mattson 1995, 72; Gerhmann et al. 1991; Zimmer 1993). In the process, the signature ideas of the extreme right Republikaner Partei were mainstreamed and became central to the public debate on the “foreigner issue” (Gerhmann et al. 1991). In an article titled “Wer ist das Volk?” (Who Is the People?) published in the signature intellectual newspaper Die Zeit, Dieter Zimmer proclaimed it “realistic” to heed the considerable natural distance between diferent ethnicities. The article played up this “natural” diference between Germans and Others, not only in relation to asylum seekers but also in relation to resident migrants’ capacity for integration. Just because the concept of ethnicity is tainted by the Nazi terminology of Das Volk, Zimmer opined, Germans shouldn’t be disallowed the need to protect their natural “ethnicity” (Zimmer 1993; Mattson 1995, 72). The notion of a healthy nativism based on ecology and quasi-biological territorial instincts was also promoted by Herbert Gruhl, now a member of the right-wing conservative organization Independent Ecologists Germany (UÖD). As Gruhl explained in 1990 [I]f one thinks ecologically, one must acknowledge that there are organic peoples, languages and cultural communities. . . . It is after all most natural that one accepts those with whom one already shares a common historical fate and with whom one even has direct blood. (Mattson 1995, 72) In this context, the metaphor of a “full boat” became central to the representation of the “natural absorption capacity” of the German nation and travelled from the extreme right-wing Republikaner Partei to the centre of public debate. If initially media coverage of the Vlora had referred to the inhumane treatment of Albanian refugees by Italian authorities, the photo of the boat was now re-infected as an omen of a looming “mass onslaught” of refugees heading to Western Europe. Die Zeit evoked biblical prophecies by referring to the “Menetekel of Bari”, while Spiegel warned of an impending “exodus”, of “apocalyptic scenes”, and of “a fght of man against man” (Sommer 1991; Spiegel 1991; Pagenstecher 2008, 127). In the context of rising mass hysteria, liberal nativism was rearticulated as “welfare chauvinism” (Butterwegge 2007; Faist 1994). On August 14, 1991, Bild’s title page speculated on “The Asylum Catastrophe: Tomorrow Also Near Us?” A few weeks later, the cover of Spiegel was headlined: “The Onslaught of the Poor: Refugees, German Resettlers, Asylum Seekers” and illustrated by a boat painted in the colour of the German fag and besieged by indistinguishable wormlike creatures. The accompanying article by Dieter Spöri, titled “Soldiers at the Borders”, republished the image of the Vlora and speculated

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that, had the Albanians requested asylum in Bremerhaven instead of Bari, they would have gained asylum and that they would have been followed by tens of millions of other “poverty” refugees who similarly would take advantage of the German constitutional guarantee which provided a practically “limitless” pretext to enter the country (Spöri 1991; Pagenstecher 2008, 127). Spöri argued that the German constitutional guarantee to asylum had also enabled welfare fraud on a massive scale by allowing asylum seekers to collect multiple beneft pay-outs in diferent German states. For Spöri, there was “no doubt” that most German citizens no longer felt able to cope with the “onslaught”. “Even if the boat is not full . . . the fear in the boat is greater than before” (Spöri 1991; Sokolowsky 2009). Alarmist publications and politicians across Germany and Northern Europe claimed that record numbers of refugees were making their way to Europe. Spöri, in Spiegel (1991, 37) quoted the director of the Geneva-based Organization of International Migration, who saw in the current numbers the beginning of the “largest and longest migration wave” the world had ever seen. Spiegel (1991) anticipated a “mass migration” from the collapsing Soviet Union (where, the article reported, 1 in 4 inhabitants would rather live in Germany than at home); from the South (“where in 10 years the lack of basic existential provisions will force 100 million people into migration”); and from Turkey (where 2.3 million Turks were reported to be ready to head out for Europe). The journal Geo predicted that 500 million people were already on their way to reach Europe (Rosenthal 2000, 201). The momentum of this rhetoric directed itself not only at Schein Asylanten (fake asylum seekers) or “poverty refugees” (Spöri 1991) but, in a “transfer of illegitimacy” (Bigo in Walters 2004, 240), it also infected the debate about the presence of Turks and other minorities in Germany, including Jews. Between 1990 and 1993, a sharp rise in xenophobic attacks and mob violence resulted in the deaths of 39 people (Human Rights Watch 1995; Steinhardt 2018). The federal government played down the violence, attributing attacks in Hoyerswerda in 1991 (targeting a pension housing asylum seekers) and in Rostock in 1992 (on a group of 200 Roma, Vietnamese, and Angolan guest workers) not to the proliferation of right-wing networks in East and West but to East Germany’s “democratic defcit” (Sokolowsky 2009). A member of parliament for the region attributed the outburst of murderous xenophobia to the presence of the migrants themselves and, disregarding the fact that the violence was directed at East German guest workers, declared: “it has been impossible for the people of Rostock to tolerate 200 asylum seekers who were crowded in a small area”. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of local Christian Democratic politicians pandered to racist views: “Today we give the asylum seekers bicycles, tomorrow it may be our daughters” or “Some speak of integration and the melting pot, I speak of blood mongrelization and crossbreeding” (Sokolowsky 2009).

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In a German version of the 1960s and 1970s British dictum that “fewer numbers make for better race relations” (Fekete & Webber 1994, 17), the FDR government pressed for the imposition of tougher borders as well as asylum and migration controls as preconditions for winning the battle against xenophobia and avoiding “catastrophe” (Sokolowsky 2009). After an arson attack by neo-Nazis in Mölln claimed the lives of three Turkish residents in 1992, Helmut Kohl threatened to impose a state of emergency. This was widely interpreted as a means to push a drastic curtailment of the German constitutional right to asylum, strongly opposed by the Social Democrats, through the Bundestag (Schuster 2004; Phillip 1994; Hailbronner 1994). As the sociologist Ülrich Beck observed at the time, with this legislation, article 16 of the German constitution was to become a relic from a bygone era when refugees were seen not as a human threat but as a threatened human. . . . Not lawlessness and the hunt for people motivate the Chancellor to use the excess vocabulary of a “state of emergency”. It is rather the arrival of foreigners he deems unacceptable. The recipe is clear: fewer foreigners, no burning foreigners, no crisis. “Let’s throw the foreigners out in order to be able to protect them better”. (Beck 1992) The asylum seeker, Beck pointed out, had come to signify “asocial” and served proverbially as the frst keyword designating a common Germanness (Beck 1992). Three days after the government negotiated the so-called “Asylum Compromise”, a neo-Nazi arson attack in Sölingen claimed the lives of fve residents of Turkish origin, most of them children. The language of “natural communities”, “full boats”, and an ethics of “eco-bordering” (Turner & Bailey 2021) conveniently served to culturalize and disarticulate the racism that informed the asylum compromise and to cover up the convergence of the extreme right and centrist parties around a host of issues, including the retrenchment of asylum, migrants’ employment and social rights, and the racialization of the welfare state. The Racialization of the Social and Differential Bordering

The curtailment of the right to asylum, then, was accompanied by a reconstitution of the German ethnos and what Christoph Butterwegge (2007) calls a racialization of the social. In addition to legitimating the introduction of a repressive asylum regime, this redefnition of the social, Butterwegge suggests, was essential to the neoliberalization of society in Germany as elsewhere. It was comprised of four elements: a) economization of the social, where all aspects of life faced restructuring according to market principles; b) culturalization of the social, with cultural identity rather

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than social class as the main criteria of social belonging and solidarity; c) racialization of the social, in which economic competition is instrumentalized to accentuate boundaries between “us” and “them”, giving legitimacy to racialized ethnic chauvinism and the mainstreaming of extreme rightwing ideas; and d) biologization of the social, in which discourse about socially determined conduct or habitus is “naturalized” through biopolitical references to human biology and genetic diferences (Butterwegge 2007, 65–66). The neoliberalization of the economy, then, included a drastic restructuring of the German welfare state and labour regime, along racialized lines. In addition to paving the way for the diferential insertion of migrants and refugees into the German economy, the refugee crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s initiated the consolidation of a diferential border regime. This regime was uploaded to the European level to form the main building blocks of the current European border regime, consolidated by the safe third-country rule, as well as the Dublin Convention, frst signed in 1990 and ratifed in 1997. Post–Cold War Europe was faced with the reunifcation of Germany, the collapse of former socialist regimes and economies, and the projected stream of refugees from defunct economies. The German reconfguration of the relationship between citizenship, state, and territory occurred in the nexus of the national and the transnational and against the backdrop of the shifting economic and geopolitical realities that fast-tracked this post–Cold War Europe to economic, political, and fscal union. A series of intergovernmental conferences in 1990 and 1991 (Dublin, Schengen, Maastricht) provided Germany (backed by several other countries such as the Netherlands and Italy) with a platform to push for a common EC immigration policy to be added to the EC Treaty base. It also provided Chancellor Kohl with a playing feld to circumvent domestic deadlock on the reform of the German asylum law, which, since it entailed a constitutional change (of article 16a), required broad coalition support and foundered on the opposition of the Social Democrats. Kohl’s push, at the Maastricht Intergovernmental Conference of December 1991, for “legally binding rules regarding asylum on the EU level” resulted in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 in the creation of an EU third pillar for justice and home afairs, to which the policy areas of immigration, asylum, and police cooperation were transferred. Moreover, as a result of the restrictions on asylum being introduced (at the behest of Germany) at the European level, Germany’s asylum law was ofcially in violation of the provisions included in the Schengen and Dublin Treaties. This provided the necessary legitimation for the push for constitutional change. Germany was not giving into “populist elements” (and invoking a haunting spectre of further right-wing radicalization to legitimize the restriction of asylum) but needed to fulfl its “European obligations”. Moreover, it could argue that without an asylum compromise, the restrictive

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policies at the European level (that Germany had pushed for) would have made Germany an asylum “haven” (Klusmeyer & Papademetriou 2009; Bösche 2006; Phillip 1994). A strategic component of the asylum compromise, signed into law in April 1993, was the policy of “sealing” of Germany’s borders (whose “openness” only recently had been a cause for euphoria) through the so-called safe thirdcountry rule. This provision, which was added to the constitution, stipulated that only someone who had not travelled or transited through a “safe third country” prior to arrival in Germany could legitimately claim asylum in the country, because asylum claims could have been fled in the “safe” countries of transit. Germany’s list of “safe third-country states” included not only all its neighbouring states (which theoretically closed of all the land routes into Germany) but also non-EC countries. In addition, Germany concluded bilateral re-admission agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic, facilitating the deportation of refugees and irregular migrants who entered Germany via these countries, now classifed as “safe” (Achermann 1995; Bösche 2006). Not surprisingly, the safe third-country rule prompted a chain reaction within the countries neighbouring Germany and beyond, which all set to securitize and seal of their borders through increased surveillance, personnel, and patrols. While the Dublin Convention, which aimed to establish criteria for determining responsibility for decisions on asylum applications, made its way through the ratifcation process by individual signatory states (it was eventually ratifed in 1997), individual member countries composed their own lists of “safe third countries” and signed series of bilateral re-admission agreements, with the goal of sending intercepted asylum seekers back across the borders. Poland concluded agreements with Belarus and Ukraine; the Czech Republic with Slovakia; Austria with Hungary; and Hungary with neighbouring Croatia, Romania, Slovenia, and Ukraine. In exchange for fnancial and economic assistance, migration control was exported to the periphery of Europe, increasingly perceived as a bufer zone. In addition, faced with a looming “exodus” of refugees from war-torn Yugoslavia, EC countries signed agreements tightening criteria for accepting these asylum requests, insisting that such refugees would be housed in camps as close to their original homes and within the borders of the former Yugoslavia (Phillip 1994). In the framework of this Europeanization of migration and asylum policy, Germany’s “full boat” and the culturalist, eco-nativist logic of “natural belonging” that informed it were extended throughout the EC/EU. As Liza Schuster has argued, what this efectively meant was that mechanisms of diferential exclusion (deportation, detention, and dispersal) shifted from being “exceptional” and occasional instruments of migration control to becoming normalized and essential to the European logic of migration “management” (Schuster 2004, 1).

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Conclusion

In the 1960s, Alain de Benoist’s strategy for revamping the legitimacy of the far right’s intellectual legacy and political profle, borrowed from communist political philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, identifed in the phenomenon of migration a key opening for reshaping popular “common sense” around notions of “natural communities” and “organic belonging”, tying it to territorial instinct and a people’s natural desire to protect the “integrity of natural environments”. De Benoist’s “integralist” cultural ecology (Holmes 2000) yielded a diferentialist racism based on the ideas of “cultural incommensurability” and the “right to diference”. In the decades since then, this nativist discourse about a supposedly natural desire for a national identity rooted in an already established, historically sanctioned, ethno-culturally rooted “way of life” that needs to be protected from invasion and corruption by immigrants has steadily been mainstreamed. In Germany, the reactivation of the metaphor of the “full boat” during the refugee “crisis” of the late 1980s and early 1990s served as a cypher for an amalgam of ideas tied to eugenics, social Darwinism, ecology, eco-nativism, and neo-Malthusian calculations about population and migration control while conveniently culturalizing and disarticulating the racist assumptions that informed it. The mainstreaming of anti-migrant and antirefugee rhetoric during this period unleashed a wave of xenophobic violence and was converted politically in the reconstitution of the German ethnos, the retrenchment of asylum, migrants’ rights, the racialization of the welfare state, and in the consolidation of the EU’s restrictive migration, asylum, and border regimes. The refurbishing of the slogan of the “full boat” in the context of the 2015 refugee “crisis” and the continuing rise to political prominence of far-right populist political parties using anti-migrant and anti-refugee rhetoric as election fuel throughout Europe demonstrate the extent to which the extreme right has been successful in shaping popular “common sense” about migration, refugees, “natural communities”, and “organic belonging”. References Achermann, A. (1995). Schengen und Asyl: Das Schengener Übereinkommen als Ausgangspunkt der Harmonisierung europäischer Asylpolitik. In A. Achermann, R. Bieber, A. Epiney & R. Wehner (Eds.), Schengen und die Folgen der Abbau der Grenzkontrollen in Europa (pp. 79–128). Verlag StämpfiundCie AG. APA-OTS. (2015, June 13). Asyl: Strache: Das Boot istvoll – Ziehenwir die Gangwayein. https://www.ots.at/presseaussendung/OTS_20150613_OTS0017/asyl -strache-das-boot-ist-voll-ziehen-wir-die-gangway-ein Bar-On, T. (2007). Where Have All the Fascists Gone? Ashgate. Beck, U. (1992, November 8). Biedermanner und Brandstifter. Spiegel. https://www .spiegel.de/politik/biedermaenner-und-brandstifter-a-e2db2019-0002-0001 -0000-000013680768

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Birnbaum, R. (2015, September 23). “Das Boot ist voll” –Kritik in der Fraktion an Flüchtlingspolitik der Kanzlerin. Der Tagesspiegel. https://www.tagesspiegel. de/politik/gegenwind-fuer-merkel-das-boot-ist-voll-kritik-in-der-fraktion-anfuechtlingspolitik-der-kanzlerin/12359920.html Bösche, M. (2006). Trapped Inside the European Fortress? Germany and the European Union Asylum and Refugee Policy. In G. Hellmann (Ed.), Germany’s EU Policy on Asylum and Defence: Europeanization by Default? (pp. 29–90). Palgrave Macmillan. Butterwegge, C. (2007). Normalisierung der Diferenz oder Ethnisierung der sozialen Beziehungen? In W. D. Bukow, C. Nikodem, E. Schulze & E. Yildiz (Eds.), Was heißt hier Parallelgesellschaft?(pp. 65–80). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Chin, R. (2007). The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. Cambridge University Press. De Genova, N. (2010). Migration and Race in Europe: The Trans-Atlantic Metastases of a Post-Colonial Cancer. European Journal of Social Theory, 13(3) 405–419. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431010371767 Faist, T. (1994). How to Defne a Foreigner? The Symbolic Politics of Immigration in German Partisan Discourse, 1978–1992. West European Politics, 17(2), 50–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402389408425014 Fekete, L., & Webber, F. (1994). Inside Racist Europe. Institute of Race Relations. Forchtner, B., & Özvatan, O. (2019). Beyond the “German Forest”: Environmental Communication by the Far Right in Germany. In B. Forchtner (Ed.), The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication (pp. 216–236). Routledge. Gadermann, D. (2016). Bundespräsident Gauck für Grenzschließung – Das Boot ist voll. Bundesdeutsche Zeitung. http://bundesdeutsche-zeitung.de/headlines/politicsheadlines/bundespraesident-gauck-fuer-grenzschliessung-das-boot-ist-voll-961471 Gehrmann, W., Kruse, K., Scholz, R., & Seidel-Pielen, E. (1991, October 11). Vereint im Fremdenhass. Die Zeit. http://www.zeit.de/1991/42/vereint-im-fremdenhass Hailbronner, K. (1994). Asylum Law Reform in the German Constitution. American University International Law Review, 9(4), 159–179. Head, N. (2016, February 18). The Failure of Empathy: European Responses to the Refugee Crisis. Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can -europe-make-it/failure-of-empathy-european-responses-to-refugee-crisis/ Holmes, D. R. (2000). Integral Europe: Fast Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton University Press. Hultgren, J. (2014). The “Nature” of American Immigration Restrictionism. New Political Science, 36(1), 52–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2013.864899 Human Rights Watch. (1995). Germany For Germans: Xenophobia and Racist Violence in Germany. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1995/Germany.htm Klusmeyer, D. B., & Papademetriou, D. G. (2009). Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and the Remaking of the Nation. Berghahn. Kreis, G. (2006). Die Metapher des Rettungsboots: Zumwerthistorischer Argumentationen. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 56(3), 338–348. http://doi.org/10.5169/seals-1688 Lee, M. A. (2000). The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists. Routledge. Mattson, M. (1995). Refugees in Germany: Invasion or Invention? New German Critique, 64, 61–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/488464

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Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W. III. (1972). The Limits to Growth; A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Universe Books. Normandin, S., & Valles, S. (2015). How a Network of Conservationists and Population Control Activists Created the Contemporary US Anti-Immigration Movement. Endeavour, 39(2), 95–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2015.05.001 Pagenstecher, C. (2008). “Das Boot istvoll”: Schreckensvision des vereinten Deutschland. In G. Paul (Ed.), Das Jahrhundert der Bilder, Band II: 1949 bis Heute. Bundeszentralefür Politische Bildung. Phillip, A. B. (1994). European Union Immigration Policy: Phantom, Fantasy or Fact? West European Politic, 17(2), 168–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402389408425020 Rosenthal, C. (2000). Zur Medialen Konstruktion von Bedrohung. In H. Schatz, C. Holtz-Bacha & J. U. Nieland (Eds.), Migranten und Medien: Neue Herausforderungen an die Integrationsfunktion von Presse und Rundfunk (pp. 196–206). Springer. Schuster, L. (2004). The Exclusion of Asylum Seekers in Europe. COMPAS Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. (Working Paper No. 1). https://www.compas.ox.ac. uk/wp-content/uploads/WP-2004-001-Shuster_Asylum_Europe.pdf Senders, S. (1996). Laws of Belonging: Legal Dimensions of National Belonging in Germany. New German Critique, 67, 147–176. https://doi.org/10.2307/827783 Sokolowsky, K. (2009, August 20). Die Angsthaber: Über die Asylantenfutund andere Horrovisionen der Angstgestörten Deutschen. Jungle World. http://jungleworld.com/artikel/2009/34/37621.html Sommer, T. (1991, August 16). Das Menetekel von Bari: Der Albaner-Ansturmand die Deutsche Asyldebatte: Fluchtwillen wider Festungsdenken. Die Zeit. http://www. zeit.de/1991/34/das-menetekel-von-bari Spektorowski, A. (2000). The French New Right: Diferentialism and the Idea of Ethnophilian Exclusionism. Polity, 33(2), 283–303. https://doi.org/10.2307/3235491 Spiegel. (1989a, February 12). Im Jahr 2000 ein türkisher Kanzler. http://www.spiegel. de/spiegel/print/d-13493688.html Spiegel. (1989b, February 19). Reden nix deutsch, kriegenaber alles. https:// www.spiegel.de/politik/reden-nix-deutsch-kriegen-aber-alles-a-1e95e b9b-0002-0001-0000-000013494568 Spiegel. (1991, August 11). Flüchtlinge: Gefährlicher Sommer. https://www.spiegel. de/politik/gefaehrlicher-sommer-a-0f4b5a58-0002-0001-0000-000013488475 Spöri, D. (1991, September 8). Soldaten an die Grenzen. Spiegel. https://www.spiegel. de/politik/soldaten-an-die-grenzen-a-bb316c89-0002-0001-0000-000013491284 Steinhardt, M. F. (2018). The Impact of Xenophobic Violence on the Integration of Immigrants (Discussion Paper No. 11781). http://ftp.iza.org/dp11781.pdf Taylor, B. (2019). Alt-Right Ecology: Ecofascism and Far-Right Environmentalism in the United States. In B. Forchtner (Ed.), The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication (pp. 275–292). Routledge. Turner, J., & Bailey, D. (2021). “Ecobordering”: Casting Immigration Control as Environmental Protection. Environmental Politics, 31(1), 110–131. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09644016.2021.1916197 Walters, W. (2004). Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics. Citizenship Studies, 8(3), 237–260. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362102042000256989 Woods, R. (2007). Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics. Palgrave MacMillan. Zimmer, D. (1993, July 23). Weristdas Volk. Die Zeit. http://www.zeit.de/1993/30/ wer-ist-das-volk

3 BIRTH RATES AND THE CLEANSING OF IMPURE BLOOD Shaping the “Muslim Question” in the Balkans Dino Suhonic

Introduction

The song played by the white supremacist in his car just before his terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, was a Serb nationalist song with lyrics that called for the expulsion of Muslims. The song “Karadžić, Lead Your Serbs”1 was produced in 1993 on the other side of the world, in former Yugoslavia, during the Bosnian Genocide. This was no coincidence as the Australian-born terrorist was greatly inspired by Serb nationalist ideologies and warlords (Gec 2019; Mujanovic 2019). Brenton Tarrant was also inspired by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white terrorist and another admirer of Serb nationalists (Ibrahim & Karcic 2019; Judah 2011; Pidd 2012). In their manifestos, both terrorists frequently alluded to the hardships of Christians living in the Balkans under Ottoman rule. They saw the Serbs as defending a white Christian Europe from Muslim invaders, a task that the West had supposedly failed to accomplish.2 Though Tarrant and Breivik were compelled by various clashes of cultures taking place both within and outside of the Balkans, it is important to note that the reach of Serb nationalist propaganda was particularly vast and infuential in shaping white, Western nationalist ideologies among these two terrorists and many others (Baboulias 2019; Down 2019; Evans 2019; Hajdarpasic 2019; Hussain 2019; Ibrahim & Karcic 2019; Mujanovic 2021). In this white supremacist logic, Ottoman occupation and higher Muslim birth rates in Kosovo and Bosnia are cast as forerunners in the replacement of native, white Christian Europeans by Muslims (Tregoures 2019). The presence of Muslims in the Balkans inspired belief in the Great Replacement that is popularized by far-right ideologists like Renaud Camus and Éric Zemmour (Tregoures 2019). DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-5

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The Serb struggle to defend Christian Europe from the Ottomans and Muslims has been foundational for white supremacists such as Don Feder3 (Demographic Winter), Serge Trifkovic4 (Green Transversal), and Bat Ye’or5 (Eurabia), one of the originators of “conspirational racialization” (ZiaEbrahimi 2018). Dutch far-right politician Pim Fortuyn (2001) stated that tensions in Kosovo and Bosnia pointed to a Cold War with Islam. Mark Steyn (2006, 20) argued that the demographic “explosion” of Bosnian Muslims is “the model for the entire continent” and rendered genocide inevitable.6 According to Samuel Huntington (1994), the atrocities in the Balkans prove that multiethnic and multireligious societies in the West are equally doomed to fail. The Bosnian war and the international solidarity schemes surrounding it inspired Huntington to write his famous article “Clash of Civilizations” in 1993 (Aydin 2017, 224). Huntington regularly refers to Bosnia to explain why, just as in some other geographical locations, “Muslims are involved in far more intergroup violence than people of other civilizations” (Huntington 1996, 262). For Huntington (1996, 259), the violence between Muslims and non-Muslims might have roots in history but is primarily driven by changes in “demographic balance”. The higher birth rates and “numerical expansion” of Muslims in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Kosovo, and Bosnia “generates political, economic, and social pressures on other groups and induces countervailing responses” (Huntington 1996, 259). The tropes used to condone the Bosnian Genocide in the 1990s, either by Serb nationalists or their international allies, have linked 19th-century racism (related to antisemitism and anti-Ottoman sentiments in Europe) to the fear of global Muslim fundamentalism after the Iranian revolution (Aydin 2017, 223; Hoare 2017; Li 2019). The Balkans have been a breeding ground for Western Islamophobia and continue to stand for a perfect site of “clashing civilizations”. They also serve as a frame to advance and popularize conspiracy theories on demographic replacement, which, unfortunately, remain understudied. This chapter explores Balkan’s “Muslim Question”. More specifcally, it starts by putting the Balkans on the map of global raciality and Europe’s “Muslim Question”. It proceeds by mapping how diferent historical periods, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the Bosnian Genocide in the 1990s, shaped the “Muslim Question” in the Balkans. Furthermore, it investigates how Bosnia and Kosovo became one of the most prominent tropes of white supremacists’ conspiracy theories that assert that Islam poses a threat to white, Christian Europe. In this narrative, Bosnian/Albanian/Slavic Muslims are a problem to Europe and must be alienated, assimilated, or removed. The systemic character of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments discussed in this chapter embeds Balkan’s “Muslim Question” in this broader framework and is centred on replacement conspiracy theories and birth rates. This chapter accounts for how “Islam” and “Muslims” operate through demographic

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changes – notably, through birth rates – relying on both (trans)national/ regional genealogies and local complexities (Goldberg 2014), which varied through diferent historical moments (Winant 2001). As “race” is linked to the construction of spatialized hierarchies of backwardness and represents a “moral cartography” through which the world is divided into civilized or backward spaces (Mills 1997), Muslims in the Balkans fall into racialized hierarchies of Europeanness, whiteness, and Western civilization. The Balkans and the Silence About Race

While white nationalism has adopted themes from Serb nationalist propaganda, it can hardly be said that Serb nationalist ideology has been inspired by white nationalism (Kiper 2021). Indeed, though the Serbs’ Othering of Muslims aligns with the global raciality of Muslims at large (Baker 2018; Li 2019), the Serbs themselves have never been considered equal to white, Western Europeans (Alter 2000). Modern-day Serb nationalists, however, do derive solace from the incorporation and modifcation of Serb nationalist ideologies by white nationalists, interpreting it as a validation of their centuries-long, enduring battle against Muslims. The co-option of the Serb nationalist ideologies by European and global white nationalists “stem[s] largely from collective white grievance” (Kiper 2021, 113). Moreover, the Balkans became a site that gives diferent meanings to white, Christian Europe and (re)defnes hierarchies of race (Baker 2018). Taken together, it is contradictory that the region remains outside of race and Europe’s “Muslim Question” (Baker 2018; Hoare 2017; Bracke & Hernandez Aguilar 2020; Li 2019). If the Bosnian Genocide plays a crucial role in shaping white nationalist ideologies, why are many scholars hesitant to think about how the Balkans has shaped our thinking on the world order, “global raciality”, and the entanglement of birth rates, ethnicity, religion, and race?7 The Balkans, as Catherine Baker (2018, 1) provocatively states, “has ethnicity, has religion” but “apparently has nothing to do with race”. Bulgarian scholar Maria Todorova (2009) criticized the scholarly eforts to separate the Balkans from “global raciality” through a hyperfocus on “ethnicity” while ignoring “race”. This is, however, paradoxical, considering that much of the understanding of “race” has informed the Balkan’s attachment to Europe (Baker 2018, 5; Todorova 2009). Additionally, Baker (2018, 7) attends to how the Balkans have always been defned by their relationship with Europeanness and modernity in an “inherently racialized logic”. Much of the literature addressing the atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo is dominated by journalists and non-academic writers who interpreted the tragedies as an inevitable consequence of “ancient ethnic hatreds” (Hoare 2014, 519),8 because of ethnopolitical/ethnoreligious confict, and as the aftermath of the collapse of state socialism (Baker 2018, 2; Hoare 2014). At the same

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time, the region is also deeply embedded in transnational racialized imaginations (Baker 2018, 4). Some studies of the historical and present-day peripheralization of the Balkans have been profoundly informed by a translation of postcolonial theory (Baker 2018, 1–6). Edward Said’s Orientalism inspired Milica Bakic-Hayden (1995) and Maria Todorova (2009) to think through the imaginations and representation of the region through the theoretical tools of “nesting orientalisms”9 and “Balkanism”10 (Baker 2018). Scholarship on Eastern European countries regularly dismisses “race” and emphasizes the dominant role of ethnicity and nationality, while much of the thinking about ethnicity and nationality was informed by biological and cultural essentialism that resembles racialized logic (Baker 2018). It would be inequitable to neglect the fact that the Balkans have already become enmeshed in the global construct of race through examinations of discrimination against the Roma people (Baker 2018). But why does it prove to be difcult to do the same with Bosnian/Slavic/Albanian Muslims and the Bosnian Genocide? Replacement and the Birth of Balkan’s “Muslim Question”

To gain a comprehensive understanding of Balkan’s “Muslim Question”, it is necessary to surpass unproductive characterizations such as “ancient ethnic hatreds” or “history repeats itself”. Though the various instances of targeting, dehumanization, and displacement of Muslims throughout Balkan history may not necessarily be interrelated, there are, nonetheless, similarities in the patterns that have shaped the development of Balkan’s “Muslim Question”. One of those common tropes in the “Muslim Question” in the Balkans is replacement. The fear of replacement stemmed from the 19th century, newly formed, and mostly Christian Balkan states in the post-Ottoman era. This fear is still present in the region, albeit with some alterations, in the dominant discourse. Replacement conspiracy theory in the Balkans was directly linked to diferent ways of “dealing” with Muslims, including assimilation, control, disciplining, oppression, violent displacement, forced conversions, mass murder, and genocide of the “heirs of the Ottomans” – that “alien body” – as well as the destruction of their houses, mosques, museums, libraries, and important infrastructure. Islam’s social, cultural, and intellectual eradication were components of a systematic campaign against Muslims. After the disintegration of the Ottoman empire,11 Muslims were subjected to a minority status in the newly established states across the Balkans.12 The Serbian state saw Muslims as the tragic legacy of the Ottoman occupier, and they were not the only ones (Karcic 2002). The 1878 Berlin Congress considered the Balkans still as a “Near Eastern Settlement”, and around the same time, the term “Balkan”13 came into the geopolitical vocabulary of Western

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powers (Karcic 2002). The Bosnian scholar Fikret Karcic (2002) argues that, despite diferent geopolitical contexts and supra-national ideologies surrounding the Balkans, the survival of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim attitudes from the 19th century to the present-day is a sign of the continuation of the Eastern Question (1774–1923). What began as a seemingly anti-Ottoman attitude became a matrix of Balkan’s “Muslim Question”: the erasure of Islamic “Otherness”. Both Serb (and Croatian) nationalist elites14 and their international allies expressed an Orientalism/Islamophobia that was interdependent and a source of common Europeanness (Karcic 2002; Baker 2018; Todorova 2009). Long-term legacies of Ottoman rule constructed notions of nationhood, ethnicity, Europeanness, and whiteness (Baker 2018; Hoare 2017; Todorova 2009). In particular, the noticeable political driver behind Serbia’s nationalizing mission was the need to “liberate” Bosnia both from the Ottomans and, later, from Austro-Hungarian rule. This implied that “our Turks” had to become nationally conscious Serbs (Hajdarpasic 2015, 92, Karcic 2002, 640–642). “The Turk” was the Ottoman ruler, and “our Turk” was a Slavic “(br)other” from the Mohammedan faith (Hajdarpasic 2015, 203). While some Serb and Croatian nationalists were trying to create brotherhood among diferent faiths of Slavic brothers, popular anti-Turkish writings in the 19th century labelled the “poturice” (the “turned-Turks”, “Turkifers”) as the ones that betrayed their faith and their roots – that is, Slavic converts to Islam, who are worse than the actual Turks (Hajdarpasic 2015, 203–204; Sells 1996). According to the newly established nationalist logic, Slavic Muslims were either forced to convert or did so because of greed and opportunism (Sells 1996). This all became a foundation of a new religious ideology called “Christoslavism”, which equated being Slavic to being Christian and considered conversion to Islam as “a betrayal of the Slavic race” (Sells 1996, 36). For prominent Serbs, Bosnia was a Serb land whose population was purely Serbian in terms of race. Serbian scholar Jovan Cvijic wrote that Muslims were Serbs, yet “[the] Bosnian Mohammedans lived under distinct conditions and had distinct psychological traits than the other Slavic renegades of the Balkan Peninsula . . . [they] changed faith and lost their national consciousness” (Zuljic 1993, 403). In a comparable vein, Cvijic stated that the Albanians fooded into Kosovo, which resulted in its transformation into an alien territory that was, nevertheless, seen as necessary to occupy for reasons of economic and strategic signifcance (Zuljic 1993). Although in confict with each other, Serb nationalists and the AustroHungarian empire had similar ideas about dealing with Muslims. The Austro-Hungarian administrators’ way of monitoring and controlling15 Bosnian Muslims drew signifcantly on how other colonial empires dealt with the “Muslim Question” (Hajdarpasic 2015, 177). Bosnian Muslims continued to play a signifcant role since they were a wealthier class that could

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oppose or balance Serb nationalism and its growing infuence (Hajdarpasic 2015). Nevertheless, as many Austro-Hungarian administrators stated, Islam had no place in the empire and Muslims were its “most Oriental and unruly element”. As Austrian jurist Adolf Strausz wrote, Europe is the home of Christianity . . . Islam is the insurmountable obstacle, as it has no real home in Europe anymore .  .  . There are only two paths: either Islam can be modifed in the spirit of Western cultural work, or it must cease to exist. (Strausz quoted in Hajdarpasic 2015, 177) This has been a matrix of both imperial and regional powers surrounding the “Muslim Question”. The displacement and mass killings of Balkan’s Muslims started at the turn of the 19th century, lasting through the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and the First World War (1914–1918) respectively (Adanir 2002; Karcic 2002). Being on the winners’ side of the First World War, the Serbs became a much more dominant political and military power. Due to agrarian reforms orchestrated by Serbs, Muslims lost both their lands and political infuence (Adanir 2002). Muslims’ desires to have their own “fourth unit” in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed “Yugoslav Kingdom” in 1929) were impossible during the interwar period (Adanir 2002, 279). Some Muslims organized around a new Muslim political organization called the Yugoslav Muslim Organization, which was obliged to proceed like a religious organization, while Serbs and Croats in Bosnia were organized along national lines (Adanir 2002, 279). The Muslim population had to choose between Serbian or Croatian nationality. Simultaneously, Muslims were killed and forced to “deturkify” or “emigrate to Asia” (Karcic 2002, 644), and the exodus of Muslims to Turkey continued. These orchestrated actions were justifed as revenge for what “they” did, revenge for the Kosovo defeat in 1389, the Serb uprising in the early 19th century, and the Balkan Wars. In a similar vein, Vaso Cubrilovic, the government of the Yugoslav Kingdom referred to the “fecundity of Albanian women” and pleaded for Albanians to leave Kosovo (Salihu 2018). In the Second World War, Bosnian Muslims occupied a complex position, being both in anti-fascist movements and in the military of the Independent State of Croatia – a satellite state of German and Italian regimes. The latter was used as a license for diferent Serb (para)militaries to kill tens of thousands of Muslims (Hoare 2013; Malcolm 1994, 192). The Birth of a Muslim Nation and Uncontrolled Birth Rates

Bosnian and Slavic Muslims in Tito’s Yugoslavia were afected by discussions about their incapacity to have a national identity because of their

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“backwardness” in developing a national consciousness (Adanir 2002; Li 2019).16 In 1948, Bosnian Muslims were “allowed” to declare themselves as Serbs, Croats, or “Muslims nationally undetermined” (Adanir 2002, 282). In 1961, Muslims gained the status of “Muslims (ethnic adherence)” and, in 1970, of nationality (Adanir 2002, 282; Li 2019, 58). At the same time, Serbs and Croats denied Bosnian Muslim’s claims to nationhood, while Tito increasingly used the “Muslim element” to balance the dominance of those groups (Adanir 2002, 282). The position of Albanian Muslims remained precarious when the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha stayed loyal to Stalin and when the policies of the Yugoslavian State Security Service under Aleksandar Rankovic in the 1950s disproportionally afected Albanian/Muslim populations (Sells 1996). For the frst time since Ottoman rule, the Bosnian Muslim population outnumbered the Serbs and gained more extensive sociopolitical infuence (Banac 1992). In the 1960s, Serb leaders within Tito’s Yugoslavia focused on birth rates, particularly in Kosovo. In May 1968, Dobrica Cosic (who would later become a prominent Serb thinker and “father of the Serb nation”) said to the Central Committee of the League of Communists in Serbia that Serbia risked “losing Kosovo” due to the Albanian birth rates in Kosovo (Salihu 2018). Nationalist projects across the Balkans painted domestic and foreign Muslims as the Other, proving their own whiteness and Europeanness along the way – reproducing a racial logic on a global scale and complementing it with a nationalist logic in the region (Baker 2018, 170–176; Li 2019, 163). Serb thinkers like Miroljub Jevtic, Vuk Draskovic, and Vojislav Lubarda fed into the anti-Muslim paranoia and spoke of “Serbophobia” among Muslim “fundamentalists” (MacDonald 2002, 233–234). Even before the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic came into power, the Serbian Orthodox Church and Serbian Academy of Science and Art initiated Serb nationalist propaganda (MacDonald 2002; Sells 1996). Serb political leaders dreamt of all Serbs residing in one country, which included either controlling or removing Muslims, as they are “Christ killers” and “race traitors” (Sells 1996, 27) and outnumber Serbs (Cigar 1995, 80). They spoke of their fght as a defence of Serbs and Europe against Muslims, another Ottoman occupation, and preventing the “infection” and “penetration” of Islam from the South (MacDonald 2002, 234). Fantasies of a “Sharia-ruled” state, pan-Islamist conspiracies and jihad, the sexual depravity of Muslim men, and their wish to rape and impregnate Serb women and girls to raise Janissaries, dominated the discourse of the 1980s and 1990s (Li 2019; MacDonald 2002, 236–237). The Serbs needed to defend themselves as they, so the story goes, sufered the most, after the Jews (MacDonald 2002, 237). Serb nationalist propaganda situated Serbia as both European and non-European, requesting Western sympathy while simultaneously blaming the international community for working against the Serbs (MacDonald 2002).

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At the same time, the demographics across Yugoslavia changed: Kosovar Albanians and Bosnian Muslims outnumbered the Serb populations in Kosovo and Bosnia. In the eyes of Serb academics, church leaders, and politicians, the high birth rates of Kosovar Albanians were a “demographic conspiracy to out-birth Serbians” and a “demographic time-bomb” designed to produce an “ethnically clean region” (Cigar 1995, 79–80; MacDonald 2002, 77; Salihu 2018; Sells 1996, 55), while the Serbs were dealing with the “white plague” (a Slavic expression for demographic decline).17 The government institutions were giving funds to Serb mothers to bear more children and, in Muslim-dominated areas like Sandjak and Kosovo, they were given medals (Cigar 1995, 80). According to the Serbian Association of Professors and Scientists, the increasing Muslim birth rate represented a “gynaecological conspiracy” and there was a plot to make Albanian women more fertile (MacDonald 2002, 77). The association also referred to Muslim women as “child/breeding machines” and “cats” (Salihu 2018; Sells 1996, 56). This was, so the story goes, an orchestrated strategy by some Muslim countries to spread Islam and threaten Serbs (Cigar 1995, 80). Diferent projects sought to increase the “Serbianization” of the region, which began when Kosovo was frst taken under Serb control (Vickers 2019, 120–122), and to set up “family planning” to reduce the percentage of the Albanian population relative to the Serbs (MacDonald 2002, 77). If this family planning was happening too slowly, Albanian Kosovars would have to be “repatriated” to Albania (MacDonald 2002, 77). Due to the emigration of Bosnian Serbs to Serbia and the higher birth rates of Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Muslims became the largest Bosnian nationality by 1971, which led to a “renaissance of Muslim national and cultural life” (Hoare 2014, 525). This was perceived as another “genocide of Serbs” (Sells 1996). Serbs equated the Bosnian Muslims with “blood thirsty” and “beasty Turks”, “Asian”, “perverted”, and “homosexual” (Banac 1992, 362–372). Reconversion to Christianity and “social de-Islamization” by forcing Muslims into interfaith marriages were seen as viable strategies to “save” them (Banac 1992, 372). Croatia’s Serb leader and psychiatrist Jovan Draskovic said Bosnian Muslims are “victims, as Freud might have said, of anal frustrations which incite them to amass wealth and seek refuge in fanatic attitudes” (Knezevic 1997, 556). Media reports about the alleged mass rape of Serb minorities in Kosovo fed into perceptions of national victimization and boosted government-led hate campaigns against Kosovar Albanians and, later, Bosnian Muslims (Bracewell 2000; Sells 1996). Biljana Plavsic, a Bosnian Serb leader, stated that “rape is . . . the strategy of fghting for Muslims . . . For Islam, this is normal, because their religion tolerates polygamy” (Subotic 2012, 42). In the city of Prijedor, the local police chief claimed that Muslims were planning to circumcise all Serb boys, kill all men, and send women to “harems to bear Janissaries” (Karcic

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2002, 647). Serb political and military leadership claimed that these actions are a continuation of anti-Ottoman uprisings and proposed an “exchange of population”, which, just like “ethnic cleansing”, was a euphemism for forced expulsions and the genocide of Muslims (Karcic 2002; Sells 1996). In the 1990s, rape was one of the most prominent features of the Bosnian Genocide by Serb (para)military interventions in Kosovo and Bosnia (Allen 1996; Bell 2018; Bracewell 2000; Doja 2019; Henry 2010; Karcic 2022; Stiglmayer 1994). Systematic sexual violence against women (and men), including the “rape camps”, was not merely a military strategy but a way of “cleansing impure blood” (Weitsman 2008), aimed at halting the high Muslim birth rate (Allen 1996; Vranic 1996) and mass-killing sexually reproductive Muslim men (Takseva 2015). After being raped, Muslim women were supposed to give birth to Serb babies, which would lead to “demographic renewal” (Takseva 2015). Some of them had to be converted to Orthodox Christianity before being raped (Takseva 2015). Systematic rape was executed by Serb perpetrators, but victims were also forced to commit sexual violence against each other (Karcic 2022, 202). As Karcic (2022, 191) states, “Serb concertation camps were an integral part of the cleansing campaign .  .  . the psychological destruction of the Bosniak “family of mind” through rape, torture, and macabre ritual is made starkly clear in demographic changes” and were part of “collective traumatization”. The deliberate attack on Muslim women as childbearers was gynocidal and sought to “equalize” birth rates (Sells 1996, 22). Wedding rings would be stolen from Muslim women (Sells 1996, 23), and in many cases, their sons, husbands, and family members were forced to witness the rape. The victims of this systematic sexual violence would have to bear “Serbian seed” and be subjected to “forced impregnation of Serb nationhood, a bizarre mixture of religion and biology that can only be understood against the underlying religious mythology” (Sells 1996, 22). The Serbian Church leader Patriach Pavle claimed that Serbs were native to Bosnia and that “Muslims had arrived with the Ottoman invasion” (Sells 1996, 83). This was in the line with racial theory developed by Serb religious nationalists like Dragos Kalajic, who stated that Muslims are not Europeans and that their identity was an expression of a “semi-Arabic subculture” that inherited inferior genes from North African Arabs by the Ottomans (Sells 1996, 83). Bosnian Muslims were seen as subhuman (Karcic 2022, 21) and, according to Biljana Plavsic, Muslims are genetically spoiled material who converted to Islam. And those genes have been reinforced generation after generation. They have become worse and they dictate and express the Muslim way of thinking and behaving. The latter is embedded in their genes. (Subotic 2012, 42)

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Plavsic was “upset by a rising number of mixed marriages between Serbs and Muslims, for they allow genes to be exchanged between ethnic groups and lead subsequently to the degeneration of Serb nationality” (Subotic 2012, 42). Conclusion

One of the most infuential catalysts of Balkan’s “Muslim Question” was the fear of replacement – the native, non-Muslim Slavic population being replaced by an alien, Muslim one. Both empire collapses and nation-building in the 19th and 20th centuries infuenced the ambiguous position of Muslims in the Balkans. The wish to control, discipline, or expel Muslims was a result of both international imperial/colonial politics and regional nationalist projects in the 19th and 20th centuries. Balkan’s “Muslim Question” might be seen as a continuation and survival of the ideologies of the “Eastern Question” that had always been driven by replacement conspiracy theories of Serb/Croat nationalist ideologists and their international allies. The presence and higher birth rates and otherness of “our Turks” in the past remained the foundation of “countermeasures” that included a variety of practices of expulsion and genocide. “Turks” became “Muslim fundamentalists”, and the fght against them inspired global white supremacists. The Albanian/ Bosnian/Slavic Muslim was Othered, racialized, and alienated from Balkan nativeness and Europeanness to the extent that, at the height of the 1980s’ nationalist uprising and 1990s’ genocidal aggression, they lost their capacity to assimilate. There was no solution to their replacement of us other than to “remove” them. Beyond the analysis of what happened during the Bosnian Genocide, one must take the ideological roots of the Bosnian genocide seriously. Besides its regional revival/survival, this replacement conspiracy theory in the Balkans is one of the foundations of white nationalist ideologies elsewhere. The expulsion of Muslims in the Balkans serves as a model for “Removing Kebab” – the soundtrack of contemporary white supremacists. Notes 1 Radovan Karadžić is a Bosnian Serb leader convicted for war crimes. Although this song belongs to a marginal war/folk music genre and gets regularly removed from social media, it became a well-known meme among white nationalist platforms. Another name of the song is “Serbia Strong” or “Remove Kebab”. Among the far right, “Kebab” is a derogatory term for Muslims. Tarrant called himself a “part-time kebab removalist” (Mujanovic 2019, 2021). The text of the song is also anti-Croat, but that part is left out in alt-right forums. 2 Tarrant states that the U.S. and NATO forces fought beside Muslims and slaughtered Christian Europeans attempting to remove these Islamic occupiers from Europe during the U.S. military interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999. Tarrant probably purposely ignores the Bosnian Genocide (1992–1995) and the initial post–Cold War American foreign policy in which the United States

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chose not to get involved in the Bosnian war in until 1994. This policy led to the embargo on weapons and a complicated situation on the ground, particularly for the Bosnian Muslim population (Dobbs 1995). U.S./NATO military interventions only came in late 1995 – and reluctantly – after a series of ethnic cleansing and other war atrocities across Bosnia. European governments overall remained reserved even as the genocide in Srebrenica happened under the watch of the UN Dutchbat. Resonating with Ye’or’s thinking on Islam and Muslims, Don Feder (2005), who coined the term demographic winter, linked Muslims in the West Bank and the Balkans to explain that “all jihad breaks loose” if they encounter non-Muslims. Ye’or regularly worked together with Serge Trifkovic, an American-Serbian publicist who was responsible for bringing Serb nationalist propaganda into the Western white nationalist movements and who worked closely with the leaders of Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić and Biljana Plavšić – both convicted of genocide (Sells 2002). Among his rich Islamophobic writings, one of the most interesting is the article “U.S. Policy and Geopolitics of Jihad: The Green Corridor in the Balkans” (Trifkovic 2009) in which he defnes the Green Corridor as “a geopolitical concept that has been used . . . to defne the long-term goal of Islamist ideologues, both in the Balkans and in the wider Muslim world, to create a geographically contiguous chain of majority-Muslim or Muslim-dominated polities that will extend from Turkey in the southeast to the northwestern-most point of Bosnia (120 miles from Austria)”. The Serb “struggle” is implemented in the thinking of Egyptian Jewish polemicist Bat Ye’or (Sells 2002). More than a decade before Ye’or’s popular writings on Eurabia, she stated that Bosnian Muslims are simultaneously “spearheads” and “the residue of the Islamic refux resulting from the wars of liberation of the Christian dhimmis” (Giniewski 1994, 17). She further states that Muslim “penetrations” via the Balkans threaten indigenous Christianity and allow the “Islamization of Europe” (Giniewski 1994). Ye’or’s polemical arguments are in line with Serb nationalist propaganda that Muslims outnumbering Balkan Christians is a direct threat to Europe and that the Bosnian genocide is nothing else than preventing the invasions of Muslims into Europe (Sells 1996). “Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 per cent to 31 per cent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 per cent to 44 per cent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Serbs fgured that out . . . if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em. The problem Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profle is now the model for the entire continent”. (Steyn 2006, 20) This question might sound paradoxical because the Bosnian Genocide is one of the most documented and discussed atrocities in human history. And yet, the scholarship lacks consensus on the genocidal nature of the Bosnian Genocide and portrays it euphemistically as “ethnic cleansing” or as a “civil war” in which “all sides are bad guys” and/or aggression orchestrated by Serbia and Croatia (Hoare 2014). This led to many revisionists or denialist arguments in the literature and public discourses (Turcalo & Karcic 2021), though the Bosnian Genocide was thoroughly discussed (Becirevic 2014; Cekic 2004; Cigar 1995; Hoare 2014; Karcic 2022; Sells 1996; Shaw 2007; Suljagic 2010; Weitz 2003). Robert D. Kaplan, the author of Balkan Ghosts (1993), was infuential in creating U.S./Western policies in the Balkans. While Kaplan was not a direct advisor, American president Bill Clinton read the book, which infuenced his decision not to lift the embargo on the Bosnian government, which complicated the situation on the ground (Kaufman 1999). Western politicians and newscasts regularly talked in Kaplan’s words of “ancient ethnic hatreds”. Kaplan was highly

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infuenced by Rebecca West’s writing on the Balkans. In her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, frst published in 1941, she writes, “If it were not for a small number of [men like her Serbian cicerones] the eastern half of Europe (and perhaps the other half as well) would have been Islamized” (West 2007, 145). As Bakic-Hayden (1995, 918) explains that “while there are many overlapping images of ‘the Orient’ . . . the gradation of ‘Orients’ that I call ‘nesting orientalisms’ is a pattern of reproduction of the original dichotomy upon which Orientalism is premised”. In her book Imagining the Balkans (2009), Bulgarian scholar Maria Todorova refers to a range of Orientalist and Eurocentric discourses in much of the literature on the Balkans. The region is seen as Europe’s “Other within”, barbaric and non-European. The initial phase of casting Muslims across the Balkan as the “Others” and the “new threat from the East” was when non-Muslim South Slavs and Albanians stood at the Antemurale Christianitatis (“the bulwark of Christianity”) during wars against the Ottoman Empire. The frst expulsions of Muslims began during and after The Great Turkish War (1683–1699). The Ottoman ruler categorized populations into millets, religious communities. The Serbian Orthodox Church was permitted to provide religious services which upheld beliefs that the Ottomans were seen as temporal rulers and Christians were morally superior to its Muslim conquerors (Hoare 2017, 167). The social divisions along religious communities allowed for the emergence of separate nationalities. This process laid the basis for the identifcation of the non-Christian population as an alien element that had to be expelled, which after the so-called First Serbian Uprising of 1804–1813 led to massive massacres or forced conversions to Christianity of primarily urban Muslim and Jewish populations (Hoare 2017, 167). Just like “balkanization” as a term to refer to a divide between diferent states (a term that white nationalists still use nowadays). This chapter does not delve into the signifcance of nationalist ideologies in Croatia and other (Christian) states within the Balkans and their international allies, despite their critical roles in comprehending the interdependent nature of localized/globalized Islamophobia and Balkan’s “Muslim Question”. For example, they centralized the religious afairs of Bosnian Muslims in a body called “Islamska Vjerska Zajednica” (Islamic Religious Afairs) (Li 2020, 59). The Austro-Hungarian empire wanted to cut or at least control the ties of Bosnian Muslims with the Ottomans (Li 2020, 244) and, at the same time, sponsored print media that would emphasize Muslim representation and develop Bosnian Muslims into a “state-building element” and suitable political partners (Hajdarpasic 2015, 165–177). Utilizing Orientalist narratives, the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front, between 1947 and 1950, orchestrated initiatives aimed at unveiling Muslim women in Tito’s Yugoslavia, serving a dual purpose of reinforcing secularism in the socialist state and promoting state-approved feminism (Hadžiristić 2017). The government, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the Serbian Academy of Science and Art all pointed to the importance of bearing more Serb children while advocating for a complete ban on abortion (Takseva 2015).

References Adanir, F. (2002). The Formation of a “Muslim” Nation in Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Historiographic Discussion. In F. Adanir & S. Faroqhi (Eds.), The Ottomans

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and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (pp. 267–304). Brill. https:// doi.org/10.1163/9789047400608_010 Allen, B. (1996). Rape Warfare. The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. University of Minnesota Press. Alter, P. T. (2000). The Serbian Great Migration: Serbs in the Chicago Region, 1880s to 1930 [Doctoral dissertation, The University of Arizona]. https://repository.arizona. edu/handle/10150/289230 Aydin, C. (2017). The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History. Harvard University Press. Baboulias, Y. (2019, April 1). The Balkans Are the World Capital of Islamophobia. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com Baker, C. (2018). Race and the Yugoslav Region. Postsocialist, Post-Confict, Postcolonial? Manchester University Press. Bakic-Hayden, M. (1995). Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review, 54(4), 917–931. https://doi.org/10.2307/2501399 Banac, I. (1992). The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (2nd ed.). Cornell University Press. Becirevic, E. (2014). Genocide on the Drina River. Yale University Press. Bell, J. O. (2018). The Bosnian War Crimes Justice Strategy a Decade Later. Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher. https://www.toaep.org/pbs-pdf/92-bell/ Bracewell, W. (2000). Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism. Nations and Nationalism, 6(4), 563–590. doi.org/10.1111/j.1354-5078.2000.00563.x Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12742 Cekic, S. (2004). Agresija na Republiku Bosnu i Hercegovinu: Planiranje, Priprema, Izvodenje (Vols. 1–2). Sarajevo: Institut za istraživanjezlocinaprotivcovjecnosti I medunarodnogprava. Cigar, N. (1995). Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing”. Texas A&M University Press. Dobbs, M. (1995, December 3). Bosnia Crystalizes US Post-Cold War Role. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com Doja, A. (2019). Politics of Mass Rapes in Ethnic Confict: A Morphodynamics of Raw Madness and Cooked Evil. Crime, Law and Social Change, 71(5), 541–580. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-018-9800-0 Down, A. (2019, March 30). The Balkan Ghosts Inspiring White Nationalist Terrorism. Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com Evans, R. (2019, August 4). The El Paso Shooting and the Gamifcation of Terror. BellingCat. https://www.bellingcat.com Feder, D. (2005, October 31). Condi Ups Ante on Crescent-Kissing—Says Islam’s a Religion of Peace and Love. FreeRepublic. https://freerepublic.com/home.htm Fortuyn. (2001, August 25). Koude oorlog met islam. Elsevier/Pim Fortuyn. https:// www.pimfortuyn.com/pim-fortuyn/archief-columns/101-koude-oorlog-met-islam Gec, J. (2019, March 16). New Zealand Mosque Gunman Entranced with Ottoman Europe. PBS. https://www.pbs.org Giniewski, P. (1994, February/March). The Return of Islam to Europe, Bat Ye’or Interviewed. Midstream, 4(2), 16–19. https://www.dhimmitude.org/archive/ giniewsju_midstream_feb94.pdf

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Goldberg, D. T. (2014). Sites of Race. John Wiley & Sons. Hadžiristić, T. (2017). Unveiling Muslim Women in Socialist Yugoslavia: The Body between Socialism, Secularism and Colonialism. Religion & Gender, 7(2), 184– 203. https://doi.org/10.18352/rg.10137 Hajdarpasic, E. (2015). Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914. Cornell University Press. Hajdarpasic, E. (2019, March 20). How A Serbian War Criminal Became an Icon of White Nationalism: The Global Nature of Racist Nationalism. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com Henry, N. (2010). The Impossibility of Bearing Witness: Wartime Rape and the Promise of Justice. Violence Against Women, 16(10), 1098–1119. Hoare, M. (2013). The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War. Oxford University Press. Hoare, M. (2014). Towards an Explanation for the Bosnian Genocide of 1992– 1995. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 14(3), 1098–1119. https://doi. org/10.1177/1077801210382860 Hoare, M. (2017). Islamophobia and Antisemitism in the Balkans. In J. Renton & B. Gidley (Eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe (pp. 165–185). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-41302-4_7 Huntington, S. (1994). America Undone. The Social Contract Press. https://www. splcenter.org Huntington, S. P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. Touchstone. Hussain, M. (2019, September 1). How White Nationalists Have Been Inspired by the Genocide of Muslims in Bosnia. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com Ibrahim, A., & Karcic, H. (2019, May 24). The Balkan Wars Created a Generation of Christian Terrorists. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com Judah, T. (2011, July 25). The Norway Killings: Breivik’s Balkan Obsession. Economist. https://www.economist.com Kaplan, R. D. (1993). Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. St. Martin’s Press. Karcic, F. (2002). The Eastern Question – A Paradigm for Understanding the Balkan Muslims’ History in the 20th Century. Islamic Studies, 41(4), 635–650. Karcic, H. (2022). Torture, Humiliate, Kill. Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System. University of Michigan Press. Kaufman, M. T. (1999). The Dangers of Letting a President Read. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com Kiper, J. (2021). An Obstacle to Decolonising Europe: White Nationalism and its Co-option of Serbian Propaganda. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 30(2), 112–122. https://www.doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300208 Knezevic, A. (1997). Social Background of a Hermeneutics of The Qur’an: The Case of Bosnia. Islamic Studies, 36(2/3), 551–563. Li, D. (2019). The Universal Enemy. Stanford University Press. MacDonald, D. B. (2002). Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centred Propaganda and War in Yugoslavia. Manchester University Press. Malcolm, N. (1994). Bosnia: A Short History. Macmillan. Mills, C. W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Ministry of Defence: Republic of Serbia. (2019, November 24). Professor Dugin: In 1999, the Serbs Woke Up the Multipolar World. https://www.mod.gov.rs/eng

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Mujanovic, J. (2019, March 22). Why Serb Nationalism Still Inspires Europe’s Far Right. Balkan Insight. https://balkaninsight.com Mujanovic, J. (2021, March 12). The Balkan Roots of the Far Right’s “Great Replacement” Theory. New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com Pidd, H. (2012, April 18). Anders Behring Breivik Attacks Inspired by Serbian Nationalists, Court Hears. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/international Salihu, F. (2018). The Politicization of Having Children. Kosovo 2.0. https://kosovotwopointzero.com/en/ Sells, M. A. (1996). The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. University of California Press. Sells, M. A. (2002). The Construction of Islam in Serbian Religious Mythology and its Consequences. In M. Shatzmiller (Ed.), Islam and Bosnia: Confict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi-Ethnic States (pp. 56–85). McGill-Queens University Press. Shaw, M. (2007). What is Genocide? Polity Press. Steyn, M. (2006). America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it. Regnery Publishing. Stiglmayer, A. (1994). Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. University of Nebraska Press. Subotic, J. (2012). The Cruelty of False Remorse: Biljana Plavšić at the Hague. Southeastern Europe, 36, 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1163/187633312X617011 Suljagic, E. (2010). Ethnic Cleansing: Politics, Policy, Violence – Serb Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in Former Yugoslavia. Nomos. Takseva, T. (2015). Genocidal Rape, Enforced Impregnation, and the Discourse of Serbian National Identity. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 17(3), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2638 Todorova, M. (2009). Imagining the Balkans. Oxford University Press. Tregoures, L. (2019, July 11). Kosovo, the Global Far Right, and the Threat to Liberalism. European Council on Foreign Relations. https://ecfr.eu Trifkovic, S. (2009). US Policy and Geopolitics of Jihad: The Green Corridor in the Balkans. Gates of Vienna. https://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com Turcalo, S., & Karcic, H. (2021). Bosnian Genocide Denial and Triumphalism: Origins, Impact and Prevention. University of Sarajevo, Srebrenica Memorial Center, Institute for Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks. Vickers, M. (2019). The Albanians: A Modern History. Bloomsbury Academic. Vranic, S. (1996). Breaking the Wall of Silence: The Voices of Raped Bosnia. Izdanja Antibarbarus. Weitsman, P. A. (2008). The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence: A Review of Bosnia and Rwanda. Human Rights Quarterly, 30(3), 561–578. https://www.doi. org/10.1353/hrq.0.0024 Weitz, E. D. (2003). A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton University Press. West, R. (2007). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Penguin. Winant, H. (2001). The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II. NBasic Books. Zia-Ebrahimi, R. (2018). When the Elders of Zion Relocated to Eurabia: Conspiratorial Racialization in Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Patterns of Prejudice, 52(4), 314–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2018.1493876 Zuljic, S. (1993). Review of Some Conclusions and Messages. In J. Cvijic (Ed.), Anthrophogeographic Research. Roots of Serbian Aggression. AGM, Zagreb.

4 “REVERSE COLONIZATION” Early Narratives of Decline in the French New Right Lou Mousset

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the ideological and political production of the GRECE (Groupement de recherches et d’études pour la civilisation européenne, or the Research and Study Group for European Civilization), a far-right group that emerged in postcolonial France.1 Born in 1968 at the junction of fascist organizations and anti-decolonial actions, GRECE was a key organization in developing and mainstreaming discourses on French national decline, I argue – discourses which, in turn, are foundational to contemporary articulations of far-right population replacement conspiracy theories. This chapter specifcally focuses on the early iterations of reverse colonization within the group’s written work and, most importantly, on their eforts to renew the ways in which narratives of national decline can be enunciated. This critical account of decline is fundamental to pursuing its “social etymology” (Stoler 2009). It allows me to attend to “words in their sites” and the conceptual weight they bear, the authority with which they are endowed, [to] ask how people think and why they seem obliged to think, or suddenly fnd themselves having diffculty thinking, in certain ways. (Stoler 2009, 36) Scavenging through the canon of European racial science, GRECE was able to produce key conceptual transformations that rendered the narrative of decline palatable for an audience outside the far right without falling under the accusation of blatant racism. The group put forward new concepts and strategies to unite its political scene. As intellectuals, they turned DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-6

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their eyes to new cultural goods, such as movies, cartoons, comics, or pop music, investigating them with their own worries and hopes (DurantonCrabol 1988). This strategic move was conceptualized through a Gramscian framework: its goal was frst to achieve cultural hegemony in order to subsequently seize governance. This move required taking a step back from classic politics and investing in new felds as part of a new metapolitical agenda (Taguief 1984).2 After a brief introduction of the theme of reverse colonization in the group’s canon, I present how GRECE articulates this narrative to its critique of Judeo-Christianity. I subsequently show how such critique was transformed by the discursive context surrounding “race” in France. The contribution of GRECE to discourses of race in France is discussed in light of its impact on the French far right, especially on the Front National. Finally, I focus on the work of Guillaume Faye, ex-member of GRECE and writer of an infuential book on population replacement conspiracy theories: La colonisation de l’Europe (2000). “Reverse Colonization”

The theme of European decline has been central to GRECE (DurantonCrabol 1988). Like its predecessors among the nationalist far right, its members feared the weakening of France without its colonial empire. Yet GRECE operated within a wider, European, horizon and its generation was free from the ambition to revive French Algeria (Taguief 1984). The group was created to provide the political fringes with a new theoretical framework to counter their political disqualifcation after World War II and the Algerian independence. It sought to move away from the disputes between nostalgic partisans of a French Algeria and those worried about the coming Algerian France (Shepard 2017). Whereas Europe-Action (1963–1967), its predecessor, wrote profusely about the threat of an “Arab invasion” (Shepard 2017), GRECE was careful when writing or speaking of colonization. Its theoretical framework and style were transformed under the infuence of the postcolonial context. In 1972, a new law regarding racism was passed in France to conform to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination adopted in 1965 by the General Assembly of the United Nations. The Pleven law ultimately created a new category titled “Incitement to racial hatred” (provocation à la haine raciale), which allowed for the dissolution of associations “inciting to discriminations” (Brahim 2020). Founding members of GRECE reshufed some of the groups who fell victim to this new legal framework (Debono 2019) and were deliberate about establishing GRECE as an intellectual project rather than a political intervention. It is, as presented by its name, a research project about, and for, European civilization.

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Like its predecessor, GRECE held onto colonization as a theme to narrate European decline, but it let go of the most belligerent attacks and took on the task of analyzing such decline through the tools of science and reason. The general use of a scholarly tone and scientifc references is signifcantly higher in GRECE publications (Taguief 1984; Duranton Crabol 1988). Most importantly, Alain de Benoist joined the cultural war by investing key progressive concepts with new meanings. The theme of “Arab invasion” is not present in the early issues of its magazine Nouvelle Ecole; instead, the young Alain de Benoist writes: Decolonization is a fact, and a given. It took place in the name of the right of peoples to self-determination, in other words in the name of the inalienable right of specifcally defned human communities to become aware of themselves and to ensure their destiny through their own genius. . . . We must go further. Colonization is not only physical and historical. .  .  . Mental colonization also exists. Cultural colonization has been manifesting everywhere and since a very long time. Decolonization must be total, and total decolonization is reciprocal decolonization.3 (GRECE 1969a, 6) By reclaiming decolonization for Europe, GRECE aligns its fght against decline with decolonial struggles. This rhetoric of reciprocity is part of a larger strategy to reach the mainstream, appropriating progressive terms along the way. If “reciprocal decolonization” implies reverse colonization, GRECE gives it a specifc narrative. Infuenced by French historian Louis Rougier (Duranton-Crabol 1988; Taguief 1994), GRECE’s early work is dedicated to what it calls the “mental colonization of Christianity” over Europe. GRECE spoke of the ancient Christianization of Europe as an invasion from the East, insisting on how violent and bloody this process was (Taguief 1994). Europe’s contemporary decline is presented as the historical product of Christian colonization over a lost pagan Europe. Pre-Christian Europe represents both a loss and a goal: it must be revived to avoid societal collapse, and what must be recovered is both ethical and genealogical. This theme of an original colonization provides the narrative of decline with its “year zero” that marks Europe forever (Duranton-Crabol 1988). They see decline manifested in contemporary “biases rooted in two thousand years of mental colonization” (GRECE 1969b, 22) and the modern taste for undiferentiation: the great and the mediocre meshed together under an ideology of egalitarianism, which they see expressed in various forms such as communism, women wearing pants, human rights, mass tourism, or TV.

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Critique of Judeo-Christianity

For the GRECE thinkers, Christianity bore the thrust towards equality – and, therefore, towards decline – because it prioritizes the soul over the fesh. Bodies, in their view, carry the marks of racial hierarchization. Against Christianity, GRECE opposes its own renewed version of a biological materialism, heir of what Billig (1981) has called racial science. The early issues of GRECE’s magazines present at length studies conducted by biologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, phrenologists, or chemists. In the 1970s, one can fnd Marxism, modern anthropology, and Christianity grouped together in the pages of its magazines as manifestations of the same “egalitarianism”. They all proclaim the equality of all men (before God or before the law) which, to GRECE, is nothing but a denial of the scientifc reality of racial diferences – “the current social hierarchy does not conform to the biological hierarchy” (GRECE 1971, 18). To fx such inconsistency, the early GRECE is open to eugenics, whether positive or negative, which it considers a necessity for Europe’s successes. It cannot be denied that an elite exists, it insists, both on a biological level (through studies of the brain and measures of intelligence) and on a cultural plane (with Europeans having produced the greatest civilizational achievements). GRECE studied those civilizational achievements via disciplines such as philology, ethnology, archaeology, and anthropology. To unveil Europe’s ancient past, they also reference Indo-European studies4 and take Indo-Europeans not merely to refer to a linguistic category but to a coherent, genetically homogeneous, group of peoples. According to GRECE, Indo-Europeans are the people who existed before Judeo-Christianity came, set Europe backward, and corrupted the genetic stocks of the population: Our civilization has bad morale and bad morals. It is tired; its momentum has been broken. Parasitic elements took advantage of it to transform breathlessness into sleep, and sleep into decline. The solution to the “crisis of morality” is the defnitive and complete rejection of what we had to absorb by force, and which we reject today. .  .  . Strangers have transformed our house, making us lose, in the night of the passing time, the very consciousness of who we are. That is why we must return to the mental soil from which we have been driven away. (GRECE 1972, 89) Although never made explicit in its writings, the reference to Indo-European studies helps us to understand who the strangers are who brought Christianity to Europe. This deployment of “Indo-Europeans” foregrounds language as a site for racial diferentiation. GRECE continues the philologic tradition, famously represented in France by Renan, of racialization through the study of linguistic structures. In modern European history, linguistics has been an

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important feld to scientifcally anchor race(s) and nations (Masuzawa 2005; Poliakov 1971; Zia-Ebrahimi 2021). In the folds of a lost history, GRECE re-introduces Indo-Europeans as a “race”. But racialization also operates elsewhere, namely through the metaphor of the parasite. GRECE is attached to a Spenglerian biological account of history (Collins 2020): races are “vegetative” and have roots, like plants; history is a “morphological” process, driving the movement of civilizations. The parasite is external to one’s body but attaches itself to blood, damaging one’s vigour. If the goal of politics is to recover the moment of vigour before decline, then in that metaphor, “the death of others makes one[’s civilization] biologically stronger” (Foucault 1997, 258). In that sense, today’s decline must be understood from the perspective of those ancient events because the “parasitic elements” are still there, in Europe. Although not always explicit, I conclude from the historical and intellectual mapping of GRECE’s canon that the group’s early criticisms against Christianity are haunted by the fgure of the Semite (Anidjar 2007). The Semite here is “a unique and somewhat changing if perhaps also ephemeral fgure whereby the Jew and the Arab merge into one as a fundamentally ‘religious’ entity” (Anidjar 2003, 192). In the early GRECE’s intellectual corpus, the metapolitical ambition is to push forward the scientifc nature of its studies and promote “science over religion”. Religion is opposed to science, to progress, to change, to improvement, and diferentiation: a binary is produced between religion and history: Christianity was born in an ethno-geographical area that no one questions, the Middle East. It bears its indelible mark. Like other Middle Eastern cults, it promotes submission and renunciation. It distinguishes men, not so much according to their merits and achievements, but according to whether or not they conform to the dogmatic precepts of the divinity. . . . The genius of Europe, on the contrary, is prefgured by the myth of Prometheus, the man who did not hesitate to steal from the gods the fame of knowledge and learning, who was condemned for this act, but whose tragic fate still arouses admiration. For what is peculiar to Europeans is this permanent need, this irresistible desire to go further, higher, faster, to launch themselves into the discovery of unknown worlds, to ignore prohibitions, to constantly beat their own records, to consider, in a word, that there is no value except in the challenges. (De Benoist & Marion 1970, 64) Here, de Benoist paints two portraits – the frst portrait being within the landscape of the Orient. Such portraits appear in the text with a comparative purpose: the reader must compare the frst portrait to “the scientifc mentality” (GRECE 1968, 4) of the Indo-Europeans. Explorers, philosophers,

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early eugenicists (GRECE 1971, 16), heirs of Prometheus, they do not surrender to Nature nor the gods; they bend their environment to their will (GRECE 1969c, 7). In comparison, Judeo-Christianity is drowned in religiosity, promoting transcendence over biological improvement. Christianity, which the early GRECE often referenced as “Judeo-Christianity”, is connected to its geographical origin, the Middle East. By doing so, GRECE ties the discursive construction of Jews as already racialized (Topolski & Nathan 2016) to egalitarian ideologies and, ultimately, to Christianity. Discourses on the Semites are especially convenient for GRECE as they tie together the fundamental anxieties of its time. Although a generational gap starts to emerge when GRECE appears on the French political scene, I have previously established that the group is constituted at the crossroad of two generational “failures”, World War II and the Algerian War. In this context, resorting to Indo-Europeans make sense because its counter-fgure (Olender 1989; Zia-Ebrahimi 2021), the Semite, is “the historically unique, discursive moment whereby whatever was said about Jews could equally be said about Arabs, and vice versa” (Anidjar 2007, 18). If the texts are ambivalent when it comes to reverse colonization, it is also because the fgure in question is ambiguous. Among those ideological roots is the discursive infra-structure of the Semites. As in a palimpsest (Schuller 2018; Bracke & Hernandez Aguilar 2020), under the text is also before the text, and in that sense, GRECE’s imaginary of the European Self stands on a racial infra-structure: the Semite as “the history of Europe” (Anidjar 2007, 21). When GRECE attempts to account for this history of the “European Self”, it mobilizes the pattern of decline through the Semite, here portrayed as an invader. 1979: Public Debate Over the “New Right”

Fostering ambiguities regarding the name of this Judeo-Christian colonizer, GRECE was able to pursue its strategical appeal in a scientifc and respectable tone. Up until 1979, it is possible to consider that GRECE was successful in restoring the intellectual relevance of the far right in France (DurantonCrabol 1988). During the 1970s, GRECE was able to progressively enter the media industry and university circles, leading a subtle campaign of seduction in sites of cultural productions, becoming a visible school of thought in the French media and political landscape. Its rise to visibility was made possible by the modern look it adopted. Prominent fgures of the group were invited to write for Le Figaro. They gained editorial responsibilities within the rightwing newspaper’s new weekly format: Le Fig Mag. This was a success; it appealed to a younger audience and touched upon modern topics such as travel, sports, movies, and literature (Duranton-Crabol 1988). On all those fronts GRECE was able to sprinkle its own ideas regarding “egalitarianism”,

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elites, biology, and Judeo-Christianity. The most analytical pieces were carried by de Benoist, always with the aim to renew the interest in a European history in which Christianization is the main tragedy. The rise to legitimacy was halted in 1979 when, from June to October 1979, an intense public debate erupted around what then was called the New Right (NR). More than 500 articles were written in the fve following months (Duranton-Crabol 1988). The public debate was constructed around two axes: anxiety around the return of biological reductionism equated to Nazism and the incorporation of GRECE in a larger constellation of “totalitarianism” (whether communist or Nazi), against which the “true liberal democrats” must take a stand (Brunn 1979). The controversy proved the impossibility of GRECE to pursue its metapolitical ambitions (DurantonCrabol 1988). Aware of the “emotional charge”5 of the word “race”, de Benoist had been working towards changing the conceptualization of race and racism within GRECE’s canon since 1974. “Against All Racisms”

In 1974, de Benoist wrote an article entitled “Against All Racisms” in the journal Elements, in which he theorized antiracism as “the people’s right to remain themselves” (De Benoist 1974, 9). Racism, then, was understood as the political eforts to refuse, deny, or eradicate one’s own biological specifcity. GRECE could claim decolonization for itself since it was trying to revive the specifc lineage and history of the Indo-European people, a goal shared equally by other “races anxious to preserve [their] specifcity, [their] culture, [their] identity” (De Benoist 1974, 10). Following this rhetoric, GRECE’s purpose could present as fully “anti-racist” – this explains its positive review of Israeli studies advising against marriages between Jews and non-Jews because they “question the cultural survival of the group” (De Benoist 1974, 9). For GRECE, the “Jewish opposition” to mixed marriages and miscegenation is more than positively welcomed; it truly becomes a template for its own politics. On a discursive note, this allows the group to defuse possible critiques of antisemitism (Taguief 1994) and, most importantly, to give respectability to its own political agenda. This discursive retorsion was successfully put forward during the controversy of 1979 and throughout the 1980s, and de Benoist continued to change the doctrine of GRECE so that culture, and not biology, would provide the grounds for racialization. De Benoist (1974, 10) called for the protection of all cultures from “the phenomenon of forced uprooting (déracinement), inherited from the colonial system, a negative fact that afects the cultural character of all”. After this shift, the biggest threat, according to GRECE, was not “egalitarianism” but “uniformity”. The modern impetus to “render all equal” was now depicted as “all will become the same”

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(Taguieff 1994). Racism then became synonymous with “universalism”; true antiracism was now the defense of cultural particularities, turning the people’s fght against assimilation into a standardized model. According to de Benoist, to ensure that cultural diferences are respected, cultures should not mix. Indeed, he argued that when two diferent populations coexist on the same territory, there is always a risk that both will lose their culturally unique features. With a theoretical framework rooted in ethology – especially in the work of Konrad Lorenz – de Benoist argued that, like animals, man has a territorial instinct that requires him to defend his territory (GRECE 1974, 43). Cut of from his roots, no longer feeling at home, he becomes alienated. This led de Benoist to argue that immigrants are stripped of their culture while in France and should, therefore, return to their countries of origin. To ensure cultural homogeneity, children of immigrants should receive an education that will enable them to reintegrate into their homeland – such policies were already present in the French legal framework of migrants’ cultural management (see Escafré-Dublet 2014; Guiraudon 1996; Lentin 2005). In the 1990s, as the debate on youth criminality in the banlieues gained traction, de Benoist argued that crimes were merely a consequence of this cultural alienation. Both French natives and foreigners are cut of from their regional communities and, in that sense, both would beneft from keeping a strict cultural separation (Taguief 1994; François 2021). Following this rhetoric, Arab foreigners bear a constant threat to the IndoEuropean legacy but so does the modern U.S. cultural infuence over Europe (e.g., food, clothing, music, movies). During the 1980s, GRECE adopted a clear anti-American stance: they considered the U.S. to be the clearest manifestation of a threatening universalism (Taguief 1994). De Benoist denounces American individualism as the ontological foundation for human rights: it is rootless, “raceless”, and provides the grounds for globalization. According to de Benoist, this modern individualism has its roots in Christianity, where the individual supposedly encounters God through the narrow channel of faith and is, therefore, cut of from the community, from the traditions and rituals that used to materialize the relations with the gods (François 2021). This modern Christian subject has no roots, no history, and no land. For GRECE, this is a denial of what constitutes Man: he is not mediated but constituted by culture, traditions, rituals, and language (Collins 2020). Against U.S. cultural imperialism, GRECE ofered a return to Indo-European paganism, the true religion of those now presented as Europe’s indigenous people. De Benoist ventured outside of the canon of far-right thinkers; against the antagonism of U.S. vs U.S.S.R., he proposed a Third Way: aligning Europe to “Third World struggles”. Expressing their demands as Europe’s indigènes, the GRECE thinkers called for the formation of a Euro-Arab axis to defend the “Third World” against the injunction to assimilate into the West (Taguief

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1994). The group dedicates an issue of the magazine Elements to Islam, a religion they contrast to Christianity: Islam, unitary combination of transcendence and naturalism, religion foreign to any form of dualism, to any ontological rupture, to any radical opposition between the profane and the sacred, the matter and the spirit, the spiritual and the temporal, remains indeed a foundation of the ArabMuslim world. (De Benoist 1985, 3) De Benoist states his hope in the 1979 Iranian revolution, for Islam could be a resistance against Modernity. Relying on Orientalist depictions, GRECE praised Islam for recognizing the importance of traditions instead of relying on modern individualism. Most importantly, Islam is presented as the religion of Arabs, whereas Christianity does not belong to Europeans and may always become a world religion. Against all forms of universalism, GRECE spoke for the radical defence of particular cultures and identities. This anti-universal defence of minority cultures was presented as antiracist in de Benoist’s rhetoric. Culture, here, is as restrictive of a racial signifer as biology was. This move from biology to culture, however, did impact the ways in which GRECE would talk of Europe’s decline. A supremacist claim against immigration was able to be articulated without the discursive motive of “invasion”. Giving up on the narrative of “reverse colonization”, GRECE pushed forward stories of decline through disenchantment, atomization, and individualization (Bar-On 2016). Reactions on the Far Right

While GRECE’s early critique of modernity did not get much traction on the far right, the retorsion of culture under an antiracist rhetoric had great success. Through the focus on cultural diferences, power symmetry was built in the so-called antiracist argument: “one has the right to be for Black Power, but on condition that one is, at the same time, for White Power and Yellow Power”, de Benoist (1974, 10) writes in 1974. Public outrage over the promotion of racial hierarchies was avoided through the endorsement of cultural diversity. De Benoist’s rhetoric “against all racisms” opened new ways for the far right to articulate supremacist claims. The Club de l’horloge (The Clock’s Club),6 a think-tank founded by dissident members of GRECE and also part of the New Right, ran with this argument to demonstrate the damages done by immigration in France. Letting go of the reference to ethology, the Club re-introduced the thesis of déracinement (uprooting) through a Lévi-Straussian frame (Lamy 2016). It was particularly interested in Lévi-Strauss’ book Race and History, with its emphasis on the

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diversity of peoples and cultures. The Club’s members spoke of dual déracinement: immigrants are cut of from their roots but so are French natives upon whom a foreign culture, Islam, is imposed. The Club de l’horloge was one of the frst to link immigration to Islam. Indeed, if the Indo-European culture is founded in pagan practices, if Judeo-Christianity is the universalization of Jewish monotheism which “cease[d] to be Jewish” (Taguief 1994, 194), then Islam becomes the cultural signifer for Arabs as a race. Their arguments were well-received by the rising Front National, and Jean-Yves le Gallou and Yvan Blot, founding members of the Club, ended up working with Jean-Marie Le Pen to elaborate the doctrine of the party as it was taking of (Lamy 2016; Camus 2015). In 1983, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National was gaining electoral weight by pushing the theme of immigration to the front under an economic critique of unemployment. From the start of his mainstream political career, Jean-Marie Le Pen targeted Islam and Arabs as the cause of French decadence. The discourse of decadence was built on demographic threats, critique of unemployment, and a general sense of nostalgia (Almeida 2014). In this rhetoric, the specifc antiracist reciprocity introduced by de Benoist found its place: France was to be defended for its cultural specifcity. He could then speak of anti-French racism, demand that “France must belong to the French” (La France aux Français), and state that “it is our duty to afrm our national personality and, us too, our right to be diferent” (Guiraudon 1996, 50, emphasis added). In this sentence, we can attribute this “us too” to the doctrinal contribution of the New Right and the traveling conceptualization of “race” through GRECE and the Club de l’horloge. Contemporary discourses of anti-white racism (Hajjat 2020) or replacement follow similar patterns of reversal. Now threatened and in decline, the group in question may request to fght back and do so under the framework of “antiracism”. Critique of Faye: The Return of Colonization

If the retorsion of “antiracism” for supremacist purposes was a success on the right and the far right (Camus 2015), the same cannot be said for de Benoist’s defence of indigenous cultures and his praise of Islam. Such arguments raised confusion on the far right. Both the Club and the Front National criticized de Benoist’s anti-Christianity (Lamy 2016). Most importantly, de Benoist’s new takes fuelled disputes within GRECE. It is from one of those disputes that Guillaume Faye’s book La colonisation de l’Europe emerged in the year 2000. Faye was a prominent intellectual within GRECE during the 1980s. He conceptualized the distinction between Europe (propriety of the Indo-Europeans) and “the West” (dominated by U.S. infuence), refusing the amalgamation of the frst into the second. He left GRECE in 1987 but returned after

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having worked ten years as a radio entertainer under a pseudonym. When he returned to the group in 1997, he built the intellectual foundations for what was then a minor trend: the “identitarian” (identitaires) right, already represented by Pierre Vial within GRECE (François & Lebourg 2016; François 2021). In 2000, l’Aencre published Faye’s La colonization de l’Europe, and the book continues to be a cornerstone of the ultra right, introducing the critique of Islam in the movement (François & Lebourg 2016). Following the publication, both the publisher and Faye were fned by a court for “incitement to racial hatred”, and Faye was also evicted from GRECE. But the book lived beyond the constellation of the New Right and echoes in many ways in Camus’ 2010 Le grand remplacement. Faye wrote La colonisation de l’Europe in a conficted dialogue with de Benoist and as a response to GRECE’s theoretical failures. A failure in style frst, since Faye denounces the “intellectualism” of GRECE, criticizing de Benoist’s work as too idealistic. For Faye, GRECE committed a “metapolitical suicide” (Faye 2000, 51), and by prioritizing the strategy of mainstreaming over problem-solving, de Benoist has become “politically correct” (Faye 2000, 224). Worse, by doing so, GRECE has “implicitly approve[d] and endorse[d] Europe’s population colonization (colonisation de peuplement)” (Faye 2000, 51). This is the second failure of GRECE according to Faye – that is, the failure to account for a deliberate process beyond immigration: the Islamic colonization of Europe. GRECE lost sight of this, according to Faye, because it was too focused on the critique of Americanization. Faye seeks to re-work the intellectual framework of GRECE to enlarge the scope of the critique and to account for this catastrophic phenomenon which he describes anxiously. This re-working occurs through a Schmittian move; Faye wants to name a new enemy. He, therefore, distinguishes the U.S. from Islam, or “the main adversary” from “the main enemy”: Know how to designate the main enemy. A cultural or economic invasion, a strategic subjection can be dealt with. It is much more difcult when the colonization is demographic and religious. This is why it is necessary to fght Americanization, ethnic colonization and Islam at the same time. And above all to never fall into the intellectual stupidity of using Third Worldism and Islamophilia as weapons against Americanization. (Faye 2000, 218) Writing before 9/11, Faye argues that “the U.S. wants more Muslims in Europe” (Faye 2000, 40) and frames them as collaborators of the Islamic enterprise. By failing to acknowledge Islamization, de Benoist is also framed as a collaborator. Faye’s attacks target de Benoist’s “multiculturalism”. For Faye, the “right to be diferent” has been corrupted. According to his account, it was frst invented “to assert the right to ethnic diference . . . of

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Europeans on their own soil!” (Faye 2000, 218). He deplores that the rhetoric has fostered arguments for a “Euro-Arab Union”, which he admittedly also pushed for during the 1980s. But, in 2000, Faye states that “the Maghreb has nothing to bring to Europe, no economic or geopolitical advantage. Such a marriage would be to unite with a parasitic group” (Faye 2000, 41). The return of the metaphor of the parasite is signifcant here. Indeed, what appears as a reworking of GRECE is, in fact, more of a recurrence. Like de Benoist before him, Faye engages in “discursive bricolage” (Stoler 1995); he recovers older discourses of race and tweaks them to produce new meanings while still maintaining the pattern of invasion. Engaged in a theoretical dialogue, La colonisation de l’Europe carries the marks of earlier racial formations, including that of the Semite, a fgure who previously emerged in GRECE’s canon as an entanglement of race and religion in the construction of an invader. As mentioned previously, the discourse of reverse colonization already existed in the early GRECE’s critique of Judeo-Christianity. But when the pattern reappears in the work of Faye, there is no ambiguity regarding the name and face of the enemy. Beyond immigration, it is about population colonization (colonisation de peuplement): Islam is in conquest, youth crime is a proto-race civil war, invasion occurs through maternity hospitals, and there is a risk of ethnocide. “They will bring all their weight to bear their power over institutions. It will be a process of colonization from below: frst demographic submersion, then political subjugation” (Faye 2000, 15). Faye brings back elements that were part of GRECE’s historical canon. The pattern of reverse colonization is there but, most notably, he brings back biology as a racial signifer in addition to the cultural framework of de Benoist: Then, why say “multicultural” when the problem is multiracial and multiethnic? Why erase this anthropo-biological and religious dimension of immigration, when we are dealing with the massive arrival of radically allogenic populations and a theocratic monotheism, Islam, and not with the “enriching” contribution of a “new culture” as Elements unfortunately suggests? (Faye 2000, 48) In Faye’s wording of an “anthropo-biological and religious dimension of immigration” (2000, 48), we fnd the entanglement of several racial signifers meshed to produce the conceptual bricolage of the “Muslim Question”. The European “Muslim Question” consists of “a plethora of debates, discourses, practices, legislations, and diferent forms of violence and discrimination centring on problematizing the presence, existence, belonging, and practices of Muslims in Europe” (Bracke & Hernandez Aguilar 2022, 201). Since Faye’s work engages explicitly in a dialogue with the European

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genealogy of race, we can study in situ which signifers are recovered to produce the “Muslim Question” and for what reasons. The return of biology is materialized by revived anxieties over birth rates; anxieties that were present in GRECE’s early work on eugenics. Faye’s colonization reverses de Benoist’s argument that “in last resort, a country is strong only by the number and the quality of its children” (De Benoist 1973, 2). De Benoist wrote this sentence in 1973 in an article discussing the possible legalization of abortion in France, which GRECE welcomed positively at the time for its potential to help control the population’s quantity and quality; that is to say, its demography and eugenics. De Benoist’s interest in what he then called biopolitique faded away under his defence of cultural diferentiation. However, he continued to praise the revival of a stable homogenous European identity. If de Benoist perceived France as much more threatened by Americanization than by Islam, his rhetoric both contributed to and built on the construction of immigrants as alien bodies within the national community (Farris 2014; Bracke & Hernandez Aguilar 2020). What Faye retains from de Benoist’s framework is the implicit acknowledgement of the impossibility of assimilation for those who did not inherit Indo-European culture and genes. Faye works on those established caesuras within a cultural continuum, except that he brings back the relational improvement promised by GRECE’s early eugenicist concerns for national (biological) reproduction. Such a relation is framed by the “antiracist” rhetorical pattern introduced by de Benoist, such that Faye can claim that the presence of Muslims on European soil is in some way racist towards Europeans. Not only are Muslims and (Indo)Europeans diferent, but the former are also a threat to the latter’s ability to “remain themselves” and that, according to Faye following de Benoist, is racist. De Benoist’s call for a strict cultural separation is invigorated with the narrative of reverse colonization. Bringing back biology while keeping the critique against any kind of “universalized religion”, Faye qualifes Muslims and (Indo)Europeans as more than merely diferent, they stand in a hierarchical relationship of inferior-superior. As a palimpsest (Schuller 2018), the discourse of reverse colonization has accumulated layers of meanings over time carrying the marks of earlier inscriptions. Tweaking the GRECE’s early writings, Faye would write that “the current social hierarchy does not conform to the [bio-cultural] hierarchy” (GRECE 1971, 18). Conclusion

This is the kind of genealogy that can be recovered by analyzing the intellectual productions of thinkers who openly state their metapolitical ambition. If the French New Right has been inhibited by the postcolonial context, its interventions were, nonetheless, explicit in the ambition to scavenge

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and salvage older discourses of race to maintain its partisan community afoat in the changing political landscape. The narrative of decline, whether manifested by decadence, invasion, reverse colonization, cultural extinction, or disenchantment, ofers a privileged standpoint to understand how the post-WWII refutation of “race” pushed its anchoring into cultural markers rather than physiological ones (Lentin 2005). Faye’s conceptualization of an Islamic colonization recovers the frst doctrine of GRECE in which biology, eugenics, and hierarchies were central, but it still accounts for Europe’s postracial hegemonic discourses (Lentin 2004; Goldberg 2015). If the topic of “reverse colonization” was central to the early GRECE as it bridged Europe’s “Jewish Question” to decolonization, we must ask in what ways such imaginary bridges are enacted by a contemporary discourse of Islamic colonization including that of the great replacement. To account for the “polyvalent mobility” (Stoler 2002) of the invasion trope, close attention to the fgure of the Semite is essential (Anidjar 2007). Only by revisiting Europe’s genealogy of racisms, as those thinkers do, we might understand how today’s “decline” produces “Europe’s Muslim Question” on grounds that are conjointly biological, religious, civilizational, linguistic, and cultural. Notes 1 This work is part of the research programme EnGendering Europe’s “Muslim Question” with project number 016.Vici.185.077, which is fnanced by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). 2 GRECE is, therefore, not a party but a collaborative research group. The group members met for conferences and trips, but their activities were mostly centred around the publications of magazines (Nouvelle Ecole, Elements, Krisis) through which their doctrine was elaborated and shared with a wider audience. Their successes were not electoral in nature but, nonetheless, sparked major political discussions among intellectuals of the time. 3 All quotes are translated by the author. 4 They refer in particular to the work of French philologist George Dumézil. Dumézil studied the ethnohistory of what he calls Indo-European civilization. GRECE has digested his research and merged it into remains of Aryanism (although, the word Aryan is barely mentioned in GRECE publications). While his international career has been under scrutiny, Dumézil was an important fgure in France. Highly respected, he was admitted to the Collège de France in 1949 until 1968. He was the patron of Michel Foucault and was infuential in his conceptualization of the archeological method (Eribon 1992). As a philologist, Dumézil was a disciple of Franz Bopp (1791–1867). He introduced “Indo-European studies” as a chair in the Collège de France. If Dumézil does not refer to Indo-Europeans as a “race”, he was criticized for not accounting explicitly for the historical ties of the feld to Aryanism and Nazism and for personally endorsing ambiguous analytical categories. On this critique, see Carlo Ginzburg (1989). Didier Eribon (1992) wrote a laudatory review in which he defended Dumézil’s structuralist intellectual legacy. Dumézil was briefy part of the patronage committee of Nouvelle Ecole but left after a year. 5 “The word race is frightening because of its emotional charge. So we don’t use it anymore. By deleting the word, we believe we are deleting the thing. But words are

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not things and realities remain”. De Benoist, Contre tous les racismes, Elements, (1974), n°8–9, 9. 6 The Club was founded as an antenna of GRECE within SciencesPo. The thinktank broke up with GRECE over its defnition of “metapolitics”. The Club wanted GRECE members to engage themselves within the political arena, join parties, and seek governance. The Club also had a disagreement over economics: it welcomed a neoliberal economy while GRECE was critical towards the valorization of economy for it “replace[s] natural hierarchies by economic ones” (Duranton-Crabol 1988).

References Almeida, D. (2014). Decadence and Indifferentiation in the Ideology of the Front National. French Cultural Studies, 25(2), 221–232. https://doi.org/10 .1177/0957155814520906 Anidjar, G. (2003). The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford University Press. Anidjar, G. (2007). Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford University Press. Bar-On, T. (2016). Where Have All the Fascists Gone? Routledge. Billig, M. (1981).  L’internationale raciste de la psychologie à la science des races. François Maspero. Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12742 Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2022). Thinking Europe’s “Muslim Question”: On Trojan Horses and the Problematization of Muslims. Critical Research on Religion, 10(2), 200–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032211044430 Brahim, R. (2020). La législation antiraciste française, support d’un racisme structurel. Communications, 2(107), 237–250. https://doi.org/10.3917/commu.107.0237 Brunn, J. (1979). La Nouvelle Droite: Le dossier du procès. Editions Oswald. Camus, J. (2015). Le Front National et la Nouvelle Droite. In S. Crépon (Ed.), Les faux-semblants du Front National (pp. 97–120). Presses de Sciences Po. Collins, J. (2020). The Anthropological Turn: French Political Thought After 1968. University of Pennsylvania Press. De Benoist, A., & Marion, J. L. (1970). Avec ou sans Dieu – L’avenir des valeurs chrétiennes. Beauchesne. De Benoist, A. (1973, November). Avortement, le vrai débat. Éléments. https://www. revue-elements.com/avortement-le-vrai-debat-pdf/ De Benoist, A. (1974, November). Contre tous les racismes. Eléments. https://www. revue-elements.com/produit/contre-tous-les-racismes-version-pdf/ De Benoist, A. (1985, March). Les arabes. Eléments. https://www.revue-elements. com/produit/les-arabes-version-pdf/ Debono, E. (2019). Les premiers pas de la loi Pleven. In Le racisme dans le prétoire (pp. 603–628). Presses Universitaires de France. Duranton-Crabol, A. (1988). Visages de la Nouvelle Droite. Presses de Sciences Po. Eribon, D. (1992). Faut-il brûler Dumézil: mythologie, science et politique. Flammarion. Escafré-Dublet, A. (2014). Culture et immigration, De la question sociale à l’enjeu politique, 1958–2007. Presses universitaires de Rennes Farris, S. (2014). From the Jewish Question to the Muslim Question. Republican Rigorism, Culturalist Diferentialism and Antinomies of Enforced Emancipation. Constellations, 21(2), 296–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12087

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Faye, G. (2000). La colonisation de l’Europe: discours vrai sur l’immigration et l’islam. L’Aencre. Foucault, M. (1997). Il faut défendre la société. Gallimard. François, S. (2021). La Nouvelle Droite et ses dissidences. Le Bord de l’eau. François, S., & Lebourg, N. (2016). Histoire de la haine identitaire: Mutations et diffusions de l’altérophobie. Presses universitaires de Valenciennes. Ginzburg, C. (1989). Clues, Myth, and the Historical Method. Johns Hopkins University Press. Goldberg, D. T. (2015). Are We All Postracial Yet? Polity. GRECE. (1968). Le langage. Nouvelle Ecole, 2, 4. GRECE. (1969a). Biologie. Nouvelle Ecole, 7, 6. GRECE. (1969b). Pour la liberté sexuelle. Nouvelle Ecole, 8, 22. GRECE. (1969c). L’ecriture. Nouvelle Ecole, 9, 7–8. GRECE. (1971). L’eugénisme. Nouvelle Ecole, 14, 18. GRECE. (1972). Mélanges-chasses. Nouvelle Ecole, 16, 89. GRECE. (1974). L’ethologie. Nouvelle Ecole, 25–26, 43. Guiraudon, V. (1996). The Reafrmation of the Republican Model of Integration: Ten Years of Identity Politics in France. French Politics and Society, 14(2), 47–57. Hajjat, A. (2020). Racisme antiblanc. La Revue Nouvelle, 5(5), 70–74. https://www. cairn.info/revue-nouvelle-2020-5-page-70.htm Lamy, P. (2016). Le Club de l’Horloge (1974–2002): Evolution et mutation d’un laboratoire idéologique [Doctoral dissertation, Université Paris VIII Saint Denis]. SUDOC 197696295. Lentin, A. (2004). Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe. Pluto Press. Lentin, A. (2005). Replacing “Race”, Historicizing “Culture” in Multiculturalism. Patterns of Prejudice, 39(4), 379–396. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220500347832 Masuzawa, T. (2005). The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. University of Chicago Press. Olender, M. (1989). Les langues du Paradis. Aryens et Sémites: un couple providentiel. Le Seuil. Poliakov, L. (1971). Le mythe Aryen: Essai sur les sources du racisme et des nationalismes. Calmann-Lévy. Schuller, K. (2018). The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Duke University Press. Shepard, T. (2017). Mâle décolonisation: L“homme arabe” et la France, de l’independance algérienne à la révolution iranienne (1962–1979). Payot. Stoler, A. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press. Stoler, A. (2002). Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth. In P. Essed & D. T. Goldberg (Eds.), Race Critical Theories: Text and Context (pp. 369–391). Blackwell. Stoler, A. (2009). Along the Archival Grain. Princeton University Press. Taguief, P. (1984). La stratégie culturelle de la Nouvelle Droite en France (1968–1983). In R. Badinter (Ed.), Vous avez dit fascismes? (pp. 13–152). Éditions Montalba. Taguief, P. (1994). Sur la Nouvelle Droite. Descartes & Cie. Topolski, A., & Nathan, E. (2016). Is There a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective. De Gruyter. Zia-Ebrahimi, R. (2021). Antisémitisme & islamophobie: Une histoire croisée. Éditions Amsterdam.

5 EUROPEAN HISTORIES, AUSTRALIAN ANXIETIES The Christchurch Killer in Context Jack Wilson and Louie Dean Valencia

The Great Replacement: Towards a New Society – or, the manifesto of the man who on the 15th of March 2019 murdered ffty-one people and injured forty-nine others across two mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand – has been widely characterized as an exercise in shitposting (Kupfer 2019; Lorenz 2019; Victor 2019).1 Shitposting is the act of posting trollish, contradictory content that is intended to confuse or provoke the reader and is associated with the culture of the online image boards 4chan and 8chan (now 8kun).2 In the case of the individual’s manifesto, the genre-cum-rhetoricalstrategy is alleged to be deployed towards undermining eforts to understand the why of the massacre and the what of the murderer’s worldview and aims (Evans 2019a). The so-called Great Replacement refers to a conspiracy theory originally put forward in 2011 by the French white supremacist Renaud Camus that asserted that migrants – and persons of colour more generally – are performing a kind of “invasion by stealth” of European countries through immigrating and working to “replace” white inhabitants by way of their comparatively higher birth rates as well as so-called “miscegenation” with these nations’ white inhabitants. Although he named his manifesto after this conspiracy theory and addresses the spurious question of “birth rates” across its length, to take the murderer at his word (i.e., entirely in terms of what is articulated in the manifesto) with respect to his motivations risks missing the broader cultural milieu from which the individual emerged and wherein his act can be situated (see Evans 2019a, 2019b; Young & Caine 2020). After all, the murderer provided us with another set of texts that allow us to see through the semiotic fog of his manifesto and perform this operation – his weapons. DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-7

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Across his weapons and their magazines, the individual wrote an array of names, dates, events, and phrases associated with the period of the Reconquista in Spain, the Crusades, and the many other wars fought by European powers against the Ottoman Empire. He also included contemporary references like the 2017 Quebec City Mosque shooting, the United Nation’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal. In aggregate, these small textual fragments resolve into a sort of narrative or sense of history on the part of the shooter. Namely, one of eternal confict between Islam and “the West” – an invented “clash of civilizations”. While practices of shitposting and a broad-strokes belief in a historiographical imaginary centred on an eternal struggle between Islam versus West are endemic to both 4chan and 8chan’s respective /pol/ boards, the latter is not articulated in nearly as much detail in the manifesto as on the killer’s weapons. Moreover, the defning preoccupation of his manifesto – replacement – is efectively absent from his weapons (see Brignoli et al. 2019). We, therefore, argue that while the individual uses the vernacular of these boards in his manifesto, his worldview is not reducible to their subcultural milieux. Instead, this chapter examines the texts written on his weapons and their magazines in terms of the persistent anxieties of invasion and replacement within the settler-colonial imaginary of the individual’s homeland: Australia (see Curthoys 1999; Papastergiadis 2004). Indeed, as Frantz Fanon has shown us, this anxiety of the Other is a product of the settler-colonial mindset. Fanon (1961/1963, 40) argues: “In the colonies, the foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and machines. In defance of his successful transplantation, in spite of his appropriation, the settler still remains a foreigner”. One should, thus, not be surprised that the gun remains the way in which one might reassert power in the face of fear of “replacement”. Fanon continues, “The governing race is frst and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, ‘the others’” – ruled by violence (Fanon 1961/1963, 40). This chapter is not a defnitive accounting of the individual and his act of terrorism but simply presents another means through which he and the massacre can be examined. While accounts of the individual that characterize him wholly as an avatar of chan culture and the hazards of radicalization therein are – in our view – misguided, the culture and dynamics of these platforms are undeniably salient to the way the massacre was articulated and has come to be the inspiration for further terrorist acts (see Bart 2021; Evans 2019a, 2019b, 2019c). Moreover, the more biographical approach of Ko tō tātou kāinga tēnei: Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain on 15 March 2019 (Young & Caine 2020) provides extremely valuable information on the actions of the individual in the period before the attack. Such details have helped to substantiate many of our own

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arguments regarding his engagement with Australian national politics during the period of his international travel and residence in New Zealand. The chapter will proceed accordingly: frst, we will further unpack the matter of the manifesto, chan culture, and their epistemologically hazardous nature, and we will problematize assertions that the individual was entirely a product of these milieux. We will then go on to examine the historical imaginary articulated on the individual’s weapons and magazines before concluding with a discussion of how this alternative history can be interpreted as an extension of anxieties and discourses of invasion and replacement that are a motif of Australian history. The Interpretative Hazards of the Manifesto and Chan Culture

4chan and 8chan are characterized by the anonymity they aford their users – known colloquially as anons – and the ephemerality of their content with threads automatically deleted as new ones appear (Hagen 2018b). On both platforms, their respective /pol/ boards are the most active by far and are notorious for being – in essence – the online home of the far right, with the culture of 8chan’s /pol/ board characterized as the primary driver of several recent far-right mass shooters’ radicalization (Evans 2019b). This is to say that, within these boards, an aesthetic has emerged that uses digital ephemera to facilitate the articulation of an online male chauvinist, white culture that borrows liberally from the history of Europe, fascist thought, esoteric belief systems, and consumer aesthetics from the late 20th century (see Brignoli et al. 2019; Hagen 2018a; Kerry & Bullock 2017). In this sense, the creation of these digital spaces in the chans recalls Dick Hebdige’s (1991) description of how skinheads of the 1970s created a white working-class culture through the appropriation of language, style, slang, and popular culture (including that of West Indian migrants). Contemporary identarian ideologues borrowed the language of empowerment that the formerly colonized and people of colour have used to articulate and combat what oppresses them. This exemplifes what Hebdige (1991) described previously as a “dialogue which reconstituted each in terms of the other” whilst scapegoating those marginalized groups. The chans produce a digital space that allows white men to appropriate signs and symbols to express themselves. There is no doubt that the individual asserted a particular sense of belonging to 4chan and 8chan’s respective /pol/ boards. After all, he posted links to his manifesto and the Facebook Live stream of the massacre to 8chan’s /pol/ board moments before it began. The manifesto itself trafcs in the same rhetoric of grievance with regard to the perceived marginalization of the white race; and the text constantly references vernacular terms and memes popular across the chans, with the individual characterizing himself as “working part time as a kebab removalist”3 and including the full text of

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the “navy seal copypasta”.4 The boards, too, have claimed him: both in their initial enthusiasm for the attack (Macklin 2019), in dubbing him /ourguy/ (a meme deployed by /pol/ users to suggest that a given public fgure represents the values or views of the board itself (see Hagen 2022), and in how the Christchurch massacre has essentially become a template for far-right terror attacks, with subsequent white supremacist terrorists imitating the individual’s actions – posting their manifesto to 8chan and morbidly discussing beating the individual’s “high score” (Bart 2021; Evans 2019b, 2019c). Given the extent that the individual’s and 4chan and 8chan’s respective / pol/ boards professed infuence upon each other, it is understandable that the individual has come to be seen almost wholly in terms of chan culture and the so-called radicalizing efects therein. But radicalized towards what? On this point, the manifesto is decidedly muddled. As the individual tells us on the question of his ideology: “I mostly agree with Sir Oswald Mosley’s views and consider myself an Eco-fascist by nature. The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China”. The leader of the British Union of Fascists (1932–1940), an extremely niche and far-right conceptualization of environmentalism (Siebert 2018), and a communist state – these three factors are presented in a juxtaposition that is not meant to resolve into a coherent worldview, but – in the matterantimatter explosion of contradictory associations – hopelessly confuse one’s eforts to extract meaning from the manifesto. In fact, the degree to which the individual associates himself with chan culture may itself be somewhat of a misdirection, with Young and Caine observing that “Although [the individual] did frequent extreme right-wing discussion boards such as those on 4chan and 8chan, the evidence we have seen is indicative of more substantial use of YouTube” (Young & Caine 2020, 193). Beyond, however, an unserious reference to the far-right YouTuber Candace Owens in the text of the manifesto, the nature of the individual’s engagement with YouTube is efectively unknown beyond the authors of the Ko tō tātou kāinga tēnei report. Given the salience of YouTube to the individual and the platform’s historical issues with far-right content (see Ledwich & Zaitsev 2020; Lewis 2018; OILab 2019; Roose 2019; View 2019), we would like to suggest that the individual’s use of YouTube become a subject of further research. Alternative Histories and Manichean Enemies Between the Chans and the Individual

While it is inarguable that the culture of 8chan’s /pol/ board is hegemonically far-right, one cannot necessarily claim that the board is an internally homogenous ideological “blob” (see Jokubauskaite 2019). Rather, both 4chan and 8chan’s /pol/ boards are sites of efectively constant argument on the topic of

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various forms of far-right ideology and preoccupations. Despite this (relative) diversity, the content of what we take to be a more accurate refection of the individual’s worldview (the writing on his weapons) are minor topics of conversation when compared to other widely discussed alt-histories on these platforms like that of the esoteric fascist onto-historical framework that is the Kali Yuga (see Brignoli et al. 2019). Through the names, dates, events, and phrases written across his guns and magazines, the individual efectively writes an alt-history of the West, one in which it has fought of an always-expansionary Islam – spanning from the attempted expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate into central Europe in the 700s to ISIS and fnally the so-called Great Replacement that is contemporary immigration of people from predominantly Muslim nations to “the West”. Certainly, the broad strokes of this alternative history are believed by the majority of /pol/ users, and certain events that are written on the individual’s guns are objects of frequent discussion within /pol/, but these conversations lack the comparative detail of what is articulated across his weapons – if they are mentioned at all (Brignoli et al. 2019). It appears, then, that rather than being the agent of a politics that is entirely embedded in chan culture, the weapons of the Christchurch murderer show us that he bears a decidedly more idiosyncratic worldview that cannot be entirely reduced to the infuence of these platforms. This idiosyncratic perspective represents an alt-history – often created or decontextualised historical “facts” used to legitimate a far-right ideology, a cobbled together timeline of events and historical actors that draws from long-outdated interpretations of history such as those proposed in early “Western civilization” textbooks like James Harvey Robinson’s An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (1902) in which he writes about Jews in Spain betraying “Christian countrymen” to Muslim invaders (Robinson 1902; Valencia-García 2020). This interpretation of history can specifcally be seen in the reference on the gun to Pelayu (685–718), the Visigoth king often credited for starting the so-called Reconquista – an imagined centurieslong struggle to defeat Muslim invaders undertaken by Christian Spaniards, coupled with a perceived genocidal need to rid the country of Jewish people. The so-called Reconquest is a jumble of people and moments plotted together over the course of 700 years by religious extremists justifying their expulsion and murder of Muslims and Jews in the late 1400s, particularly by the Spanish Catholic monarchs, Isabel and Ferdinand – who shortly after their “reconquest” of Spain from Muslims and Jews started their conquest of the Americas, where their desire for riches was justifed by both religion and claims of racial superiority. To be clear, this coincided with a then contemporary concept of limpieza de sangre, or “cleanliness of the blood”, which was used to determine who was a non-Semitic Christian Spaniard and who wasn’t – a form of biological racism was always a part of this equation.

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Today, there is little doubt amongst professional historians that the use of the word “Spaniard” to describe people living in Iberia at the time, before the concept of national identity was invented, or to imagine some sort of hegemonic Christianity in the 7th and 8th centuries was a modern invention used for later nationalistic purposes (Valencia-García 2020). With references to everyone from Charles Martel (688–741) to David Soslan (?–1207) to Edward Codrington (1770–1851) and the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the shooter’s gun gives the reader a sense that the defning characteristic of European history has been a struggle against Muslims and Jews, rather than a much more complicated history that includes brutal colonization; the oppression of women, queer people, and religious and ethnic minorities; and class hierarchies. On the individual’s gun, many of his “heroes” and battles are located at the edges of what is considered Europe today – Eastern and Southern Europe – and as locations are, in his view, characterized by their being sites of contestation between the “Christian” and “Islamic” worlds, or “the West” and “the East”. By placing these historical fgures and moments together, the shooter creates an alt-history that legitimizes his violence – much as Isabel and Ferdinand did in the 15th century when they used images of the Crusades to legitimate their defence of Christendom. This is accentuated when looking at the individual’s understanding of New Zealand as an extremely remote settler-colonial nation – an outpost of whiteness – he claims an attack in New Zealand would bring to attention the truth of the assault on our civilization, that no where [sic] in the world was safe, the invaders were in all of our lands, even in the remotest areas of the world and that there was no where left to go that was safe and free from mass immigration. (The Great Replacement 2019, 15) In agreement with Young and Caine (2020), such assertions are propagandistic in nature and, therefore, not a reliable complete articulation of his worldview or reasoning for the attack. In fact, in his manifesto, the individual claims a desire “for revenge against [I]slam for the 1300 years of war and devastation that it has brought upon the people of the West” and that he is “not afraid of [I]slam” but calls attention to the supposed “high fertility rates” of Muslims that will result in Islam growing “to replace other peoples and faiths” (The Great Replacement 2019, 18–20). The manifesto provides contradictory perspectives: the killer simultaneously claiming not to be afraid of Islam and seeking revenge. It is only by looking at the weapons we see the killer placing himself as an historical actor and combatant in a centuries-long struggle against Islam. As an alternative, we would like to suggest that, within this Manichean historiographical imaginary, the relatively successful multiculturalism of

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New Zealand represented a kind of “end of history” that, in his fascist view, represented an intolerable conclusion. The attack, then, was an efort to start this profane imagining of history again, enabling the individual to insert himself as a “great actor” defending “Europe” and “European culture” from Muslim invaders. Like his heroes before him, he, too, was fghting in the “borderlands” of Europe. This was, of course, a doomed efort as this Manichaeism is not the engine of history at all, and regardless – the actions of a single individual would not be sufcient to fuel it (see Benjamin 1999/2015). A Crusade in Pacifc: Australia as the Borderlands

Historically speaking, Australia has characterized itself in similar terms as the individual describes New Zealand: an antipodean outpost of whiteness – and thus “Western civilization” – that is imperilled by the racialized Others that are perceived to surround it (McSwiney et al. 2022). Although Australian Islamophobia is not nearly as elaborate or conspiratorial as the European theory from which the individual’s manifesto takes its name (and, it should be noted, other theories of “white genocide”), it has, by and large, manifested as analogous to fear of Islamic invasion and white displacement that appears to have motivated the individual. While the object of this settler-colonial anxiety has shifted over time, the fear has been the same: that of the white settler population being displaced, again, after the founding trauma of transportation from England (Curthoys 1999). While the initial object of this anxiety came from within, namely in the form of the country’s indigenous people whose very existence undermined the doctrine of Terra Nullius (“land belonging to no one”), which was used to legitimate colonization, with the efective erasure of Indigenous Australians from the national-historical imaginary, the settler colony looked out towards its south Asian neighbours and saw invaders. In fact, the very frst act passed in Australian parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 – popularly known as the White Australia Policy – which, “was driven by fears of Asian infux” (Papastergiadis 2004), and since this initial act, much of Australia’s domestic, foreign, and immigration policies have been oriented around allaying this fear of invasion from the Asian continent. While Asia (and China, in particular) still looms rather large in the national imaginary – evidenced by intermittent panics regarding Chinese infuence in national politics and popular culture – in the present, the more keenly felt threat to settler-colonial Australia’s sense of being in the nation is Islam. Although Scott Poynting and Victoria Mason (2006, 2007) argue that Australia was already in a cultural and institutional process of shifting to a hegemonic Islamophobia before 9/11 – as evidenced by the demonization of boat-arriving and largely Muslim refugees from 1999 onwards – 9/11,

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the 2002 Bali bombings, and the 2005 London bombings saw this process accelerate, with the presence of Muslims in the nation increasingly considered in terms of “invasion”. Indeed, this framing was the explicit motivation for – and post-facto justifcation of – the 2005 Cronulla race riots. As the presence of Lebanese Australians on the beach of the eastern Sydney suburb of Cronulla was seen in terms of white Australians’ becoming dispossessed of this metonymy for the nation (the beach) by a “foreign” entho-religious group, the riots were characterized by its participants and supporters as an attempt to “take it back” (Marr 2005). In the intervening years, media narratives of white Australians’ asserted dispossession by Muslims are profigate: whether it is an entire suburb becoming “Muslim Land” (Blair 2014), to fabricated panics about gangs of Sudanese migrant youth terrorizing the city of Melbourne (Wilson 2018), to – in a particularly striking instance – fearmongering on the topic of migrants literally “outbreeding” white Australians (Bye 2016; Holderhead 2018).5 Moreover, the eponymous leader of the country’s largest and most successful reactionary nativist party – Pauline Hanson’s One Nation – has trafcked in narratives of white alienation and replacement since her maiden speech in 1996, wherein she argued that Australia was at risk of being “swamped by Asians . . . [who] have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate”. She picked up this theme of being “swamped” again in 2016, asserting that Australia was “now in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own” (see Sengul 2019, 2020, 2021). And in a fnal, particularly bleak, example thereof: it was a federal senator historically associated with this same party – but sitting as an independent at the time – who became internationally infamous for, on the day of the Christchurch massacre, blaming the victims for immigrating to New Zealand at all (Press Association 2019). Unfortunately, such sentiment is not confned to the political margins or News Corporation-owned media properties, with the former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbot praising Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in September of 2019 for being “the frst European leader to cry ‘stop’ to the peaceful invasion of 2015 and [who] is now trying to boost Hungary’s fagging birth rate” (Karp 2019). Although the individual was traveling outside of Australia or domiciled in New Zealand over the course of the decade that preceded the attack, there is, nonetheless, evidence that he remained engaged with Australian politics to the extent that he was active in various Australian far-right organization’s Facebook groups, donated money to these same organizations, and corresponded with one of their leaders (Young & Caine 2020). It also does not change the fact that the fears and ideologies that motivate this current hegemonic Islamophobia were already efectively entrenched in the country.

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Conclusion

While the individual borrowed the vernaculars of chan culture in his manifesto – which itself refects a broader trend on the Australian far right of using imported rhetoric to discuss local and historical anxieties – his politics have deeper roots in the nation than it might care to admit. These Australianborn politics, in fact, have global repercussions, as ABC reported as recently as 2021, in a 30-minute special report focused on an Australian “far-right troll” who has brought his own brand of Australian fascism to the global stage by targeting “children online with a mix of racial stereotypes and hardcore shock tactics” using a variety of tactics in person and online to inspire his global fan base (Mann 2021). The troll, currently based in the United States, encourages hatred against women and people of colour, as well as Jewish and queer people – whilst urging followers to have procreative sex with white women and to learn to use heavy-duty armaments and physically train to protect their homelands. Although subsequent chan-linked mass shooters have voiced similar concerns regarding invasion and such rhetoric is also fairly common in mainstream right politics across the United States and Europe, it was long before Renaud Camus put forward the Great Replacement that Australia was already having nightmares of “open foodgates” (former Australian prime minister John Howard, quoted in Papastergiadis 2004) that would wash away the settler-colonial nation. Notes 1 The manifesto will be referred to throughout the chapter and its author will be referred to as “the Christchurch Killer” or “the individual”. It is our view that, even in work that is otherwise entirely critical, fgures like the murderer can still – in the act of naming them – impart upon these individuals and their acts a certain infamy that may encourage copycat behaviour (see Shah 2022). Therefore, with regard to the individual’s name, we have elected to follow the example made by the authors of Ko tō tātou kāinga tēnei: Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain on 15 March 2019 (Young & Caine 2020) as well as representatives of New Zealand’s government (Wahlquist 2019) in wholly omitting it from this chapter. 2 4chan and 8chan/kun are image boards that are characterized by their – respectively – loose to all-but-non-existent moderation policies (see Hagen et al. 2019). Over the last decade these platforms – specifcally their “politically incorrect” (or, ‘/pol/’) boards – have become notorious for their association with the so-called alt-right (see Beran 2019; Sandifer 2018), conspiracist movements like QAnon (Zadrozny & Collins 2018), and several mass shootings by far-right terrorists (Harwell 2019). Although 8chan now trades under the name 8kun after the site lost its hosting providers after yet another mass shooting was linked to the board, it was not long before the platform was back – and remains – online in its rebranded form (Glaser 2019). For the purposes of this chapter, we will refer to the platform as 8chan, as this is what it was named at the time of the Christchurch massacre.

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3 A reference to the 1993 song by the Serbian musician Željko Grmuša known among denizens of the online far-right as “Remove Kebab” (Know Your Meme n.d.-b). 4 Where “copypasta” is essentially a text-based meme with this specifc “navy seal” version thereof being a parody of the ludicrous claims made by “internet tough guys” (Know Your Meme n.d.-a). 5 While we would be remiss to not point out that all the afore-cited news articles are from outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – given the extremely consolidated nature of media ownership in Australia with regard to News Corp and the company’s salience at setting political-discursive agendas – we believe the News Corp-myopia of the authors is in this case justifed.

References Bart, T. (2021, January 21). The Gamifcation of “Lone Wolf” Terrorism on 4chan and 8chan. OILab. https://oilab.eu/the-gamifcation-of-lone-wolf-terrorism-on4chan-and-8chan/ Benjamin, W. (2015). Illuminations (H. Zorn, Trans.). Bodley Head (Original work published 1999). Beran, D. (2019). It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Ofce. All Points Books. Blair, T. (2014, August 17). Inside Sydney’s Muslim Land, by Tim Blair. Daily Telegraph. https://dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/last-drinks-in-lakemba-tim-blairtakes-a-look-inside-sydneys-muslim-land/news-story/10f3f32ee52998fb7b5ba44 fc4ab62f Brignoli, N., Filippi, E., Giorgi, G., Jurg, D., de Keulenaar, E. V., Kisjes, I., ValenciaGarcía, L. D., & Wilson, J. (2019). The Secret Histories of 4chan/pol: Kali Yuga and the “Clash of Civilisations”. Digital Methods Initiative. https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSchool2019SecretHistories Bye, C. (2016, February 12). The Born Identity. Daily Telegraph, 23. Christchurch Killer (2019). The Great Replacement. Self-published. Curthoys, A. (1999). Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology. Journal of Australian Studies, 23(61), 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1080/14443059909387469 Evans, R. (2019a, March 15). Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre. Bellingcat. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2019/ 03/15/shitposting-inspirational-terrorism-and-the-christchurch-mosque-massacre/ Evans, R. (2019b, April 28). Ignore the Poway Synagogue Shooter’s Manifesto: Pay Attention to 8chan’s /pol/ Board. Bellingcat. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/04/28/ignore-the-poway-synagogue-shooters-manifesto-pay-attentionto-8chans-pol-board/ Evans, R. (2019c, August 4). The El Paso Shooting and the Gamifcation of Terror. Bellingcat. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-pasoshooting-and-the-gamifcation-of-terror/ Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press (Original work published 1961). Glaser, A. (2019, November 11). Where 8channers Went After 8chan. Slate. https://slate.com/technology/2019/11/8chan-8kun-white-supremacists-telegramdiscord-facebook.html

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Hagen, S. (2018a). “Deus Vult!”: Tracing the Many (Mis)uses of a Meme. OILab. https://oilab.eu/deus-vult-tracing-the-many-misuses-of-a-meme/ Hagen, S. (2018b). Rendering Legible the Ephemerality of 4chan/pol/. OILab. https:// oilab.eu/rendering-legible-the-ephemerality-of-4chanpol/ Hagen, S. (2022). “Who is /Ourguy/?”: Tracing Panoramic Memes to Study the Collectivity of 4chan/pol/. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10. 1177/14614448221078274 Hagen, S., Burton, A., Wilson, J., & Tuters, M. (2019). Infnity’s Abyss: An Overview of 8chan. OILab. https://oilab.eu/infnitys-abyss-an-overview-of-8chan/ Harwell, D. (2019, August 4). Three Mass Shootings This Year Began with a Hateful Screed on 8chan. Its Founder Calls it a Terrorist Refuge in Plain Sight. Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-mass-shootings-this-yearbegan-with-hateful-screed-chan-its-founder-calls-it-terrorist-refuge-plain-sight/ Hebdige, D. (1991). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge. Holderhead, S. (2018, July 30). Baby Drivers. The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 9. Jokubauskaite, E. (2019). Not So General: Mapping Issue Publics on 4chan/pol. OILab. https://oilab.eu/not-so-general-mapping-issue-publics-on-4chan-pol/ Karp, P. (2019, September 13). Tony Abbott Doubles Down on Praise for Hungary’s Far-Right PM Viktor Orbán. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/ sep/13/tony-abbott-doubles-down-on-praise-for-hungarys-far-right-pm-viktor-orban Kerry, E., & Bullock, P. (2017, January 30). Trumpwave and Fashwave Are Just the Latest Disturbing Examples of the Far-Right Appropriating Electronic Music. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/mgwk7b/fashwave-trumpwavefar-right-appropriating-electronic-music Know Your Meme. (n.d.-a). Navy Seal Copypasta. https://knowyourmeme.com/ memes/navy-seal-copypasta Know Your Meme. (n.d.-b). Serbia Strong / Remove Kebab. https://knowyourmeme. com/memes/serbia-strong-remove-kebab Kupfer, T. (2019, March 15). A Mass Murder for the Age of Sh**posting. National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/a-mass-murder-forthe-age-of-shposting/ Ledwich, M., & Zaitsev, A. (2020). Algorithmic Extremism: Examining YouTube’s Rabbit Hole of Radicalization. First Monday, 25(3). https://doi.org/10.5210/ fm.v25i3.10419 Lewis, R. (2018). Alternative Infuence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube. Data & Society Research Institute. https://datasociety.net/library/ alternative-infuence/ Lorenz, T. (2019, March 15). The Shooter’s Manifesto Was Designed to Troll. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/the-shootersmanifesto-was-designed-to-troll/585058/ Macklin, G. (2019, July 18). The Christchurch Attacks: Livestream Terror in the Viral Video Age. Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 12(6). https://ctc.usma. edu/christchurch-attacks-livestream-terror-viral-video-age/ Mann, A. (2021, July 23). Unmasking One of Australia’s Most Shocking Far-Right trolls. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-24/catboykami-backgroundbriefng/100314278 Marr, D. (2005, December 13). One-way Radio Plays by its Own Rules. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/national/one-way-radio-plays-by-itsown-rules-20051213-gdmmg4.html

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McSwiney, J., Günaydın, E., & Maher, H. (2022). Discourses of Western Civilisation in the Australian Federal Parliament. In E. Smith, J. Persian & V. J. Fox (Eds.), Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia and New Zealand (pp. 218–235). Routledge. OILab. (2019). 4chan’s YouTube: A Fringe Perspective on YouTube’s Great Purge of 2019. https://oilab.eu/4chans-youtube-a-fringe-perspective-on-youtubes-greatpurge-of-2019/ Papastergiadis, N. (2004). The Invasion Complex in Australian Political Culture. Thesis Eleven, 78(1), 8–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513604044544 Poynting, S., & Mason, V. (2006). “Tolerance, Freedom, Justice and Peace?”: Britain, Australia and Anti-Muslim Racism since 11 September 2001. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 27(4), 365–391. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860600934973 Poynting, S., & Mason, V. (2007). The Resistible Rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001. Journal of Sociology, 43(1), 61–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783307073935 Press Association. (2019, March 16). Fury as Australian Senator Blames Christchurch Attack on Muslim Immigration. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian. com/world/2019/mar/15/australian-senator-fraser-anning-criticised-blaming-newzealand-attack-on-muslim-immigration Robinson, J. H. (1902). An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (Vol. 1). Ginn & Company. Roose, K. (2019, June 8). The Making of a YouTube Radical. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical. html Sandifer, E. (2018). Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right. Eruditorum Press. Sengul, K. (2019). Critical Discourse Analysis in Political Communication Research: A Case Study of Right-Wing Populist Discourse in Australia. Communication Research and Practice, 5(4), 376–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2019.1695082 Sengul, K. (2020). “Swamped”: The Populist Construction of Fear, Crisis and Dangerous Others in Pauline Hanson’s Senate Speeches. Communication Research and Practice, 6(1), 20–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2020.1729970 Sengul, K. (2021). “It’s OK to be White”: The Discursive Construction of Victimhood, “Anti-White Racism” and Calculated Ambivalence in Australia. Critical Discourse Studies, 19(6), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2021. 1921818 Shah, S. (2022, March 2). How (Not) to Make a Violent Copycat: Lessons from “Dark Fandoms.” CREST Security Review. https://crestresearch.ac.uk/comment/ how-not-to-make-a-violent-copycat-lessons-from-dark-fandoms/ Siebert, M. (2018, July 19). Linkola, Montana. Jacobite. https://jacobitemag. com/2018/07/19/linkola-montana/ Valencia-García, L. D. (2020). Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/ Histories. Routledge. Victor, D. (2019, March 15). In Christchurch, Signs Point to a Gunman Steeped in Internet Trolling. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/ world/asia/new-zealand-gunman-christchurch.html View, T. [Travis View]. (2019, January 10). I was looking at the “likes” on the Youtube page of Buckey Wolfe, the QAnon follower who is accused of killing his brother. [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/travis_view/status/1083437810634248193

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Wahlquist, C. (2019, March 19). Ardern Says She Will Never Speak Name of Christchurch Suspect. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ mar/19/new-zealand-shooting-ardern-says-she-will-never-speak-suspects-name Wilson, J. (2018, January 18). Burst Your Bubble: Australia’s “African Gang Crisis” Has Been Brewing for Years. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/australianews/commentisfree/2018/jan/18/the-african-gang-crisis-has-been-brewing-inaustralias-media-for-years Young, W., & Caine, J. (2020). “Ko tōtātoukāingatēnei”. Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Masjidain on 15 March 2019. Volume 2. https://christchurchattack.royalcommission.nz/ Zadrozny, B., & Collins, B. (2018, August 15). How Three Conspiracy Theorists Took “Q” and Sparked Qanon. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/ tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-theorists-took-q-sparked-qanon-n900531

6 ECOFASCISM AND THE POLITICS OF  REPLACEMENT IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE NORDIC RESISTANCE MOVEMENT (NRM) Sindre Bangstad and Maria Darwish

Introduction: Ecofascism and the Fear of “White Replacement”

In recent years, the realities of anthropogenic climate change have become evident across the world in the form of sweltering heat waves, the melting of glaciers and ice caps, the devastation wrought by drought and forest fres that are unprecedented in scale, and hurricanes and torrential rains (IPCC 2022). The far and populist right that have risen to positions of power and infuence in many Western countries (Mudde 2019) continue to be largely wedded to climate change denialism and to superimpose on fossil fuel capitalism the idea of a “racially defned nation powered by fossil fuel” (Malm & the Zetkin Collective 2021, 4). However, more recently, scholars have also noted a return to ecofascism in sections on the far right (Thomas & Gosink 2021). Though the historical linkages between certain strands of ecology and fascism have been evident for close to a century, surprisingly little reference is made to ecofascism in the mainstream scholarly literature on fascism (for a pioneering title, see Biehl & Staudenmaier 1996). Staudenmaier (2011) defnes ecofascism as “the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns” (Staudenmaier 2011, 13–14). The white supremacism and racism that are intrinsic to all historically fascist political formations can, in fact, be traced back to some of the founding fathers of modern ecology. The German zoologist and biologist Ernst Haeckel (1819–1916) is credited with coining the term ecology in 1867 and establishing ecology as a scientifc feld of study (Thomas & Gosink 2021, 32; Szenes 2021, 151). Though care must be taken not to present Haeckel as a fascist avant la lettre, Haeckel was an avid eugenicist, an advocate for “scientifc racism”, and a purveyor of DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-8

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ideas about a specifcally Nordic “racial superiority”. Haeckel’s ideas about an intrinsic connection between the “purity of nature” and the “purity of race” certainly lent themselves to later appropriation by German Nazi ideologues with an ecofascist orientation, such as Walter Schoenichen (1876– 1956) and Richard Walther Darré (1895–1953). When a Nordic country like Norway turned out to be so central to the German Nazi utopian vision of a future German empire in Europe (Stratigakos 2020), it was not in the least due to the long-standing popularity of the idea of the “superiority of the Nordic race” in Nazi German elite circles (Kott & Emberland 2012). The history of the development and elaboration of these ideas not only involved U.S. conservationists and eugenicists, such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard (Whitman 2017), but also several Norwegian scientists providing statistics and measurements for corresponding German “racial scientists” (Kyllingstad 2012). Conjunctures of “deep crises” (Malm & the Zetkin Collective 2021, 235) are key to the production of what Eley refers to as past and present “fascist potentials” (Eley 2014, 93, 104). The global anthropogenic climate change crisis is, if anything, precisely such a crisis. The potential for political violence and terrorism inherent in contemporary articulations of ecofascism really came to the fore internationally in 2019 (Beinart 2019; Owen 2019). For on March 15, 2019, a 28-year-old man massacred 51 Muslims attending prayers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. This was followed by the killing of 23 people, most of them Latinos, at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 3, 2019, by a 21-year-old male perpetrator. In Bærum, Norway, a 21-year-old man attempted (unsuccessfully) to massacre mosque-goers on the eve of Eid celebrations after the brutal killing of his adoptive Norwegian-Chinese stepsister in her own bed on August 10, 2019. The Christchurch and the Bærum perpetrators both claimed inspiration from the 31-year-old Norwegian terrorist who on July 22, 2011, murdered 77 people in two successive attacks at the Government Headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and on the small island of Utøya, north of Oslo (Bangstad 2014). What the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, El Paso, and Bærum shared, beyond the simple fact of all of them appearing to be young white men lacking educational attainment, stable familial and sexual relationships, and social and economic status, was an ideological orientation towards ecofascism and/ or identitarianism (Zúquete 2018). In the case of all three perpetrators, this included a belief in apocalyptic ideas about a supposedly ongoing “white replacement” and/or “white genocide”, which was translated into a belief in the righteousness of inficting violence and terror on racialized minority individuals as a means of palindefence or “self-defence” (Malm & the Zetkin Collective 2021, 257) in service of a nation or civilization racially coded as “white”.

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In an important contribution to the literature on the ideologies of the contemporary far right, Chetan Bhatt notes that “the Western far-right has shown considerable political energy and multiple political forms” (Bhatt 2021, 28) in recent years. Similarly, Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective argue that “the far-right is in fux and adopts varying positions in diferent countries and will continue to adapt to changing circumstances” (2021, xi). If fascism is “a travelling political universe, a radical nationalism afected, and, to some extent, constituted by transnational patterns” (Finchelstein 2019, 14), it becomes all the more important to study how ideas about anthropogenic climate change travel in and out of the diferent varieties of fascism in our time. With reference to the standard-setting work of Roger Grifn fascism may be defned as a form of “palingenetic ultranationalism” (Grifn 2018, 40–45). Fascist politics “invokes a pure mythical past tragically destroyed”; that mythical past can be “religiously pure, racially pure or all of the above” (Stanley 2018, 3). Bhatt also contends that “white extinction” is “a defning idea of the contemporary Western right” and that “fascist naturalism is a key ideological engine for racism” (Bhatt 2021, 28). Fascism is “essentially racist” (Grifn 1991, 45). Inspired by Bhatt and others, we argue that racism and racial fantasies pertaining to “white replacement” are intrinsic to contemporary ecofascism. But what is particularly noteworthy for the contemporary form of racism, which is inherent to ecofascism, is the emphasis on biological diversity and the rendering of nonwhite immigrants and racialized minorities as “foreign, invasive” species. There is, however, nothing peculiarly ecofascist about this emphasis: if anything, it points to the co-imbrication and intertwining of ecofascist discourses about immigration and immigrants with far and populist rightwing discourses on the same topics (Davies 2021). In present ecofascist discourse, the conferral of a status as human, and the rights that follow from that status, is premised on one being white. This is one more area in which ecofascist lineages point back to liberalism. For it hardly needs pointing out that for the greater part of the history of modern Western liberalism, it was taken for granted, also by perfectly liberal thinkers, that only whites of European descent were fully human and had the “right to have rights” (Mills 1997, 27). The material for our case study is the ecofascist discourse of the panNordic and Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (Nordiska Motstandsrörelsen, NRM). However, we depart from the widespread tendency in much scholarly literature to regard environmentalist and ecological concerns in ecofascist movements and their discourses as “inauthentic”, a “mask” for fossil fuel fascism, or an instrumental attempt at broadening popular support through adopting a “softer” image. To admit to the chequered and ambiguous modern histories of environmentalism and

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ecology when it comes to white supremacism and racism – particularly in relation to indigenous populations, immigrants, and racialized Others – is neither to engage in historical relativism nor historical revisionism. It is by taking the discourse of ecofascism and ecofascists’ emotional and intellectual investment in it seriously that we can also begin to understand Nordic ecofascism in its political and historical contexts and to understand the co-imbrication with, and sometimes spill-over into, more common, mainstream, and popular discourses of the political conversation in the Nordic countries at present. We argue for the need to bear in mind that ecofascism, as expressed in contemporary ecofascist movements and among ecofascist actors, draws on long historical lineages of European Romanticism, German Nazism’s idealization of Nature as well as the role that ideas about Nature have played in white supremacist movements in the Nordic countries, in particular. But we should not make the categorical error of assuming that ecofascism’s concerns with ecology and fears relating to a purported “white extinction” and “white replacement” are exclusive to the far right and have exclusively far-right genealogies. As McDonald and others remind us, “white replacement” and “white genocide” myths “are not new; they have a long ideological heritage in liberal capitalism” (McDonald 2020). One needs only to think of classical titles in white supremacist and racist literature – such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great White Race from 1916 or Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy from 1920 – to realize that the ideas of “white extinction” and “white replacement” have a long historical lineage (Sussman 2014). The contemporary farright discourse about “white replacement” and “white genocide” enacts a classical “victim-perpetrator reversal” (Wodak 2015, 64–66). This is a victim-perpetrator reversal in which populations racialized as white; populations that were instrumental in advancing European colonialism, settler colonialism, and extractive racial capitalist formations (see Mamdani 2020); and populations that sometimes also perpetrated actual colonial genocides (see Estes 2019; Olusoga & Erichsen 2011; Hochschild 1998) are now cast as being under existential threat by formerly colonized and racialized populations. It is, in other words, impossible to think of ecofascism without also thinking about colonialism and settler colonialism (Moore & Roberts 2022). By means of another rhetorical trick of far-right discourse, populations racialized as white are currently reconstituted as indigenous, and claims to “indigenous rights” are openly made in their purported name. Considering the long and problematic history of entanglement between white supremacist movements, conservationists, and ecologists throughout the Western world, it simply cannot be the case, as some scholars would have it, that “one cannot be anti-racist without being an ecologist today, and vice versa” (Hage 2017, 2).

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Methodology

The source material for our analysis of the ecofascist discourse of the Nordic Resistance Movement (Nordiska Motstandsrörelsen, NRM) is the weekly podcast Nordic Frontier, which frst aired in January 2017. The weekly podcast aims to disseminate NRM’s political message to a wider audience and ofers insights into “what National Socialism has to ofer in the 21st century” (Nordfront Editorial Ofce 2023). It is tailored to an international audience, lasts for two to three hours, and has a somewhat surprisingly non-aggressive tone, with very little use of the white racist power music that was characteristic of the white power scene in the 1990s and 2000s (Teitelbaum 2017). The format and the tone of this podcast must be seen as a deliberate attempt to soften the media image of the NRM. We have also looked at the NRM’s party political programme from 2016, Our Path: New Politics for a New Time; the Norwegian state broadcasting corporation NRK’s 2017 documentary Rasekrigerne; Klungtveit’s popular (2020) account of the Nordic Resistance Movement (Klungtveit 2020); and several scholarly accounts on various aspects of the NRM that have emerged over the past few years (Askanius 2021; Eriksson 2018; Simonsen 2021; Szenes 2021; Darwish 2018). The methods used to analyze this material for this article are broadly and generally drawn from critical discourse analysis (CDA) as elaborated by Wodak (2015). As a social and political movement formally established in 2015, but with roots in the neo-Nazi group the Swedish Resistance Movement (SRM) established in 1997 (Lööw 2016), the NRM is committed to the violent and revolutionary overthrow of the purportedly decadent and corrosive liberal and democratic regimes of the Nordic countries by the forces of National Socialism. Like its ideological predecessor, the SRM, the NRM is and remains Swedish-dominated, but its vision of a future pan-Nordic Nazi state has also attracted neo-Nazi activists in Norway and Finland. Ever since the 1950s, Sweden has had a much stronger neo-Nazi milieu, an organizational strength that might be accounted for by the fact that Nazism was never tarnished in quite the same manner in a country that was never occupied by German Nazi forces during World War II. Norwegian neo-Nazis aligned with the NRM initiated the largest neo-Nazi march in Norway since World War II, in the southern Norwegian city of Kristiansand on July 29, 2017 (Bangstad 2017). Kristiansand, which sits in the southern Norwegian Bible Belt region of Agder, was also the site of a high-profle and symbolic neo-Nazi hoisting of Nazi fags and banners on April 9, 2018 – the day Norwegians commemorate the German Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940. The NRM is Swedishdominated, but it is, above all, committed to the idea of a purported “race war”. In a 2018 NRM podcast titled Leadership Perspectives, Swedish activist and NMR’s leader since 2016, Simon Lindberg, referred to “the Zionist

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and globalist Jews” as the forces “orchestrating the import of alien races”. Simonsen cites this podcast to underline the continuities between “historical National Socialism and contemporary neo-Nazism” with “conspiracist antisemitism” as a “core element” (Simonsen 2021, 645). This discourse points to the persisting pre-eminence of antisemitism in the NRM’s rhetorical universe, even though much of far and populist right-wing energy in the Nordic countries has shifted over the past decades towards forms of Islamophobia. Hence, although Islamophobia is more widespread and common than antisemitism (Hofmann & Moe 2020), this discourse illuminates how the two are closely and paradoxically bound. The Nordic countries generally have a very small Jewish population and few immigrants of Jewish background. During the 1980s and 1990s, the attention of Nordic neo-Nazis to an increasing extent shifted from Jews to Muslims (see Bangstad 2014). The NRM’s conspiratorial idea of a “hidden Jewish hand” behind the immigration of people racialized as “nonwhite” to Europe and the Nordic countries is by no means unique: one fnds the same intertwining of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the messaging about immigration from the right-wing populist regime of Viktor Orbán in Hungary (Thorleifsson 2017). In this account of NRM discourse, we have deliberately chosen to focus on ecofascist discourse, and we have, therefore, also limited the source material to that aspect of the NRM. The ecofascist discourse of the NRM is, however, linked to a wider discursive universe in which the idea of “white extinction”; white supremacist, racist, and antisemitic ideas; and patriarchal gender norms are intrinsically linked. White Replacement and Ecofascism

Scholars on the far and extreme right have long known that Scandinavian far- and extreme-right activists are more supportive of environmentalism than their U.S. white supremacist counterparts (Kimmel 2003). The NRM’s 2016 manifesto in English, Our Path: New Politics for a New Time, presents the NRM as the “new Green Party” of their respective Nordic countries, referencing the enforcement of a sustainable human relationship with nature, stricter organic standards, animal rights, and animal welfare as central to the NMR’s political vision. The NRM’s 2016 political manifesto posits the “nefarious and powerful sources” of “global Zionism” as a main cause of “environmental degradation”. “Global Zionism” is, furthermore, presented as a “cancerous force” responsible for an ongoing “genocide against the Nordic and ethnic peoples of Europe” (NRM 2016, 10). In line with the classical dehumanizing tropes of antisemitism inherent to neo-Nazi rhetoric, “Global Zionism” (which in this context denotes Jews) is described as a “parasitic”, “exploitative”, “hostile”, and “elite” force “feeding on mankind” and as “destructive

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forces that rule the world” and “control the entire global monetary infrastructure”. The manifesto declares “miscegenation and multiculturalism” to be “criminal genocidal practices of treason against the Nordic people” (NRM 2016, 46). The pan-Nordic “united ethnic nation” (NRM 2016, 11) that the NRM envisions being established after the violent and revolutionary overthrow of the existing and decadent liberal political regimes will be reserved for the purported “Nordic race” or the “Nordic people”, which in NRM discourse is also referred to as “the Nords” (NRM 2016, 14). The NRM regards “racial survival” as “the most important goal of the Nordic Resistance Movement” (NRM 2016, 12) and imagines the establishment of a future “government institution that will efciently and, with the aid of modern genetic profling, racially assess all people who have acquired citizenship [in the Nordic countries] after 1975 and their descendants” (NRM 2016, 13). Much like their Nazi forebears, the NRM do conceive of themselves as “standing on the shoulders of science” in arguing for the purported existence of biological “races”. Though mainstream science has long declared the idea that biological races exist to be pseudo-science (Saini 2019; Rutherford 2020), one does not have to be a neo-Nazi to linger in the faith of their existence, but it surely helps. Think here of former U.S. president Donald Trump’s reference to white Minnesotans having “good genes” and the “racehorse theory” at a September 2020 Republican rally in Minnesota, U.S.A. (Rutherford 2022, 62). In its manifesto, the NRM decries a purported “lack of modern and correct racial terms” said to stem from “a taboo” on “research on race” in “all Nordic countries since 1945”, resulting in a situation which “enables race deniers to continue spreading the lie that there are no uniquely diferent human races” (NRM 2016, 14). In the new Nordic Nation, the NRM will not only bring about the complete halt of “all non-Nordic immigration”, but it will also “initiate repatriation of racial foreigners situated within the borders of the Nordic region” (NRM 2016, 13). Details about exactly how this “repatriation” is to be undertaken are not provided. As if to underline the white supremacist ideology at work here, the NRM in its 2016 manifesto also and quite counter-factually reconstitutes “Nordic peoples” as an “indigenous population” in the Nordic countries: the Sámi population is the indigenous population of Nordic countries such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Once the envisioned “repatriation” of “racial foreigners” has been afected, the NRM declares that it is open to the idea of granting “asylum to racial kinsmen from around the world who have been persecuted due to their race or their political afliation” (NRM 2016, 15). That the overriding concern with the survival of the purported “Nordic race” is also regarded by the NRM as an environmentalist concern with “biodiversity” is evident from the NRM’s rhetorical constitution of “racial foreigners” as “foreign species”, which “through unnatural means establish themselves in

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the Nordic nature” and thereby “threaten native populations, ecosystems and biological diversity” (NRM 2016, 31). The NRM’s use of terms such as biodiversity is anchored in ethnopluralist visions common to far-right identitarianism and builds on an ethos of “blood and soil”. The myth of white extinction here runs in tandem with conspiracy theories about an impending Eurabia in Europe (Bangstad 2013) and the theory of the Great Replacement (Zúquete 2018), which suggests that the white people of Europe are systematically replaced by overbreeding nonwhites and Muslims who have allegedly been allowed to settle in Europe courtesy of “treacherous” elites. The centrality of these myths in the NRM discourse is visible in the following excerpt from a podcast discussion. In the NRM-produced podcast Nordic Frontier, the show hosts discuss the article “Do You Want to Save the Climate – Don’t Have Children” published by the Swedish state broadcaster Sweden’s Radio, which was based on a study from Lund University. The study found that the top personal choice individuals could make to lessen their “CO2 imprint” was to have fewer children. “Let’s talk about nature”, says one of the hosts. (Nordfront Editorial Ofce 2017). “How does a scientist recommend an organism to stop breeding? . . . That is insane. They’re not telling us that, hey, six kids is [sic] a little excessive, could you maybe settle for four”. He pauses and says gravely: “They’re telling us to go extinct”. This example draws attention to three features of ecofascist discourse. First, it demonstrates the salience of the conspiracy culture around the image of the insidious Other aiming to reduce white/Nordic population numbers. The host presents the study as part of a genocidal plan devised by an academic elite to undermine/subdue/extinguish Nordic people. This view repeats the theory of cultural Marxism, which is a term that the far right has been using since the 1990s as a general signifer for liberal and/or liberal left-leaning politics in Western societies. It refers to a conspiracy theory which holds that cultural and intellectual elites seek to “destroy the West” by means of subverting classical liberal ideals. As Malm and the Zetkin Collective (2021) note, in as much as the far right generally attributes the origins of cultural Marxism to the Frankfurt School and its European Jewish founding fgures, such as the philosophers Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, this particular far-right conspiracy theory is but a modern iteration of the antisemitic idea of Judeo-Bolshevism that was once so central to German Nazism (see Hanebrink 2018). Proponents of this conspiracy theory suggest that climate science is a cultural Marxism hoax to subdue and dominate the world (Malm & the Zetkin Collective 2021, 300–313). What may be referred to as the “climate left conspiracy theory” (Malm & the Zetkin Collective 2021, 284–285), in turn, postulates that leftists looked for another way to exert social and cultural domination after communism failed and that the maturing climate science of

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the early 1990s became a tool for the “liberal, multicultural Zionist elites” to control culture, humans, and society and to ultimately exterminate white people. According to the NRM, then, Nordic/white people are slowly steered towards extinction by the hands of a looming, steering liberal-left consensus or collective consciousness. Second, the ecofascist antidote to a leftist-liberal dominated environmentalism and climate science is a deterministic, sociobiological race-based form of ecology that enforces purportedly “natural hierarchies” privileging white men. “Race” and hierarchy are at the core of the fascist ecology represented by the NRM, and fascist ecology is promoted as the only “true environmentalism” because it is presented as being in accordance with the “laws of nature”. Or, as the NRM asserts in their 2016 tract Our Path, “by acknowledging that mankind is part of nature, we must also realize that humans cannot be exempt from the laws of nature with regard to human diversity”. For the NRM, “multiculturalism” is “a genocidal ideology which constitutes the polar [sic] opposite of biological diversity” (NRM 2016, 31). The NRM’s discourse demonstrates an aestheticization of politics in which questions about economical redistribution, climate justice, and critique of the capitalogenic exploitation of nature are suspended in favour of identity and culture-based politics. Third, the white race is constructed as a victimized object for the NRM. The Nordic people function as a proxy for the white race, connecting the NRM to transnational white supremacist eforts to preserve whiteness. By examining contemporary crises and the NRM’s suggested solutions to these, the most pressing problem is presented as the extinction of white people. Their ideology and politics are structured around this crux, constructing the NRM’s mythic core as the crisis of a prospective “white extinction” and “white replacement”. In Conclusion: Overlaps Between Ecofascism and Liberal Capitalism

Ideas about white innocence (Wekker 2016) in the face of European colonialism and racism are strong and persistent in Nordic countries. In writing about contemporary fascist movements and actors in the Nordic countries, there is always and inevitably a risk of exceptionalizing these phenomena (Loftsdóttir & Jensen 2016). The myths about “white extinction” and “white replacement” are by no means unique to ecofascism. Rather, such myths have a long ideological lineage in liberal capitalist formations. After all, liberalism was developed alongside racist and colonial projects and served to justify white supremacist agendas. Likewise, the attempt of reaching fascism’s ideological core can, at times, appear to lead nowhere else but to European conservatism’s antiliberal and nationalist strands. Recognizing the overlaps between what we have discussed as ecofascism and our common liberal heritage is

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important in order to retain a broad base of analysis regarding future permutations and potentials of fascism. References Askanius, T. (2021). “I Just Want to be the Friendly Face of National Socialism”: The Turn to Civility in the Cultural Expressions of Neo-Nazism in Sweden. Nordicom Review, 42(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2021-0004 Bangstad, S. (2013). Eurabia Comes to Norway. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 24(3), 369–391. https://doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2013.783969 Bangstad, S. (2014). Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia. Zed Books. Bangstad, S. (2017, August 21). Scandinavian Nazis on the March Again. Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/ scandinavian-nazis-on-march-again/ Beinart, P. (2019, August 5). White Nationalists Discover the Environment. The Atlantic Monthly. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/whitenationalistsdiscover-the-environment/595489/ Bhatt, C. (2021). White Extinction: Metaphysical Elements of Contemporary Western Fascism. Theory, Culture & Society, 38(1), 27–52. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0263276420925523 Biehl, J., & Staudenmaier, P. (1996). Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience. AK Press. Darwish, M. (2018). Green Neo-Nazism: Examining the Intersection of Masculinity, Far-Right Extremism and Environmentalism in the Nordic Resistance Movement [Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Oslo]. Davies, J. (2021). Brexit and Invasive Species: A Case Study of the Cognitive and Afective Encoding of “Abject Nature” in Contemporary Nativist Ideology. Cultural Studies, 36(4), 568–597. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1882520 Eley, G. (2014). Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–1945. Cambridge University Press. Eriksson, J. M. (2018). Den Nordiske Motstandsbevegelsen: Forestillingen om en homolobby. AntirasistiskSenter. Estes, N. (2019). Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Verso Books. Finchelstein, F. (2019). From Fascism to Populism in History. University of California Press. Grifn, R. (1991). The Nature of Fascism. Routledge. Grifn, R. (2018). Fascism: An Introduction to Comparative Fascist Studies. Polity Press. Hage, G. (2017). Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Polity Press. Hanebrink, P. (2018). A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hochschild, A. (1998). King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Mariner. Hofmann, C., & Moe, V. (2020). The Shifting Boundaries of Prejudice: Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Contemporary Norway. Scandinavian University Press. IPCC. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel

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on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E. S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem & B. Rama (Eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. https://www.doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844 Kimmel, M. (2003). Globalization and its Male Contents: The Gendered Moral and Political Economy of Terrorism. International Sociology, 18(3), 603–620. https:// doi.org/10.1177/02685809030183008 Klungtveit, H. (2020). Nynazister Blant Oss: PåInnsiden Av Den Nye Høyreekstremismen. KaggeForlag. Kott, M., & Emberland, T. (2012). Himmlers Norge. Aschehoug. Kyllingstad, J. R. (2012). Norwegian Physical Anthropology and the Idea of a Nordic Master Race. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), 46–56. https://doi. org/10.1086/662332 Loftsdóttir, K., & Jensen, L. (2016). Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities. Routledge. Lööw, H. (2016). Nazismeni Sverige 2000–2014. Ordfront. Malm, A., & The Zetkin Collective. (2021). White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. Verso Books. Mamdani, M. (2020). Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Harvard University Press. McDonald, S. M. (2020, March 19). It’s Not “Ecofascism” – It’s Liberalism. Current Afairs. https://www.currentafairs.org/2020/03/its-not-ecofascism-its-liberalism Mills, C. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Moore, S., & Roberts, A. (2022). The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far-Right. Polity Press. Mudde, C. (2019). The Far Right Today. Wiley & Co. Nordfront Editorial Office. (2017, July 20). Nordic Frontier #26: Having Aryan Babies is Eco-terrorism? https://nordiskradio.se/?avsnitt=nordic-frontier-26having-aryanbabies-is-eco-terrorism Nordfront Editorial Ofce. (2023, February 7). Nordic Frontier #255: Blair Cottrell from Down Under. https://nordiskradio.se/?avsnitt=live-20-00-nordicfrontier-255-blair-cottrell-from-down-under NRM (Nordic Resistance Movement). (2016). Our Path. https://www.nordfront.se/ wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Our-Path.pdf Olusoga, D., & Erichsen, C. W. (2011). The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide. Faber & Faber. Owen, T. (2019, August 6). Eco-Fascism: The Racist Theory That Inspired the El Paso and Christchurch Shooters. Vice News. https://www.vice.com/en/article/59nmv5/ eco-fascism-the-racist-theory-that-inspired-the-el-paso-and-christchurch-shootersand-is-gaining-followers Rutherford, A. (2020). How to Argue with a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Rutherford, A. (2022). Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Saini, A. (2019). Superior: The Return of Race Science. Allen Lane. Simonsen, K. B. (2021). Antisemitism on the Norwegian Far-Right, 1967–2018. Scandinavian Journal of History, 45(5), 640–662. https://doi.org/10.1080/0346 8755.2020.1726809 Stanley, J. (2018). How Fascism Works: The Politics of us and Them. Random House.

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Staudenmaier, P. (2011). Fascist Ecology: The “Green Wing” of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents. In J. Biehl & P. Staudenmeier (Eds.), Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience (pp. 13–42). New Compass Press. Stratigakos, D. (2020). Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway. Princeton University Press. Sussman, R. W. (2014). The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientifc Idea. Harvard University Press. Szenes, E. (2021). Neo-Nazi Environmentalism: The Linguistic Construction of Ecofascism in a Nordic Resistance Manifesto. Journal for Deradicalization, 27, 146–192. https://journals.sfu.ca/jd/index.php/jd/article/view/465/281 Teitelbaum, B. R. (2017). Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism. Oxford University Press. Thomas, C., & Gosink, E. (2021). At the Intersection of Eco-Crises, Eco-Anxiety, and Political Turbulence: A Primer on Twenty-First Century Ecofascism. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 20(1), 30–54. https://doi. org/10.1163/15691497-12341581 Thorleifsson, C. (2017). In Pursuit of Purity: Populist Nationalism and the Racialization of Diference. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 28(2), 186–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2019.1635767 Wekker, G. (2016). White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Duke University Press. Whitman, J. Q. (2017). Hitler’s American Model: The USA and the Making of Nazi Race Laws. Princeton University Press. Wodak, R. (2015). The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. Sage. Zúquete, J. P. (2018). The Identitarians: The Movement Against Globalism and Islam in Europe. University of Notre Dame Press.

PART II

Technologies of Replacement

7 COLONIAL CENSUS AND SAFFRON DEMOGRAPHY The Shaping of Numerical Communities and Contestations in India Sayan Das

Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged countries and brought life to a standstill, India was caught up in a groundswell of protests against the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), passed in 2019. Both the NRC and CAA have a long and complicated history. Briefy, the NRC, following a countrywide survey of the population through an update of the National Population Register, is expected to sift the actual citizens from the “illegal immigrants”, while the CAA will grant citizenship to asylum-seekers only if they meet certain conditions. Protests erupted around these conditionalities which allegedly discriminate against Muslims, a minority community in India. The present amendment in the Citizenship Act made religion – of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi, or Jain communities, barring the Muslims – the basis of entitlement to citizenship by naturalization, raising serious doubts about India’s constitutional secularism (Desai 2020). The contention followed that the dual process of NRC-CAA favoured Hindus while creating hurdles for Muslim immigrants to become naturalized citizens of the country. It is feared that this massive social engineering project led by the state will allow Hindu majoritarianism to fester unchecked by anchoring the Hindu identity in legalbureaucratic privilege over the Muslims and rendering the validity of Muslim citizenship perennially suspect (Aaron 2019). The project of mapping and marking the people of the country, followed by granting citizenship to a selected few, appears to be deeply rooted in a Malthusian logic where population growth is blamed for the misery befalling people while the unequal distribution of and access to resources is seldom questioned. This became obvious during an election rally where Amit Shah, the president of the largest party in the coalition ruling India – the Bharatiya DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-10

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Janata Party (BJP) – said, “These crores of illegal immigrants are like termites and they are eating the food that should go to our poor and they are taking our jobs” (Ghosh 2018). The fear of a population explosion, particularly of the Muslims in the case of India, is an old trope, dating back to colonial times but surprisingly still tenacious in its hold over the popular imagination today. In this chapter, we explore demographic data and social history to examine whether this fear has an actual statistical basis or is created and driven by what has come to be known as “Safron Demography”, that is, “a set of pernicious myths about claimed diferences between Hindu and Muslim populations”, propagated by the right-wing to capitalize on the fear of the Muslim Other (Jefery & Jefery 2005, 1). Tracing the history of the communalization of demography from the frst colonial census to the recent statistical exercises and associated propaganda, the chapter demonstrates how data have been recklessly politicized to drum up fear of the Other in the quest to realize a “racially pure” India, with devastating consequences. Data, Decibels, and Demography

On August 25, 2015, the Ofce of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India released the data on the population by religious communities from Census 2011, four years later than usual. It was met with a great deal of commotion, ably assisted by hyperventilating news anchors on postdinner TV and screaming headlines in morning dailies the day after. In the English-language media, the reaction varied between a sensationalist “Hindus less than 80% of country’s population” (with “less than 80%” in alarming red) in Hindustan Times and a relatively sober “Muslim population growth slows” in The Hindu newspaper. Among the vernacular outlets, Navbharat Times ran the headline “Dharm ka siyasi data: Chunav se pehle jangananeke ankre, Muslim abadi sabse tej”, which roughly translates to “The political data of religion: Muslim growth the fastest in the census data before the elections”. Both Dainik Jagran, a Hindi-language daily with a large circulation, and Lokmat of Maharashtra, a Marathi-language newspaper, emphasized the increase of the Muslim share in the population, despite the reduction in their birth rate. The Kannada daily Udayvani of Karnataka declared, “Muslims increase more than Hindus! Percent of Hindus declines” in its headline while Punjabi Jagran ran the headline “Hindus and Sikhs decline as Muslims rise”. The Assam Tribune chose to focus only on the Muslim population in the state: “Muslim population in State up to 34.22 pc” (Jain 2015). Let us now turn to the data that these headlines sought to frame. The Census 2011 data (see Table 7.1) presented the distribution of the total population by six major religious communities: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain, besides “Other Religions and Persuasions” (ORP) and “Religion Not Stated” (RNS).

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TABLE 7.1 All India religion census data 2011

Hindu

Muslim

Christian Sikh

Buddhist Jian

ORP

RNS

96.63 17.22 2.78 2.08 0.84 0.45 0.79 0.29 crores crores crores crores crores crores crores crores (79.8%) (14.2%) (2.3%) (1.7%) (0.7%) (0.4%) (0.7%) (0.2%) Source: Created by the author using data from the Ofce of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, 2015

The factors feeding the frenzy were the Hindu population dropping below 80% for the frst time after independence and the relatively higher growth rate of the Muslims. While the growth rate of the total population in 2001–11 was 17.7%, the breakdown for diferent religious communities was: 16.7% for Hindus, 24.6% for Muslims, 15.5% for Christians, 8.4% for Sikhs, 6.1% for Buddhists, and 5.4% for Jains. Taken in isolation, this data can lead to erroneous interpretation. Examining the trends over time, however, clearly shows that growth rates for both Hindu and Muslim communities are in decline which, according to data from 1991–2001 and 2001–11, is greater among the Muslims (Pew Research Center 2021). In fact, the ffth iteration of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-V) bolsters this claim incontrovertibly, demonstrating that not only is India’s total fertility rate (TFR) declining, but across religious groups, the drop is steepest among the Muslims (2.3% in 2019–21) when compared to NFHS-1 (4.4% in 1992–93). The data also reveals that the fertility gap between Hindus and Muslims is converging to a diference of less than one child (International Institute for Population Sciences & Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2021). Iyer’s (2002) study had earlier shown that after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, there was no statistically signifcant diference between Hindus and Muslims when it came to contraception use. Lack of health services in Muslim localities/ghettos, high unmet need for contraception, and socioeconomic underdevelopment, among others, are primarily responsible for the diferential fertility between the two communities. Rewinding back to 2015, we see that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a powerful Hindu nationalist organization with the declared ideal of carrying “the nation to the pinnacle of glory through organizing the entire society”, was quick to jump into the fray following the release of religion-wise census data (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh 2015). At its Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal program in Ranchi, the organization expressed “deep concern” over these “severe demographic imbalances”, which may threaten “the unity, integrity and identity of the country”, and urged the government to “reformulate” the national population policy through the preparation of a national register of citizens (Bhardwaj 2015). Such fracas around the release

112 Sayan Das TABLE 7.2 Decade-wise national population growth rates of the Hindus and Muslims

in %  

1981–1991

1991–2001

2001–2011

Hindu Muslim

22.7 32.9

19.9 29.4

16.7 24.6

Source: Created by the author using data from Pew Research Center (2021)

of religion-based census data is not particularly new. The same year, in April, another report entitled The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections 2010–2050 was published by the Pew Research Centre (2015) seeking to explain “Why Muslims are rising fastest”. The report stated that, averaging 3.1 children per woman, Muslims had the highest fertility rate and further projected that, despite maintaining its Hindu majority, India will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia. Alarmed by the fndings, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), another prominent Hindu nationalist group, demanded a uniform law to rectify the “demographic imbalance” in the country and asked Hindus to have as many children as Muslims (Press Trust of India 2015). This was an echo of similar concerns raised back in February by the Bharatiya Janta Party’s (BJP) Sadhvi Prachi, who accused Muslims of giving birth to “40 dogs” each and “trying to convert Hindustan into Darul Islam”1 (Daniyal 2015). This fear of the Muslim population taking over the country appears as a constant fxture in Hindutva propaganda. In the early ’90s, when the Hindu communalist parties – the so-called Sangh Parivar – were consolidating themselves to obtain political power, the slogan of “Hum Do, Hamare Do; Woh Paanch Unke Pachees”, meaning “We are two and have two; they are fve and have twenty-fve” was particularly popular. Cleverly rifng of the national family planning program slogan promoting the two-child policy, the insinuation was that the Hindus with one wife maintain small two-children families, while the polygamous Muslims can have four wives and twenty-fve children. However, this promulgation had no basis in evidence which, on the contrary, showed that polygamous marriages were more common among Hindus than Muslims and that Muslims in Kerala or Tamil Nadu, and in most of South India, had smaller families than Hindus in northern states like Uttar Pradesh (Rao 2007). Such data strongly suggest that religion does not hold the answers. In fact, over time, research has chipped at the Malthusian edifce, opening up the complex relationship between population and its multiple determinants, especially socioeconomic development (Rao 1994). Yet drumming up demographic fear of Muslims taking over India remains vital to the Hindutva agenda of creating Hindu Rashtra – a theocratic state. In the next sections, we explore in greater detail how such demographic deception came to be and what gives it this enduring traction.

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The Colonial Census and Community Identity

The discipline of demography, while purportedly a neutral numerical exercise, is embedded within social and power relations as any other human enterprise. Arguably, a census does not just count peoples and communities but also alters and shapes them in the process. Bernard Cohn’s (1987) famous essay, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectifcation in South Asia” demonstrated how the apparently scientifc exercise of data-gathering in the colonial census, driven by practical logic and necessities, created new numerical identities that reconfgured issues of status, social mobility, and electoral politics in India. From creating categories and defning them to including questions that limit possible answers to pre-decided options, every step in a census is steeped in perception, perspective, and politics. Choices made along the way can and do have serious implications. The use of censuses to classify and enumerate race, ethnicity, and nationality has been the subject of intense debate and contestation in many countries, such as the U.K., U.S.A., Canada, Brazil, and India. In France, the classifcation of immigrants based on their place of birth and mother tongue was met with sharp criticism for failing to recognize the migrant population’s dynamic character and change over time (Bhagat 2006). The apparently innocuous exercise of classifcation and collection of such data, thus, often transformed into technologies of power by lending themselves to the creation of tools and policies of control. Colonial archival instruments such as maps, museums, agricultural surveys, racial studies, and the census represent similar tools that, in their attempts to render colonial subjects legible, helped shape colonial governmentality but, ironically, also colonial nationalism (Appadurai 1996). The colonial census was emblematic of the union between the colonial and Orientalist project, engaged in “the particularizing and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts” (Said 1978, 72). Appadurai (1996) argues that the complicated interaction between exoticization and enumeration, both strands of a single colonial project, could shed some light on the communal violence in India today. Driven by concerns about the extent of poverty and relief necessitated, many European countries instituted the census at the beginning of the 18th century. The British census, unlike the colonial census in India, was largely preoccupied with economic, occupational, and territorial concerns rather than ethnic or religious questions, which were only introduced in the census of 1991 and 2001 respectively. In India, on the other hand, questions on religion, caste, and race were part of the very frst colonial census in 1872. Religion, in fact, was employed as a fundamental category for data tabulation. Signifcant precolonial political formations like the Mughals, for instance, collected information about land for revenue purposes but seldom enumerated group identities for the purpose of social control (Bhagat 2001). Various colonial censuses, on the other hand, as Ayesha Jalal notes, had “cast the die making religion the central factor superseding all forms of social relationship”

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(Jalal in Guha 2003, 150). The colonial fxation with group identities like religion is also evident in discursive practices such as the periodization of Indian history into Hindu and Muslim periods, unlike the ancient, medieval, and modern periods in European history. Crucially, while the British or the French census was the most intrusive in its social margins constituted by the poor, sexual degenerates, lunatics, and criminals; in colonies like India, the pervasive gaze of the census deemed the entire population as diferent and difcult (Appadurai 1996; Bhagat 2001). The categories chosen and defned for the Indian census refected this colonial gaze. The numerical weight added to these categories cemented the people enumerated further within distinct and discrete social and geographical confnes, erasing what scholars had defned as “fuzzy communities” with porous boundaries (Kaviraj 1991). Lacking any overt internal cohesion or defned externalities, these groups used to represent communities that had no concrete idea about the extent of their spread or numerical strength. Their self-awareness was, thus, less pronounced, and the need for the Other was less acute. The colonial census changed all of that. Its approach to classifcation and enumeration sowed and nurtured the idea of numerical majority and minority based on religious identity (Bhagat 2001). Caste was also a key site of colonial numerical surveillance, but the huge social variability proved too daunting a task for the foreign rulers, leading to prioritizing “numerical majorities” as the touchstone around which census information was organized. The diferences of caste, class, and sect were, thus, forcibly fattened to create and propagate a uniform identity of the Hindu majority – a project that continues in contemporary India at the behest of the Hindu nationalists. The official ascription of quantitative values to the categories created new notions of self, representing what Ian Hacking called “dynamic nominalism” (Hacking in Appadurai 1996). Before the nationwide numerical mapping, there was rarely a need or even possibility for the communities dispersed across the vast country to identify themselves precisely on any specific parameter or to compare themselves with anyone besides their kin in terms of similarities or differences. The “abstract, precise, complete and cool idiom of number” served the justificatory, pedagogical, and disciplinary needs of the colonists for domesticating the vast and diverse people of India (Appadurai 1996, 123). The essentializing and enumerative colonial gaze redefined group identities into majority and minority, which eventually congealed into cultural codes for the dominant and the disenfranchised. The colonial census, therefore, transformed fuzzy localized communities into enumerated communities and, ultimately, into political communities, creating a pervasive communal consciousness. The colonial period is littered with instances where geographic and demographic information from the census was

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used to foment communalism. The division of Bengal on the basis of religion in 1905 is a prime example where the new province of East Bengal was marked around predominantly Muslim locations (Bhagat 2001). In the post-census period, the idea of politics as a contestation between essentialized and enumerated communities would go on to take firm root in India, a country where self-representation was rarely tied to quantification. Census and Creation of Communal Common Sense

Since the frst colonial census in India, the category of religion came to signify “communities mapped, counted, and above all compared with other religious communities” (Jones 1981, 84). Census data was one among the many popular networks of tropes and themes that emboldened Hindu communalism. The census, for instance, informed U. N. Mukherjee’s 1909 pamphlet titled A Dying Race,2 infuential in propagating the narrative of declining Hindu numbers and feeding into Hindu communalism. The pamphlet met with a huge demand and went into several reprints, informing many of the later publications to come out of the Hindu Maha Sabha, the predecessor to many of today’s Hindu nationalist outfts. The pamphlet and its doomsday predictions for the Hindu race proved particularly useful to consolidate the hugely diverse and often antagonistic caste-diferentiated Hindu community at a time when both the Muslim and lower caste communities were demanding separate representation. The “demographic common sense” of the pamphlet succeeded in boosting fedgling Hindu communalism, increasingly becoming preoccupied with numbers. The myth of a dying Hindu race also handed the British rulers an invaluable weapon to further their strategy of Divide et Impera. For instance, the census commissioner for 1891 Charles James O’Donnell, in abeyance of simple statistical logic, decided to calculate the number of years it would take for the disappearance of the Hindu community based on their slower growth rate compared to the Muslims. Sowing further suspicion, H. H. Risley, home secretary of India and proposer of the partition of Bengal in 1903, exclaimed, “Can the fgures of the last census be regarded in any sense the forerunner of an Islamic or Christian revival which will threaten the citadel of Hinduism or will Hinduism hold its own in the future as it has done through the long ages of the past” (Datta 1993, 1306). Losing all pretence, the 1921 census reported: “Both relatively and absolutely Hindus have lost . . . Hindus have decreased during the last decade by 347 per 10,000, or just under 3.5%” (Gupta 2004, 4303). At the Maha Sabha meeting in Nashik, prominent Hindu religious leader Jagatguru Shankaracharya expressed apprehension that with such rates, Hindus will completely disappear in a century. A tract written in 1922 and

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titled Hinduon Ke Sangrakshan aur Atmarakshan (The Conservation and Self-Protection of the Hindus)3 commented: Some Hindus argue “what we have to do with increasing our numbers. We should be more concerned with preserving the seed of our true Aryan identity”. Dear, what do you mean by the protection of the seed? In every census, the number of Hindus is decreasing while that of Muslims and Christians is increasing. And you are just concerned with the protection of the seed! Our aim should be to increase the numbers frst and foremost. (Gupta 2004, 4303) Lamentations for the “dying race” spawned many such tracts like Hinduon Ke Sath Vishwasghat (Betrayal of the Hindus), expressing fear over the disappearance of the Aryan race from India. Newspapers, much in the same manner as today, peddled the same myth with catchy headlines like Hinduon ka Bhayankar Haas (The Dangerous Decrement of the Hindus). The numerically defned strength of the community played an important part in establishing the idea of a homogenous monolithic Hindu identity. Bhai Premanand, a luminary of the Hindu Maha Sabha, locating the main reason behind Hindu-Muslim confict in the numerical expansion of the Muslims and relative decline of the Hindus, proposed a project of shuddhi (purifcation) and sanghathan (organization) to halt this numerical catastrophe (Gupta 2004). Even today, the trend continues with quotidian regularity. After the 2001 census, when religion-based data was released in 2004, a similar hue and cry over the Muslim population growth became strident. The debate, often misinformed and usually malicious, led the government to establish a prime ministerial highlevel committee, popularly known as the Sachar Committee, to fnd out the social, economic, and educational status of the Muslims. The Sachar Committee report, besides demonstrating the downward social mobility of Muslims, also dispelled the myth of population growth. Taking the falling growth rate of the Muslim community into account, the committee report estimated the Muslim proportion to stabilize at between 17% and 21% of the Indian population by 2100 (Sachar 2006). Even the relatively higher fertility of Muslims, as compared to Hindus, is more a function of their socioeconomic disparity than religion (Iyer 2002). Recent analyses use polynomial and exponential growth models to plot population data, predicting that the chances of Hindu and Muslim population growth graphs ever crossing paths in the foreseeable future are extremely unlikely (Quraishi 2021). Yet we see the same debates crop up again with the release of the 2011 data and continuing even a decade later (Tiwary 2022). Thus, despite evidence to the contrary, this demographic deception continues to fuel communal common sense today with disastrous consequences. The formation and propagation of imagined identities and contestations around religion in India, thus, need a deeper inspection.

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Imagined Communities and Communal Confict

Central to the idea of the communalists is the notion of the nation as a “culturally” defned entity. For Hindu communalists, it is a purely Hindu nation, while, for Islamic communalists, it is a similar idea of Pakistan, all the while conforming to colonial constructs. While the replacement of religious-political institutions with secular ones is deemed a hallmark of modernity, the rising tide of religiously fuelled conficts in modern times indicates otherwise. The confict does, however, seem warranted at one level. Both religion and nationalism, albeit secular, participate in creating identities for their followers and seek communal loyalty in return (Baber 2000). One of the distinctive features of late modernity appears to be the confict between the competing ideologies of religious nationalism and secular nationalism. In India, colonial rule was instrumental in creating the two religiously defned communities of Hindus and Muslims. The religious divide was also evident in the colonial attempt to standardize indigenous law, where “Hindu” and “Muhammedan” laws were clearly distinguished. Further, through numerical mapping, the institutionalization of distinct community identities in a Hindu “majority” and a Muslim “minority” provided the foundation for electoral, representative politics. Along with rationalizing the administrative structures for the smooth operation of the colonial state, the British also informed the self-perception of specifc communities. In this vein, the “Orientalist” school of colonial administrators, represented by fgures such as William Jones, Nathaniel Halhed, or James Prinsep, constructed the idea of India as an ancient Hindu civilization where the Brahmins were in authority. At the same time, while tracing the common ancestry of Western and Hindu civilizations in their Indo-European root, they also created a narrative with the recurring leitmotif of the decline of Hindu civilization under “Muslim” rule. In this discourse, the colonial administrators identifed themselves as the saviour of their Hindu subjects from the “oriental despotism” of the Muslims. The Islamophobic nature of these ideas can, indeed, be traced back to their origins in Western Europe, and notably, to discourses produced in relation to the Crusades or the wars against the Spanish Moors in the 15th century (Baber 2000; Jefery & Jefery 2005). Later picked up by the Hindutva brigade, the colonial narrative regarded Islam in India as identical to the Islamic civilization centred around the Middle East, while Hindus were painted as the true natives of India, whose pre-Islamic past glory was crumbling under Muslim rule. Internalizing this imagined identity, a few Hindu reformers such as Dayananda and Vivekananda called for a “revitalization and homogenization of their community”. Similarly, on the “other” side, individuals such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of Aligarh Muslim University, argued the same for the Muslim community. His notion of irreconcilable diferences between the two communities was shared by the likes of Aurobindo Ghose, Bankim Chatterjee,

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Tilak, Lajpat Rai, Malaviya, V. D. Savarkar, and others. In 1937, Savarkar, an inspiration for the ruling BJP, wrote in his famous tract titled Hindutva:4 “India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary, there are two nations in the main; the Hindus and the Muslims . . . there are two antagonistic nations living side by side in India” (Savarkar in Baber 2000, 75). Guru Golwalkar, the RSS leader, in a tract titled We or Our Nationhood Defned, opined that To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the World by her purging the country of the semitic races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having diferences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and proft by. (Golwalkar 1939, 87) Further along the tract, picking up the Orientalist narrative thread of Muslims as foreigners, Golwalkar ofered some advice: Emigrants have to get themselves naturally assimilated in the principal mass of population, the national Race, by adopting its culture and language and sharing in its aspirations, by losing all consequences of their separate existence, forgetting their foreign origin . . . That is the only logical and correct solution . . . in one word, they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, not even citizen’s rights. (Golwalkar 1939, 105) Religious conficts today, even when strongly anchored to the present context, carry with them a strong sense of the past, often emanating from perceived injustices rather than evidence. There is a continuous attempt to reconfgure social memory to legitimize the claims of the present. The attempt to codify Indian history as Hindu, Muslim, and British; institutionalization of the pain of the partition and its reconfguration as a unanimous “Muslim” demand instead of the demand of a particular party; and eliding over the separatist movements of the Tamils and other Hindu communities – all play into this in “consolidation of imagined Hindu and Muslim communities as irreconcilable yet inextricably connected elements of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’” (Baber 2000, 70). In this narrative, the fgure of the Muslim, who embodies all the sins of the past as well as those of the future, is universal. Any Muslim, therefore, can stand in for the retribution reserved for the deeds of another. For instance, Muslims are attacked in Ayodhya today for the claimed demolition

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of an allegedly Hindu temple by Babur, who ruled some 500 years back. Sarkar (2002) emphasizes this to be the crucial reason behind the logic of revenge – the action-reaction theory articulated by the then chief minister and the present prime minister of India Narendra Modi – which unfolded to devastating efects in Godhra, Gujarat. Women, Masculinity, and the Demographic War

A closer reading of the Gujarat carnage reveals another facet of this demographic war. Sarkar states that the pattern of cruelty inficted on women and children in Godhra suggests three things: One, the woman’s body was a site of almost inexhaustible violence, with infnitely plural and innovative forms of torture. Second, their sexual and reproductive organs were attacked with a special savagery. Third, their children, born and unborn, shared the attacks and were killed before their eyes. (Sarkar 2002, 2875) Patriarchy is known to ascribe the community’s honour and pride to its women, more specifcally female bodies. Thus, the rape of women is typically deployed in communal violence to collectively dishonour the community. Allegedly, rape during the Gujarat violence was similarly employed to mark the entire community as “impure” and “polluted”. But what explains the excesses of cruelty, the surplus of savagery? According to Sarkar (2002), the fabricated story of the rape and murder of 80 Hindu women aboard the Sabarmati Express, later denied by the police, roused the entrenched communal common sense to a frenzy, unleashing a violent cycle of “action-reaction”. The excesses borne by Muslim women perhaps tell of the chilling need for revenge to surpass the perceived original ofence (Sarkar 2002). Overcoming the other perceived threat of prodigiously virile Muslim men luring away nubile Hindu women also appears to underlie the outcomes of the pogrom. According to Martha Nussbaum (2009), the Hindu right’s afair with masculinity is multilayered. As a humiliated and emasculated subject of repeated conquests by various Muslim invaders in the Middle Ages and the British in the later period, the Hindu right’s obsession with an imagined and unsullied national identity is largely infuenced by the European romantic notion of nationalism based on purity, blood, and soil. Although there is a deep hatred for the ruler, there is also an internalization of shame for being denied recognition as masculine or orderly subjects, inducing an intense desire to recreate themselves in the image of the aggressive masculine ruler. This combination of shame and aggression shapes much of the Hindu male’s impression of the Other community (Nussbaum 2009). Historically, the notion of Muslim masculinity, articulated in alliances between Muslim men and

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Hindu widows, has long been held responsible for the purported proliferation of Muslims by Hindu propagandists. The loss of a Hindu widow was a double blow for the religious zealots; not only did it reduce Hindu numbers, but her children would be added to the Muslim population pool. A collection of newspaper articles, titled “Humara Bhishan Haas” (Our Cataclysmic Decline),5 published in the 1920s, stated: Our sexually unsatisfed widows especially are prone to Muslim hands and by producing Muslim children they increase their numbers and spell disaster for the Hindus . . . Muslim goondas are especially seen outside the houses that have Hindu widows . . . You yourselves say, would you like our Aryan widows to read nikah with a Muslim? (Manan Dwivedi in Gupta 2006, 182) Several publications also urged Hindu men to take matters into their own hands. One that adopted the voice of a Hindu widow to awaken Hindu men is worth reproducing: “Jis din than jayegi man mein, kahi nnikal main jaoongi. Kisi yavan ka hath pakarkar, usko mainraaoongi. Paida karke bacche usse, uski Shakti bharaongi”. (Gupta 2004, 4303) (The day I decide in my mind, I will go out somewhere. Holding the hands of some Muslim, I will make him my own. Bearing his children, I will strengthen his numbers). (Gupta 2004, translation mine) To handle the crisis at hand, the solution proposed was widow remarriage. Hindu men were encouraged to marry Hindu widows and raise children as their religious duty. Ergo, the liberal demand for widow remarriage found advocacy in the need for “potential childbearing wombs” to reverse the declining Hindu numbers (Gupta 2004). The anxiety over the lure of Muslim masculinity and the uncontrollable desire of Hindu women continues to haunt the Hindu male psyche even today, notably sublimating into the spectre of Love Jihad. This curiously named campaign, straight out of the Hindu right myth machine, would have us believe that young Muslim men are waging war through love to capture young Hindu women. In addition, this was also claimed to be part of a global Islamic conspiracy to use non-Muslim women as sex slaves, prostitute them or seduce them in order to convert them. A great deal of “evidence” was marshalled to prove the case. For instance, the Hindu Janajagriti Samity of Karnataka claimed that 30,000 young women had been lured into this trap by the Love Romeos in the state. Inquiries

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conducted in Kerala and Karnataka, however, could not fnd any substantial evidence (Johnson 2017). What the Love Jihad campaign exposed, however, was the centrality of Hindu women in the Hindutva body politic. It exhibited, on one hand, the Hindutva brigade’s desire to socially control women’s sexuality using purported threats of physical, emotional, and religious harm, while, on the other, it exposed their age-old anxiety over Muslim virility and the Muslim population explosion. Charu Gupta, in an amusing account of Indian Hindu women’s fascination with the Pakistani Muslim matinee idol Fawad Khan in the same period, emphasized how women and their desires are posing a threat to the dream of the Hindu Rashtra, becoming the undoing of it (Rao 2011; Gupta 2014; Menon 2014). But returning to the Godhra genocide, one question still haunts: Why did the large-scale brutal murder of Muslim children occur, often in the presence of their parents? The answer, once again, probably lies within the domain of Saffron Demography – within the perceived threat of the Muslim population growth. The fear fuelled by fantasies of the potent Muslim men, the hyperfertile Muslim women, and the dying of the “Hindu race” identified in Muslim children a promise of future growth for the community, even beyond pogroms. Therefore, the specific and barbaric attack on Muslim women and children, as elicited by Sarkar, had multiple aims: First, to possess and dishonour them and their men, second to taste what is denied to them and what, according to their understanding, explains Muslim virility. Third, to physically destroy the vagina and the womb, and, thereby, to symbolically destroy the sources of pleasure, reproduction, and nurture for Muslim men, and for Muslim children. Then, by beatings, to punish the fertile female body. Then, by physically destroying the children, to signify an end to Muslim growth. Then, by cutting up the foetus and burning it, to achieve a symbolic destruction of future generations, of the very future of Muslims themselves. (Sarkar 2002, 2876) Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat in 2002, labelled the riot camps sheltering displaced Muslims as “baby producing factories” (Mukhopadhyay 2019), proving how pervasive the logic of Safron Demography was in the Godhra pogrom. Conclusion

The chapter ofers a historical account of the phenomena of Safron Demography in India that builds on the colonial census as a technology of power to create and propagate the myth of a Muslim population takeover. By any

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inspection, it would appear that the logic of Safron Demography is not only supremely fallacious but extremely pernicious, too, creating a majoritarian common sense with little substance. In today’s complex world, where misinformation is becoming an epidemic, these myths masquerading as truth fnd their fair share of takers. Exploiting such a demographic fear of Muslims taking over the country, irrespective of the absence of any statistical foundation, has become a core agenda of the right wing in India in their efort to justify social engineering processes towards a Hindu majoritarian state. Evoking fear and anxiety about the future in an insidious manner makes people complicit in its design, paving the path to future horrors such as those already being witnessed in India’s detention camps (Banerji 2019). As the protests against NRC-CAA demonstrated, there is also dissent against these discriminatory practices. However, the microphysics of power that permeate through apparently innocuous technologies like the census exercise, moulding the discourse justifying such ends, have remained largely absent from the ongoing discussions. That is where this chapter hopes to contribute. By tracing the journey of numerical governmentality and its instrumentalization of technologies of power, particularly the census, it wishes to shed light on the processes that underlie the horrors unfolding today. Notes 1 Curiously, Anders Breivik, the mass murderer from Norway who acted upon the conspirational fear of Europe turning into Eurabia, was a vocal supporter of Hindutva, the ideology underlying Hindu nationalism (Swami 2016). 2 U.N. Mukherjee, A Dying Race (2nd ed.). Calcutta 1910. 3 Babu Bhagwandass, Hinduon ka sangrakshan aur atmarakshan, [The Conservation and Self-Protection of the Hindus], Kashi. 4 Savarkar, V. D. (2021). Hindutva. Prabhat Prakashan; as quoted in Baber (2000). 5 Dwivedi, M. (1924). Humara bhishan haas [Our cataclysmic decline] (3rd ed.). Pratap; as quoted in Gupta 2006.

References Aaron, S. (2019, December 23). CAA+NRC is the Greatest Act of Social Poisoning by a Government in Independent India. The Wire. https://thewire.in/communalism/ caa-nrc-bjp-modi-shah Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Baber, Z. (2000). Religious Nationalism, Violence and the Hindutva Movement in India. Dialectical Anthropology, 25(1), 61–76. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/29790624 Banerji, R. (2019, September 11). From India to China, the World’s Muslims Are Being Put into Concentration Camps. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ india-bjp-narendra-modi-muslim-detention-camps-assam-bangladesh-a9100886.html Bhagat, R. B. (2001). Census and the Construction of Communalism in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 36(46/47), 4352–4356. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4411376

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Bhagat, R. B. (2006). Census and Caste Enumeration: British Legacy and Contemporary Practice in India. Genus, 62(2), 119–134. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29789312 Bhardwaj, A. (2015, November 1). Review Policy to Check Muslim, Christian Population: RSS Resolution. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/ india/india-news-india/review-policy-to-check-muslim-christian-population-rss/ Cohn, B. S. (1987). The Census, Social Structure and Objectifcation in South Asia. In An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (pp. 224–254). Oxford University Press. Daniyal, S. (2015, April 8). Five Charts that Puncture the Bogey of Muslim Population Growth. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/705283/fve-charts-that-puncturethe-bogey-of-muslim-population-growth%20Accessed%20on%2028.11.15 Datta, P. K. (1993). “Dying Hindus”: Production of Hindu Communal Common Sense in Early 20th Century Bengal. Economic and Political Weekly, 28(25), 1305–1319. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4399871 Desai, M. (2020). CAA–NRC–NPR and its Discontents. Economic and Political Weekly, 55(7), 25–30. https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/7/perspectives/caa–nrc– npr-and-its-discontents.html Ghosh, D. (2018, September 24). Amit Shah Termite Remark on Immigrants Unwanted, Says Bangladesh. NDTV. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/amitshah-termite-remark-on-immigrants-unwanted-says-bangladesh-1921088 Golwalkar, M. S. (1939). We or Our Nationhood Defined. Nagpur, India: Bharat Prakashan. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G7rGketH_H3_oxPwgaMjyogJZsYxsZh/view Guha, S. (2003). The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600–1990. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45(1), 148–167. https://www.jstor. org/stable/3879485 Gupta, C. (2004). Censuses, Communalism, Gender and Identity: A Historical Perspective. Economic and Political Weekly, 39(39), 4302–4304. https://www.jstor. org/stable/i400977 Gupta, C. (2006). Hindu Wombs, Muslim Progeny: The Numbers Game and Shifting Debates on Widow Remarriage in Uttar Pradesh, 1890s–1930s. Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, 167–198. www.academia. edu/2223302/Hindu_Wombs_Muslim_Progeny_The_Numbers_Game_and_Shifting_Debates_on_Widow_Remarriage_in_Uttar_Pradesh_1890s_1930s Gupta, C. (2014, November 3). Love for Fawad Khan vs Jihad Against Love. Kafla. https:// kafla.online/2014/11/03/love-for-fawad-khan-vs-jihad-against-love-charu-gupta/ International Institute for Population Sciences & Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. (2021). National Family Health Survey (NFHS-V), 2019–21: India. https:// dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/FR375/FR375.pdf Iyer, S. (2002). Religion and the Decision to Use Contraception in India. Journal for the Scientifc Study of Religion, 41(4), 711–722. https://doi.org/10.1111/14685906.00156 Jain, M. (2015, August 26). Here’s How the Regional Media Reported the Latest Religion Data from 2011 Census. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/751191/ heres-how-the-regional-media-reported-the-latest-religion-data-from-2011-census Jefery, R., & Jefery, P. (2005). Safron Demography, Common Wisdom, Aspirations and Uneven Governmentalities. Economic and Political Weekly, 40(5), 447–453. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4416136 Johnson, T. A. (2017, August 22). 8 Years before NIA, Karnataka CID Probed “Love Jihad”, Found No Specifc Instance. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/

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article/india/8-years-before-nia-karnataka-cid-probed-love-jihad-found-no-specifcinstance-4807667/ Jones, K. (1981). Religious Identity and the Indian Census. In N. G. Barrier (Ed.), The Census in British India: New Perspectives (pp. 73–101). Manohar. Kaviraj, S. (1991). The Imaginary Institution of India. Columbia University Press. Menon, N. (2014). The “New and Improved” Love Jihad Formula, Unethical Media and “Social Science” Votaries. Kafla. https://kafla.online/2014/10/26/the-newand-improved-love-jihad-formula-unethical-media-and-social-science-votaries/ Mukhopadhyay, N. (2019, April 08). PM Has Begun Sounding Like CM Modi of 2002. Deccan Herald. https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/comment/pm-hasbegun-sounding-like-cm-modi-of-2002-727583.html Nussbaum, M. (2009). The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Harvard University Press. Ofce of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner. (2015). India Religion Population. https://www.census2011.co.in/religion.php Pew Research Center. (2015). The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050. https://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/ religious-projections-2010-2050/ Pew Research Center. (2021). Population Growth and Religious Composition. Religious Composition of India. https://www.pewforum.org/2021/09/21/populationgrowth-and-religious-composition/ Press Trust of India. (2015, April 4). VHP Demands Uniform Law to “Rectify” Demographic “Imbalance”. The Times of India. https://timesofndia.indiatimes. com/india/vhp-demands-uniform-law-to-rectify-demographic-imbalance/articleshow/46806704.cms Quraishi, S. Y. (2021). The Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning and Politics in India. Harper Collins. Rao, M. (1994). An Imagined Reality: Malthusianism, Neo-Malthusianism and Population Myth. Economic and Political Weekly, 29(5), 40–52. https://www.jstor. org/stable/4400725 Rao, M. (2007). India’s Safron Demography: So Dangerous, Yet So Appealing. DiferenTakes, 48. https://sites.hampshire.edu/popdev/indias-safron-demographyso-dangerous-yet-so-appealing/ Rao, M. (2011). Love Jihad and Demographic Fears. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 18(3), 425–430. https://doi.org/10.1177/097152151101800307 Sachar, R. (2006). Sachar Committee Report. Ministry of Minority Afairs. Government of India. https://www.minorityafairs.gov.in/WriteReadData/RTF1984/ 7830578798.pdf Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Vintage Books. Sangh, R. S. (2015). Vision and Mission. https://www.rss.org/Encyc/2015/3/13/ Vision-and-Mission.html Sarkar, T. (2002). Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra. Economic and Political Weekly, 37(28), 2872–2876. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/4412352 Swami, P. (2016). Norwegian Mass Killer’s Manifesto Hails Hindutva. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national//article60501211.ece Tiwary, D. (2022, October 5). Population Imbalance can Divide Countries, Need Policy of Population Control: Mohan Bhagwat. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/ article/india/rss-mohan-bhagwat-population-control-policy-imbalance-8190789/

8 THE MAJORITY OPPRESSED? ON THE LEGITIMACY OF MAJORITY RIGHTS Tamar de Waal and Jan Willem Duyvendak

Introduction

Political parties and movements around the globe that warn against the dangerous dilution of current majorities and their cultural identities have been remarkably successful.1 Take, for example, supporters of Brexit in the UK, Jaïr Bolsonaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the U.S., the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party) in Switzerland, the Partij voor Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and strong majority-rights forces in Russia, Turkey, and India. Within this global political tendency, the main endangerment of the majority culture is claimed to be a coalition of current legal and political arrangements, mainstream media, academics, politicians, and activists standing up for diversity, strong minority protection, and the rights of migrants, including refugees. The proposals put forward by these voices, most often (but not solely) belonging to the radical right of the political spectrum, touch upon a wide range of topics: from banning the construction of mosques, to opposing genderneutral toilets, to closing the border for (Muslim) migrants and refugees, to combating “the war on Christmas”, to dismantling the European Union, and more. Nonetheless, the basis of virtually all their proposals can be traced back to one underlying point: the preference, anxieties, and demands of the (cultural) majority are ignored but should not be up for discussion (anymore). Simultaneously, a growing number of academic publications argue in favour of increased protection of majority identities or (cultural) “majority rights”, echoing the political discourses claiming that the interests of majorities have been neglected. Of course, not all these academic analyses are exactly the same or argue in favour of the same solutions. Nevertheless, DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-11

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there is a clear rise of commentators that claim that academic scholarship has been one-sidedly concerned with the positions, needs, and rights of minorities and, therefore, that our normative thinking has swung too far in one direction (e.g., Bouchard 2011; Kaufmann 2018; Koopmans 2018; Koopmans & Orgad 2020; Orgad & Koopmans 2022). It is argued that a new balance should be found and that academic attention should be given to the interests and sensitivities of majorities, for example, in relation to concerns about the (alleged) erosion of their cultures. Moreover, the underlying suggestion of these publications is that current times, characterized by the rise of the radical right and populism, require new normative thinking that takes the concerns of “native” populations seriously. As such, majority-rights theories commonly present themselves as cutting-edge and reasonable forms of liberalism. They claim to supplement and enhance our current theories and promise to better appease the revolting majorities around the world that want to protect their cultural ways of life and increasingly vote for (illiberal) radicalright populist parties. This chapter critically examines the legitimacy of this academic tendency and the main arguments that underlie it. Given that virtually all academic majority-rights voices to date take Western democracies as their case studies, this chapter also predominately focuses on Western countries and white majorities; however, in principle, the presented underlying normative analyses can also apply to nonwhite majorities and to other countries. We will demonstrate that it is mistaken that liberal-democratic theory and practices have ignored the importance of the majority (culture). In fact, liberal-democratic theory and practices strongly promote and privilege the majority culture, although in ways that do not violate core individual rights and are, as much as possible, accommodating to minorities. It is, therefore, relevant to raise the question of why some authors, nonetheless, claim that the rights of majorities are forgotten and threatened. We argue that this is caused by a specifc understanding of who embodies “the majority”. Most often, pro-majority theories rest on the idea that immigrants and their descendants dangerously dilute majorities, as they are (culturally) “not native”. These theories are, thus, rooted in racialized and essentialized ideas about who belongs to the majority. As a result, amongst other things, majority rights theorists “freeze” the majority culture claimed to be worth protecting in such ways that it jeopardizes equal citizenship. In addition, it hampers possibilities for social and political change, especially changes triggered or asked for by (immigrant) minority groups. To be clear, our contribution to this emerging majority rights debate does not entail that majorities and their cultures do not have (cultural) rights tout court. Instead, we aim to show that the interests of majorities and their cultural identities are well-secured in current liberal-democratic theory and practice and that, therefore, an additional lexicon of “majority rights” is not

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needed. Put sharper, the ambition of this chapter is to show that the emerging theories of majority rights are not a necessary correction of liberal theories of justice. Instead, the present-day calls for more majority rights would compromise liberal-democratic values. Majority Rights: What Are They About?

Given the wide range of political issues that the recent majority-rights thinkers are concerned about – such as national identity, immigration, secularism, gender discussions, and, in the context of the Netherlands, the fgure of Black Pete – the exact implications and merit of their theories may prima facie seem somewhat obscure. To demonstrate that the implications of these theories are profound and touch upon values of liberalism, it is important to map the main claims in this new feld of academic scholarship that we respond to. We will also make explicit what we think should be seen as side or separate debates. Gérard Bouchard’s (2011) contribution to the multiculturalisminterculturalism debate is a good frst example of the type of majoritarian thinking we discuss – in his case, in the context of Canada and Quebec. He writes: “While seeking an equitable interaction between continuity and diversity, interculturalism allows the recognition of certain elements of ad hoc (or contextual) precedence for majority culture” (451). He stresses that he does not want to formally or legally enshrine forms of second-class citizenship. He does explain, however, that interculturalism difers from multiculturalism in the sense that the majority culture, because it is the majority culture, has a principled precedence over minority cultures. This is indeed a viewpoint that multiculturalists would not endorse in this way. In addition, Eric Kaufmann critically writes on “asymmetrical multiculturalism” (see e.g., Kaufmann 2018, 516–521), a term he coins to describe forms of liberal politics that disregard protecting the majority identity while carefully protecting the identities of minorities. Within the asymmetrical multiculturalism he is especially concerned about, he contends that white majorities are required to identify with (unfeasible) cosmopolitan identities – and asked to transcend and even reject their ethnic identity – whereas ethnic minorities are (efectively) urged to embrace their ethnicity and heritage. For this reason, he advocates what he calls “multivocalism” – a political system in which white majorities can (also) express their ethnically distinct versions of the common national identity. Along similar lines, Ruud Koopmans and Liav Orgad (2020, 21) argue that “the cultural demands of majority groups” have been ignored and that “the equilibrium between majority and minority rights needs to be adjusted” with theories of majority rights. They paraphrase Kaufmann’s concerns of asymmetry, and their main solution is that “moral justifcations for cultural minority rights should also apply to majority groups” (3). In addition,

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articles on specifc discussions and political events echo these analyses. For instance, David Miller (2016, 437) wrote on the minaret ban in Switzerland that “the equal treatment in principle can be triumphed by considerations of national identity” if majorities want this to be the case, as long as this identity “remains open to democratic deliberation”. Indeed, Miller concludes that, for example, “precedence” can be given to “a particular religion” (454) in a political community for historical and majoritarian reasons. This stream of publications has received some response in the academic literature. For example, Avigail Eisenberg (2020) astutely observes and criticizes the increase of majority rights theories. Our analysis concurs with her conclusions that discourses of majority rights are “unlikely to ofer a helpful response to so-called anxieties of majority groups” that “majority interests are already protected in societies dedicated to protecting minority rights” and that they contribute to “encouraging the chauvinism of majority culture” (Eisenberg 2020, 326). Our analysis difers from hers in that she fags that majority-rights theories “carry risks” to transform into a license to restrict minority rights. We will show that this is not merely a (more practical) risk but a logical outcome of the type of normative reasonings that underpin these new majoritarian theories. Allan Patten has argued that a vocabulary of majority rights could be normatively defended in very limited and often temporal circumstances (e.g., Patten 2020). Although interesting, we leave this angle aside because the central aim of the novel majority-rights theorists is not to provide legitimacy to majority rights “in very specifc social circumstances and normative considerations” which “face very signifcant limits” (539). Rather, they argue that majority rights should structurally supplement our standard liberal theories and practices. For this reason, we will also not deal with the idea that forms of cultural majority rights might exist in the context of globalization – say, in response to the dominance of Hollywood over local cultural arts or the rise of English master’s programs at European universities (e.g., Koopmans & Orgad 2020, 9). Again, the central aim of majority-rights thinkers is not to prove that such – in this case, more “externally orientated” – majority rights exist. They are primarily concerned with the cultural power of minorities visà-vis the majority on the domestic level. Last, we also do not respond to “majority rights” in the context of border control. For instance, Orgad (2009, 719) suggests that asking immigrants to accept “some structural liberal-democratic principles as a prerequisite for state admission” (see also Orgad 2015) can be seen as invoking “majority rights”. Yet within the ethics of migration literature, arguments that countries may selectively close their borders to secure, for example, required degrees of liberal attitudes in society or forms of social cohesion are not uncommon (although not labelled as “majority rights”) (e.g., Miller 1995, 24–29). Even Will Kymlicka (2001, 166), for example, with his

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focus on liberal minority rights, argues that political communities cannot be expected to admit immigration in such ways that would disrupt certain foundational structures of society (e.g., political, economic, or cultural). That said, in relation to all these debates we leave aside, we do prima facie also doubt whether introducing a lexicon of “majority rights” would have explanatory power over existing normative or legal vocabularies. Therefore, we believe the most relevant question about this new generation of majorityrights thinkers is: what is it exactly that these authors are arguing for? Minority Rights vs. the Majority

We will, thus, engage with the central claim of majority-rights theories: that majority rights are overlooked by established liberal theorists – most prominently, multiculturalists advocating minority rights – and should structurally supplement our liberal theories on domestic justice. To understand why we think that this claim is incorrect, we must frst expound on what multiculturalism is within the academic scholarship on liberal justice. First, it should be made clear that individual constitutional core rights should not be seen as minority rights that accommodate cultural diversity or support just minority-majority relations. Instead, these rights are individual core rights that all citizens possess equally. Of course, core rights do limit the power of (potentially tyrannical) majorities. However, they also limit, for instance, how minorities treat members internally and how minorities treat other minorities. This is the case because they limit the power of all citizens towards each other – in addition to, perhaps most importantly, limiting the power of the state towards its citizens. On that account, to frame the debate in such terms that individual core rights seem to particularly disadvantage the cultural majority (e.g., Koopmans & Orgad 2020, 7–8; Miller 2016), is not necessarily problematic. However, it is also only one step away from the illiberal claim that core rights, in certain instances, should yield to appease cultural majorities. Therefore, it should be crystal clear that regarding the protection of individual core rights, the most relevant question is not, and can never be, how majorities (or minorities) “culturally” tend to look upon them. If we then turn to academic debates on minority rights – rights that indeed apply to certain groups according to multiculturalists – we see that these debates pertain to how liberal democracies with diverse citizenries should undertake nation-building practices, inculcate citizenship, and promote collective belonging. Naturally, similarly to majority-rights theorists, not all minority-rights theorists argue the same here (e.g., Kymlicka 1995; Modood 2007). On a fundamental level, however, multiculturalists who advocate for the protection of minorities and minority rights agree that the norms, attitudes, and skills of democratic citizenship are not innate but must be learned, socialized, and practised. Thus, liberal democracies have legitimate interests

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to engage in practices of nation-building and promote forms of shared citizenship by consolidating common national language(s), national (historical) narratives, national symbols, national education curricula, national media, common institutions, and so on. The idea is then that if citizens are living together in an “ethical community” (e.g., Miller 1995, 23) resulting from these practices, they are more likely to fulfl their obligations of justice towards each other and will be better able to participate as equals in democratic deliberations and societal life in a shared historical and intergenerational political community (see also Kymlicka 2002, 265). However, multiculturalists reject that within practices of nation-building and citizenship, the promoted nationhood should solely exist of (or unreasonably privilege) the identity, language, and culture of the majority. Instead, it should be communicated that the state does not belong to the dominant group but to all citizens equally – and that, therefore, all citizens should have equal access to state institutions and to political and social life. What this exactly entails in terms of minority rights and minority accommodation signifcantly varies between countries because the histories (of injustice), presence, and cultural characteristics of minorities (and majorities) difer. For example, some countries must accommodate sizable groups that are concentrated on a (more or less) historic territory that have retained their language and that historically have governed themselves. Such cases – say, the First Nations in Canada and several national minority groups in Europe – can require replacing unilingual states with multilingual states or forms of (quasi-)federal territorial autonomy. Note, however, that the recent majority-rights theories that we focus on pay surprisingly little attention to the potential limits or risks of protection for these types of minorities (i.e., indigenous people and national minorities), considering that the forms of cultural, linguistic, and political rights and protection granted to them by multiculturalists can be extensive and strong. Instead, they focus on minority protection for immigrant groups. Nevertheless, given that immigrants inherently have no historic territory in their new country, have no history of self-government, and are often numerically small and dispersed, multiculturalists conclude that upholding equal citizenship in relation to them should mostly involve fghting stigmas, racism, discrimination, and other barriers that prevent them from being fully accepted and participating as equal citizens (e.g., Modood & De Waal 2021). Under multiculturalism, immigrants are asked to learn the national language and “integrate” into the broader society in a liberal fashion. Within multiculturalism, minority accommodation regarding immigrant groups requires ongoing and systematic attempts to examine public institutions and policies to see if they contain (hidden) biases that disadvantage members of immigrant groups and their descendants. Relevant public institutions are, for instance, courts, schools, universities, media, and hospitals

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(Kymlicka 2003, 152). Moreover, multiculturalists stress that all citizens should be acknowledged in the state-promoted national identity. As a result, amongst other things, histories of immigration should be included in “the national story” that is part of school curricula. As such, multiculturalism involves a constant remaking of national citizenship and keeping the national identity “open” so that all citizens can see themselves in the national identity and achieve a sense of belonging together (Modood 2014). Mistaken Claims

This brief overview of the tenets of multiculturalism, we believe, makes it intelligible that several foundational claims of the new majority rights theories are mistaken. The following are the most important ones: 1) Multiculturalism has forgotten the needs of majorities to maintain and protect their culture; 2) Multiculturalism assumes that majorities can take care of themselves for empirical (numerical) reasons; 3) Because minority rights exist, majority rights must as well. The frst claim we want to discuss is that multicultural theories of justice only focus on the rights of minorities while neglecting the interests of cultural majorities. For example, Koopmans and Orgad refer to Kaufmann’s asymmetrical multiculturalism argument and suggest that, according to multiculturalists, majority cultures “should be neutral, or be universal, while minority cultures are allowed to preserve their religious particularity” and that this “creates asymmetric political and normative realities” (Kaufmann 2018, 516–521; Koopmans & Orgad 2020, 18; see also Koopmans & Orgad 2020). The culture of the majority would, therefore, be vulnerable, powerless, and stuck between “universalism” and “minority rights” (see also Koopmans 2018). However, multiculturalists observe that no state can be culturally neutral. In fact, this is their theoretical starting point rooted in acknowledging that liberal countries (also) promote national identities, historical narratives, ofcial languages, et cetera. Nevertheless, as said, the concern of multiculturalists is that these nation-building projects do not sufciently accommodate (diferent types of) minorities and protect equal citizenship. The claim that theorists who advocate and protect minority rights also ask the majority to remain culturally neutral and universal thus makes a straw man of multiculturalism. Rather, remarks such as that “it is perfectly legitimate” for majorities to have an interest in “perpetuating and maintaining their culture” (Bouchard 2011, 438) are, in principle, not at odds with multiculturalism at all. For multiculturalists, again, the normative crux of the matter is as follows: given that

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the state’s nation-building practices – which in principle legitimately uphold an “ethical community” needed for a functional liberal democracy – cannot be culturally neutral, they should be as fair as possible in terms of accommodating just majority-minority relations and cultural diferences. It is true that within these practices of nation-building, majorities should be extra vigilant not to overpower minorities given their numerical and factual position of advantage. However, the need to protect both majority and minority cultures is not only an empirical matter for multiculturalists but also, and even mainly, a normative one. This brings us to the second incorrect claim of majority-rights theories – that multiculturalism allegedly assumes that, for numerical reasons, the majority “can take care of itself”. This is mistaken because, within multiculturalism, the culture of the majority – its language(s), cultural reference points, symbols, history, et cetera – is constantly and actively educated, cultivated, and promoted by the state within its nation-building practices (e.g., in schools, on national TV, and during memorial days). Moreover, as we explained, the majority has a particularly strong position of cultural hegemony in the context of post-migration minority protection – about which majority rights proponents seem most strongly worried. According to multiculturalists, in response to immigration, states should remain unitary: no forms of territorial or political power sharing between dominant groups and immigrant groups are needed. There is also no need for adjustment of the ofcial languages. Of course, given its liberal principles, multiculturalism does emphasize that immigrants should not be required to fully assimilate into the cultural majority to be regarded as equal citizens. Citizens can retain, within the boundaries of liberal democracy, their own cultural characteristics, languages, and outlooks – but the main idea is that they should “integrate” into broader society. This leads us to the third misconception of majority theories that we want to highlight – the argument that because minority rights exist, majority rights must as well. Indeed, the normative necessity of minority rights is used as a direct theoretical stepping stone to prove that majority rights should exist: if minorities have a right to their culture, then surely majorities have this too. Our analysis, however, shows that this is a wrong take. In essence, the fallacy is: you cannot receive cultural, linguistic, or political compensation for public arrangements that are installed as safeguards to counterbalance your position of cultural, linguistic, and political predominance. The same logical error underlies the sometimes-heard line of argument that “straight prides” should be organized because “gay prides” exist. The mobilizations of gay prides around the globe are reactive: they have been a response to the permanent hegemony of heterosexuality (in practically all layers of politics, law, and society). Thus, it is logically impossible to argue that straight prides must be organized because gay prides exist.

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Minority rights and protection are reactive in a similar fashion: they exist in response to processes of nation-building and citizenship promotion by liberal states that use the majority culture (e.g., language, history, national and historical reference points) as the main “vehicle”. Considering this context, the claim that “since certain minority rights exist, the same rights must exist for majorities as well” is puzzling. In addition, it is also bound to lead to illiberal outcomes. It justifes taking measures against reactive measures that aim to somewhat neutralize the robust hegemony of the majority culture. As such, it obscures the necessity of protecting the equal citizenship of minorities and enabling their equal access to mainstream society and its common institutions as much as possible. Why Would Majority-Rights Thinkers Claim That Majority Rights Are Threatened by Minorities?

We hope, so far, to have demonstrated that the cultural rights and interests of majorities are not forgotten but, in fact, well-protected in normative liberaldemocratic theory. In addition to this conceptual discussion, it is important to also note that empirically seen, majority cultures are privileged and powerful, even if states accommodate minorities in ways hoped for by multiculturalists. To be sure, we do not argue that it is necessarily undesirable that newcomers or citizens with immigrant backgrounds question or change existing hegemonic norms, values, and practices – culturally or otherwise – and that they should (fully) assimilate. Instead, our focus here is to show that those who warn about majorities being dangerously culturally replaced or diluted by immigrants are blind to the empirical evidence to the contrary. Eisenberg (2020) illustrates well that accommodating diversity, in practice, often strengthens the dominance of the majoritarian group. She shows that assessing what “reasonable accommodation” of minorities vis-à-vis the majority entails often has in-built biases towards the majority (Eisenberg 2020, 317–318). Moreover, the majority has what Tariq Modood calls a “sociological privilege”, which entails that the majority has all sorts of cultural capital and cultural power to reproduce the majority culture (e.g., in art, media, school, politics, and public life) more easily than minorities ever can (Modood 2014, 309). Furthermore, Alba and Duyvendak (2019) demonstrate that the vast majority of immigrants eventually “integrate” into a broader shared liberaldemocratic mainstream of the country of arrival – and not the other way around, where they would fundamentally change the receiving society – broadly in the way multiculturalists envision. This integration process, however, may take time and is rarely linear. Nevertheless, majority-rights thinkers claim that majorities are currently disappearing, whereas the numbers show that the mainstream national culture is, in fact, still dominant, even in highly diverse cities. They, for example, mention

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immigration numbers (e.g., see later, where we discuss Koopmans and Orgad), highlighting that in certain cities, no group holds the majority status in numbers (anymore). However, to have a better understanding of the integration processes of immigrant minorities in multicultural societies, Alba and Duyvendak (2019) show that we must take the dimension of social power into account. This dimension overlaps with nation-building practices, as discussed earlier in this chapter, and is also constantly reinforced in many other institutions (including local schools, hospitals, and civil society). Its power becomes visible in the cultural adjustments, such as fuently learning national languages or identifying with national reference points, made by members of immigrant-origin minorities, particularly among those who aspire to social mobility. Importantly, this power axis is not strictly dependent on the demographic distribution of ethnic groups, given that “natives” remain very powerful even when they are a numerical minority. Citing percentages of citizens with immigration backgrounds in cities, for this reason, is not a relevant statistic. The crux is whether a broader liberal-democratic mainstream – to which citizens with all types of backgrounds can belong and integrate – continues to exist and emerge. It is questionable, however, whether majority-rights thinkers are genuinely worried about declining majorities owing to confusion about what the relevant empirics are. The justifcation for their theories seems fuelled by worries about the declining “rights” of a very specifc majority – that is, the current majorities in Western countries. Indeed, in majority-rights theories, the relevent “majority” – and who belongs to it – is too often implicitly or explicitly essentialized and racialized. Kaufmann is the most outspoken representative of this idea, and his work comes dangerously close to the “replacement theories” of the radical right (e.g., Ford 2020; Holmwood 2020). Instead of acknowledging the processes of mainstreaming among migrants and the rise of mingling and intermarriage (Alba & Reitz 2021), he explicitly aims to keep the majority “white”. Indeed, in his book White Shift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, he argues that majorities in the West have the right to claim their cultures in terms of protection of white culture against dilution. Kaufmann (2018) justifes this on the basis that any attempt to create a shared culture that transcends ethnicity has failed. Apart from this highly questionable claim, his work sufers from the logical fallacy with illiberal outcomes expounded previously: instead of thinking through about why Black and other nonwhite citizens have to mobilize and struggle for equality based on their ethnic identity (in reaction to the oppression they experience owing to their ethnicity and in response to the hegemony of whiteness), his solution is that white citizens should also mobilize based on their – white – identity, as if that identity is not hegemonic. If we then turn to Koopmans and Orgad (2020), we see that they explicitly claim to not focus on keeping the majority white, but they do emphasize the need for majority rights because the percentage of “people with migrant

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backgrounds” (defned as being born abroad or having at least one parent born abroad) is “between 20 and 25% of the population in several European States” (Koopmans & Orgad 2020, 8). Insofar as these groups do not “adopt the political and cultural values that are the core of the majority self-understanding of society”, they write, “the majority may end up feeling culturally ‘strangers in their own land’” (8–9). Although Koopmans and Orgad claim that “blood and place of birth are irrelevant” in determining who belongs to the majority because “what counts is identifcation” (2022, 17), they, in fact, do introduce a distinction between those who are perceived as natives to the country and others who remain “external” to the country and are an enduring threat to the native population. Therefore, if we closely read their argument, the place of birth turns out to be relevant. Moreover, based on this distinction, Koopmans and Orgad argue that there should be a “legal right” for the majority “from changes imposed against its will, that is, a right to avoid certain unwanted changes by external forces” because when it comes to cultural change, “it is for members of the majority to generally decide the content of their cultural essentials, and the process/pace of the change” (19, emphases added). There is some ambiguity here because, in a democracy, majorities can surely decide upon a lot of things, including cultural practices, but it seems that they strongly confate “the majority” with “natives”. Therefore, as we see it, their reasoning has two consequences. First, the distinction they make jeopardizes equal citizenship (Kešić & Duyvendak 2019; Duyvendark & Kešić 2022). Why would “foreign” citizens “with a migrant background” not have an equal but conditional voice in political matters, including those regarding cultural norms of “the majority” – defned as citizens without immigrant backgrounds – and their perspective on the national identity (De Waal 2021, 104–110)? Why do they form an “external force”? This boils down to immigrant citizens having less equal standing to comment on political issues, especially if these involve protesting against certain national traditions or parts of the national identity.2 From the perspective of equal citizenship, there is no reason to say that (certain) citizens must wait to hear what a fxed conception of “the majority” thinks of the cultural changes they propose. Second, Koopmans and Orgad (2020) have no conception of changes within mainstream values and cultures – except that they are threatened in their existence by “outsiders”. Nevertheless, how do social and political changes happen within their allegedly homogeneous majority? Does this reasoning imply that activists for gay rights and feminism in the past should have frst consulted the “majority”? Moreover, attitudes of the majority are not frozen like this: political and social changes happen, and new majorities emerge, often gradually but also all the time, for various reasons, and at times in response to minority activism. Their essentialized idea about who belongs to the majority hence freezes the majority culture in such a way that

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it stigmatizes and silences (immigrant) citizens who use their democratic voice on political issues, especially if they comment on, protest against, or propose improvements to parts of the national identity and majority culture. Conclusion

In sum, we see little reason to rejoice at the rise of theories of majority rights in academic scholarship. These theories rest on erroneous depictions of multiculturalism; deny empirics on the integration processes of immigrants in liberal democracies; rest upon nativist or even racist normative premises; advocate practices of unequal citizenship; and aim to hamper social, cultural, and political change triggered by immigrant minorities. We believe that the suggestion that these majority-rights theories are normatively required or can provide an answer to the global shift toward illiberal democracy is mistaken. Even stronger, based on our analyses, we believe that majority-rights theories should be careful not to provide unjustifed legitimacy to the troublesome worldwide rise of replacement conspiracy theories often premised on nativism, in which cultural majorities consider themselves entitled to inherently deserving special treatment in comparison with minorities, particularly in matters of culture, gender, and religion. The current times assuredly ask for increased attention and vigilance regarding the protection of liberal democracy. However, if these majoritarian ideas take further root, it would be a step in the wrong direction. Notes 1 The authors of this chapter have also published an article that builds on the fndings and insights discussed in this chapter (De Waal & Duyendak 2022). 2 Moreover, at times, it appears that this unequal civic standing also applies to citizens who struggle for gender or sexual rights, given that Koopmans mentions this as a threat to the majority culture as well, if majorities think diferently on these political issues (Duyvendak & De Waal 2019). Koopmans mentions “gender-neutral toilets” as a threat to the majority culture in certain Western liberal states during the conference Majority and Minority Rights, 25–27 April, 2019.

References Alba, R., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2019). What About the Mainstream? Assimilation in Super-diverse Times. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(1), 105–124. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/01419870.2017.1406127 Alba, R., & Reitz, J. G. (2021). The Signifcance of Mixed Family Backgrounds for Mainstream Integration in Canada. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47(4), 916–933. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1654162 Bouchard, G. (2011). What is Interculturalism? McGill Law Journal, 56(2), 435–468. De Waal, T. (2021). Integration Requirements for Immigrants in Europe: A LegalPhilosophical Inquiry. Bloomsbury Academic.

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De Waal, T., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2022). The Majority Oppressed? On Asymmetrical Multiculturalism and Majority Rights. Comparative Migration Studies, 10(42). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-022-00319-8 Duyvendak, J. W., & De Waal, T. (2019). Waarom we onze democratie moeten beschermen tegen de dictatuur van de meerderheid. De Groene Amsterdammer. https:// www.groene.nl/artikel/niet-echt-nederlands-is-ook-nederlands. Duyvendak, J. W., & Kešić, J. (2022). The Return of the Native: Can Liberalism Safeguard us Against Nativism? Oxford University Press. Eisenberg, A. (2020). The Rights of National Majorities: Toxic Discourse or Democratic Catharsis? Ethnicities, 20(2), 312–330. https://doi.org/10.1177/146 8796819866488 Ford, R. (2020). Raising the White Flag. Ethnicities, 20(1), 228–233. https://doi. org/10.1177/1468796819839071 Holmwood, J. (2020). Claiming Whiteness. Ethnicities, 20(1), 234–239. https://doi. org/10.1177/1468796819838710 Kaufmann, E. (2018). White Shift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities. Penguin UK. Kešić, J., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2019). The Nation Under Threat: Secularist, Racial and Populist Nativism in the Netherlands. Patterns of Prejudice, 53(5), 441–463. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1656886 Koopmans, R. (2018). Cultural Rights of Native Majorities Between Universalism and Minority Rights (WZB Discussion Paper No. SP VI 2018-106). https://www. econstor.eu/handle/10419/194003. Koopmans, R., & Orgad, L. (2020). Majority-Minority Constellations: Towards a Group-Diferentiated Approach (WZB Discussion Paper, SP VI 2020–104). https:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3741507 Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Clarendon Press. Kymlicka, W. (2001). Territorial Boundaries: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective. In Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (pp. 249–275). Princeton University Press. Kymlicka, W. (2002). Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, W. (2003). Multicultural States and Intercultural Citizens. Theory and Research in Education, 1(2), 147–169. Miller, D. (1995). On Nationality. Clarendon Press. Miller, D. (2016). Majorities and Minarets: Religious Freedom and Public Space. British Journal of Political Science, 46(2), 437–456. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0007123414000131 Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. Polity Press. Modood, T. (2014). Multiculturalism, Interculturalisms and the Majority. Journal of Moral Education, 43(3), 302–315. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2014.920308 Modood, T., & De Waal, T. (2021). Multiculturalism Today: Diference, Equality and Interculturalism. In F. Levrau & N. Clycq (Eds.), Equality: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 135–164). Springer International Publishing. Orgad, L. (2009). “Cultural Defence” of Nations: Cultural Citizenship in France, Germany and the Netherlands. European Law Journal, 15(6), 719–737. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2009.00487.x

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Orgad, L. (2015). The Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights. Oxford University Press. Orgad, L., & Koopmans, R. (2022). Majorities, Minorities, and the Future of Nationhood. Cambridge University Press. Patten, A. (2020). Populist Multiculturalism: Are There Majority Cultural Rights? Philosophy & Social Criticism, 46(5), 539–552. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453720903486

9 THE AFFORDANCES OF REPLACEMENT NARRATIVES How the White Genocide and Great Replacement Theories Converge in Poorly Moderated Online Milieus Emillie de Keulenaar and Marc Tuters

Introduction

In the last few years, journalists and academics have decried the role of social media platforms such as YouTube as “radicalization machines” whose algorithms tend to funnel users towards more extreme political content (Tufekci 2018; Lewis 2018). Recent quantitative research, however, has questioned this prevailing hypothesis, arguing that the problem of political radicalization online is not caused by the supply of media “radicalizing an otherwise moderate audience” but rather, and more disturbingly, that it is also a question of audience demand, previously constrained by the more limited ideological scope of legacy media (Munger & Phillips 2020, 22). Similarly, the political scientists Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell argue that the authoritarian turn in Europe and around the Western hemisphere should not be understood as the “‘last howl of rage’ from old white men soon to be replaced by tolerant Millennials”, but rather a symptom of a “new era of political fragmentation, volatility, and disruption” (Eatwell & Goodwin 2018, epub). Both examples touch upon a larger issue in the composition of the European and American public spheres, where laxer speech moderation from social media platforms has facilitated the return of once marginal extremist rhetoric in the wider political mainstream. In this chapter, we take a media studies approach to answering the question of how reactionary political opinion appears to emerge from poorly moderated milieus, namely the anonymous message board 4chan and the YouTube comment section. As media studies scholars, our most fundamental axiom is McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1994). McLuhan advocated for an ecological type of understanding of DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-12

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the systemic dynamics that each new technology creates for itself. In claiming that “the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance”, McLuhan may be understood as merely pointing to the profound (and often largely unnoticed) epistemological effects of new media environments (McLuhan 1994, 40). Whereas McLuhan’s metaphor of the “global village” was much celebrated by the (once) techno-utopians of Silicon Valley, what comes to the fore in our analysis is the dark side of this metaphor: the global village as a parochial and illiberal environment, which retrieves atavistic political dynamics (wrongly) considered by many to have been relegated to the dustbins of history. We, thus, offer this research in an effort to render visible the misunderstood effects of new media on much broader sociopolitical dynamics, specifically the growth and spread of racial conspiracy theories online. Following this observation, our argument is that extreme ideologies, even if they are theoretically distinct, tend to not only subsist but also converge in poorly moderated milieus of social media platforms. These milieus may be entire platforms, such as 4chan, VK, BitChute, Rumble, Telegram, and other emerging “alt-tech” (Donovan et al. 2018) but also specific sections of otherwise moderated platforms, such as the YouTube comment section (R. Lewis 2018). As such, our empirical analysis looks at the role of relatively unmoderated online discussion forums in fostering extreme antagonism online and how narratives of replacement that are ideologically distinct – namely, the French “great replacement” and North American “white genocide” variants – begin to converge by virtue of circulating in the same ill-moderated milieus. Building on past research on the role of the technical and social affordances of the anonymous messaging board 4chan (Tuters & Hagen 2019) and the YouTube comment section (Alshamrani et al. 2020) in giving rise to racist vernacular slang, this chapter makes use of a heuristic that posits 4chan and the YouTube comment section as sites of convergence for extremist ideas, which can then be disseminated and normalised in more mainstream spheres. Mainstreaming Replacement Narratives

Since World War II, French and European far-right discourse has sought to distance itself from the racial language of Nazi and American white supremacism by embracing a strategy of “differential racism” (Balibar & Wallerstein 1991, 22). In the past decade, and with greater momentum since the European refugee crisis, these nuances are arguably becoming lost, as American “alt-right” nativism, particularly the belief that “whites” are victims of a demographic replacement, has made some inroads into the French and European political mainstream. Renaud Camus encapsulated these fears in the concept of the “great replacement”, with which he argues that mass

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migration, mainstream media, and national education in France are inflicting a process of “deculturation” through systematic “oblivion” of French culture (Camus 2010). The concept of the great replacement has perhaps gained more mainstream popularity with Jean Raspail’s 1973 Le Camp des saints, which became a top-five bestseller in France in 2011 (Dupuis 2011). The book echoes Camus’ concept, telling the fictional story of how millions of Indian migrants “slithered” into France (Raspail 1975, 15) to demand First World standards of living while showing no interest in integrating with local culture. The book was later cited by Steve Bannon as an analogy of the European refugee crisis, which he described as “almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe” (Bannon & Sessions 2016, 14:20–14:52). In 2022, the presidential campaign of Éric Zemmour in France demonstrated the inherent speciousness of “differentialist” rhetoric when he was heard approving of Ukrainian refugees for being “white” and “Christian” in contrast to “Arab” and “Muslim” (Valeurs Actuelles 2022), despite seeking to distance himself from racialist terminology (Zemmour 2021). Though originally from the United States, the concept of “white genocide” is frequently compared with that of the great replacement (Davey & Ebner 2019). Described by Wendling as “a master plan dedicated to the total destruction of the white race . . . driven by forces engaged in an active conspiracy specifically targeting the white race” (Wendling 2018, epub), the term “white genocide” was originally coined in 2006 by Bob Whitaker (Hawley 2017). Whitaker is a U.S. radical right figure also known for formulating the slogan “anti-racist is a code word for anti-white”, which encapsulates the alt-right’s conjoining of anti-political correctness with white nationalism (Greene 2019). As such, the term “white genocide” can be seen as bearing a family resemblance with Camus’ great replacement theory, though it shifts the focus from “European culture” to “whiteness”. This narrative can arguably be found in more or less explicit forms in various parts of the U.S. media environment, with mainstream news media Fox News frequently expressing preoccupations with declining levels of “white” birth rates in the U.S. census (Mikelionis 2018), in comparison to radical spaces across social media platforms and image boards speaking more explicitly of “white genocide”. It seems likely that making a distinction between the great replacement and white genocide narratives is redundant, as the concept of European civilization strongly equates – albeit implicitly – that of “whiteness”. Balibar and Wallerstein do, indeed, make this argument when explaining that the concept of race bears the same meaning as that of “civilization”, because they both imply that individuals are doted of an insoluble cultural quality, or “essence” (Balibar & Wallerstein 1991, 22). It is, nevertheless, important to note that mainstream nationalist discourse in France, particularly that of the Rassemblement National (hitherto Front National), has for decades

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sought to distance itself from the concept of race as a primary marker of civic, national, and other identities, in an attempt to challenge accusations of racism (Shields 2013, 191). This move does not (just) imply a strategy of obfuscation but the development of an intellectual tradition that partly results from such strategies and distinguishes itself from that of its North American counterparts, which explicitly retain biological race as a primary unit of social identity. The possibility that these two concepts are conflated in online popular discourse is evidence of a problematic development in French right-wing public discourse (arguably also in some elements of the French left), in which the concept of biological race is normalized enough to return to the public sphere, against the grain of a long-standing rejection of this concept as a form of antiracism. The Affordances and Political Culture of 4chan and the YouTube Comment Section

How and to what extent has the racialist framing of migration by the North American “alt-right” come to resonate with the ideas of “cultural” or “civilizational” replacement from the French far right in poorly moderated online milieus? To explore this question, we begin discussing how the design of 4chan/pol/ and the YouTube comment section afford the expression of extreme ideas, which would otherwise be moderated on YouTube videos as hateful language or “abusive behaviour” (YouTube 2019, 2020). Methodologically, we examine how great replacement and white genocide theories have spread across 4chan and the YouTube comment section and then use a host of natural language processing techniques to assess the extent to which they converge ideologically. Speech Affordances in 4chan and the YouTube Comment Section

Since roughly 2018, a host of social media platforms have taken more resolute measures to hamper the circulation of various kinds of speech that actively “[push] the boundaries of acceptable norms of public culture” (Pohjonen & Udupa 2017, 1174), as with, for example, active content moderation measures against hate speech (YouTube 2019) or “abusive behaviour” (Twitter 2022). One of the most frequently reported by-products of platform moderation is the distribution of content across platforms with varying levels of tolerance for objectionable speech. Through their governance policies and content moderation features, every platform may be understood as effectively affording and licensing certain forms of speech, which, in turn, provide more or less favourable conditions for the growth of different political cultures. Hateful language tied to pseudo-scientific racist “debates”, as well as conspiratorial narratives linked to COVID-19 or the U.S. elections of 2020, has

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been reported to migrate to platforms that can afford them, such as free speech–absolutist alternatives like 4chan, Telegram (Rogers 2020), or specific areas of otherwise actively moderated platforms, such as the YouTube comment section. Indebted to Gibson (J. J. Gibson 2014), the term “affordances” is broadly understood in science and technology studies and social media and platform studies as “what material artefacts such as media technologies allow people to do” (Bucher & Helmond 2017, 3). In our case study, this broad definition can refer to a plethora of platform features that regulate users’ speech, which we name “speech affordances”. These affordances can be “abstract highlevel” content moderation policies that “enable or constrain . . . communicative habits” (Bucher & Helmond 2017, 12), by, for example, forbidding the usage of specific expressions, words, or ideas. There are also featureoriented “low-level” affordances (ibid), such as reinforcement mechanisms (demotion, deplatforming, reporting, flagging), and more general “platform vernaculars”, such as the implicit rules of anonymity and free speech absolutism that govern 4chan/pol/. On YouTube, the speech affordances of the comment section are distinct from those of videos. The ways in which YouTube videos are found and recommended on YouTube have, for the past five years, been the target of public criticism for allegedly “radicalizing” its users through personalization features (P. Lewis 2018; Munn 2020) as well as for including a sizable community of far-right or alt-right content (R. Lewis 2018). In response, YouTube has ceased to rely solely on users to report or “flag” content, enacting instead a series of new measures to remove hate speech, “misleading statements”, and other types of objectionable information (YouTube 2019). These measures are enacted through its content moderation policies, which have, since 2019, been repeatedly updated to capture new kinds of hate speech, such as the more conspicuous discriminatory vernaculars of biological or “scientific” racist beliefs (de Keulenaar et al. 2021b). It is under the enactment of its hate speech or “abusive behaviour” policies that YouTube removed thousands of channels and videos tied to far-right extremism in June of 2019 (Waterson 2019) and introduced more sophisticated techniques to downrank or “demote” objectionable videos in search and recommendation results (de Keulenaar et al. 2021a). Despite these changes, the YouTube comment section still bears a reputation for toxicity. As research tends to highlight the generally “uncivil” behaviour in this section of the platform (Alshamrani et al. 2020; Goode et al. 2011), the platform has tested various techniques to address this problem (Alexander 2018). In 2015, it launched a “ranking system” akin to Reddit’s, where comments can be up or downvoted by users or be automatically ranked on top of a comment list if it is posted by someone the video uploader follows (Alexander 2018). With modest results, it tried in 2016 to give more

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moderation affordances to video uploaders, who were granted the ability to appoint specific moderators, blacklist undesirable slurs, or automatically filter inappropriate content with the assistance of hate speech–detection algorithms (Shao et al. 2018, 279). Then, in 2017, creators were allowed to altogether turn off their comment sections in specific videos (Alexander 2018). The problem of toxicity has, however, persisted, partly because the comment section relies, for the most part, on users to report inappropriate language, based on the assumption that (human) moderation is best equipped to judge what is and is not permissible in context (Munn 2020, 2). Previous research has described how YouTube did not prevent comments from expressing conspiratorial narratives linked to COVID-19 despite its “deplatforming” of numerous related videos (de Keulenaar et al. 2021a). The same could be hypothesized for conspiracies linked to demographic replacement, which, due to their xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist, and antisemitic components, could arguably be classified by YouTube’s hate speech policy as bordering on “conspiracy theories saying individuals or groups are evil, corrupt, or malicious” (YouTube 2020). While a considerable number of channels spreading such conspiracies have been terminated since 2019 (de Keulenaar et al. 2021a), comments claiming the veracity of replacement conspiracies in otherwise “authoritative” content, such as a Deutsche Welle feature on migration in Europe, were, as of February 2022, still online (DW News 2019). 4chan, on the other hand, is regimented by a largely vernacular speech moderation enacted under a “free speech absolutist” philosophy of public debate (Phillips 2015). Since 2003, the imageboard has been governed by a relatively lax moderation policy, as founder Christopher Poole chose to delegate 4chan’s moderation practices to its own community. 4chan’s highlevel “Rules” and a small group of about 20 senior and junior moderators only “provide a general framework” for moderation (Schwartz 2008). Junior moderators, or “janitors”, are tasked with deleting posts and images or recommending seniors to ban users that violate any of 4chan’s “17 Rules” (4chan 2022) – though what gets deleted and why is reportedly up to the volition of a few senior counterparts (Arthur 2020). Since 2016, for example, 4chan’s moderation has reputedly favoured content on the (extreme) right – despite the site officially prohibiting racist content (Arthur 2020). 4chan’s exertion of free speech–friendly moderation policies is especially visible in its communication affordances. The key affordance to facilitate the propagation of racist and otherwise openly transgressive speech is its anonymity: users cannot (and should not, as per 4chan’s policies) reveal their identities. A notable effect of this affordance is the isolation of speech from the moral oversight of public identity, the absence of which facilitates the usage of ambiguous and ironic language typical of “alt-right” communication (Tuters 2019). Similarly, the ephemerality of 4chan board feeds – that is, the relative speed with which user posts appear and disappear in a feed –

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is described as a factor in the board’s constant concoction of conspiratorial narratives, by virtue of users weaving arbitrary connections from a stream of unrelated posts (Tuters et al. 2018). Due in part to these unique affordances, the 4chan/pol/ site has been the home of many memes, vernaculars, and tropes that have characterized the nascent “altright” during the online culture wars of 2015–2018: Pepe the Frog, Kekistan (Tuters 2019), conspiracy theories like QAnon (Zeeuw et al. 2020) and Pizzagate (Tuters et al. 2018), as well as various hateful slurs (de Keulenaar et al. 2021b; Peeters et al. 2020). Sites like this have also been an important resource for users versed in replacement narratives. In March of 2019, for example, Christchurch terrorist Brendon Tarrant posted a manifesto on 8chan, the sister website of 4chan, titled The Great Replacement: We March Ever Forwards, in which he advocated the use of “edgy humour and memes in the vanguard stage” of a global war to defend Western culture from Islamic and Jewish influence. While this kind of extreme speech usually gets removed from social media platforms, we observe that the relatively unmoderated milieus of 4chan/pol/ and YouTube comments often function as a sort of growth medium for toxic ideas (Figure 9.1a, 9.1b and 9.1c). They form a passage through which such ideas may disseminate more or less explicitly across more mainstream (and

FIGURE 9.1A A simplified diagram showing the effect of speech affordances on the

spread of objectionable language across platforms (focus: YouTube videos). Source: authors

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FIGURE 9.1B A

simplified diagram showing the effect of speech affordances on the spread of objectionable language across platforms (focus: YouTube comments).

Source: authors, YouTube

FIGURE 9.1C A simplified diagram showing the effect of speech affordances on the

spread of objectionable language across platforms (focus: 4chan/ pol/). Source: authors, 4plebs

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more moderated) platforms. The language used in each platform may change depending on the amount of moderation in place, with the YouTube comment section being arguably mid-way between the free speech–friendly brand of moderation visible on 4chan/pol/ and the more proactive, human rights– based philosophy of moderation that regiments YouTube videos. While on 4chan/pol/ replacement narratives may be explicit and mingled with a variety of other extreme ideas (for example, scientific racism, as seen in Figure 9.1c), on the YouTube comment sections, users allude to the great replacement narrative in a more formal, and acceptable, tonality (Figure 9.1b). However, searching for videos that mention the great replacement or white genocide reveals a much higher degree of moderation: one sees instead a promotion of counter-speech (for example, videos debunking these narratives showing on top of search results) – and videos that were once popular, such as Lauren Southern’s “Great Replacement” (2017), have now been removed or become private (Figure 9.1a). Method

With such considerations in mind, our method is designed to explore the dissemination of French and U.S. replacement conspiracies across the less moderated spaces of 4chan and the YouTube comment section and examine the extent to which these relatively distinct narratives of demographic replacement begin to converge ideologically by virtue of coinciding or “meeting” in the same spaces. In short order, we first collected relevant data from 4chan/pol/ and YouTube using “white genocide” and “great replacement” in French and English as queries. We then set out to measure the extent to which both concepts are mentioned in the same spaces at similar times, from

FIGURE 9.2 

Method pipeline.

Source: authors

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platforms (4chan, YouTube) to specific comment sections, by using keyword frequencies – that is, we sought to find evidence of spatial convergence. Having established that the YouTube comment section is a space where the two concepts converge, we then sought to measure the extent to which they are mentioned by commenters interchangeably – that is, whether there is evidence of semantic convergence – using a host of natural language processing techniques. Data Collection

Our 4chan data was collected using 4CAT, a data collection and analysis tool (Peeters et al. 2020). 4CAT relies on 4plebs, an online archive of nearly all of 4chan/pol/ from 2013 to the present. We used it to collect all posts that mentioned the queries “white genocide”, “great replacement”, or “grand remplacement” (the equivalent in French), in any time period. This resulted in 4,427 posts dating from 2013 to late 2018. Our YouTube comments originate from an archival dataset compiled by Dimitri Tokmetzis, a Dutch journalist specializing in online political extremism for the Dutch news outlet De Correspondent (Tokmetzis 2019). Tokmetzis used the YouTube API v.3 to capture the videos and comments of channels belonging to right-wing European and U.S. political parties, media organizations, NGOs, and think-tanks identified on Wikipedia, right-wing extremist forums (4chan/pol/, 8chan), or by academic literature and reports of NGOs such as HOPE not Hate and Kafka (Kafka 2021). The dataset contains 36,065,106 comments from 175,553 transcribed videos dating from 2006 until the end of 2018, many of which were eventually removed by content moderation (de Keulenaar et al. 2021a). To harmonize our 4chan/pol/ and YouTube datasets, we limited them to posts ranging from 2013 until 2018. Filtering Processing

To verify the prominence and spread of great replacement and white genocide conspiracies across our datasets, we first needed to determine how users phrase these concepts. While some users may mention “white genocide” or “great replacement” as stand-alone concepts, others may rely on other terms that are synonymous, complementary, or vernaculars of the former. Altogether, synonymous, vernacular, or complementary expressions constitute a larger lexicon around the concepts of white genocide and great replacement, even when other terms are not intended to mean exactly the same thing as these concepts. The notion of “mass migration”, for example, is used in far more conventional spaces and speech registers than “white genocide” is, but it belongs, nevertheless, to a broader lexicon that describes, critiques, or observes the intersections between migration, politics, and identity.

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To find synonyms, complementary, or vernacular expressions, we first relied on running word2vec (Goldberg & Levy 2014) on both our datasets to find terms synonymous with white genocide and great replacement in French and English. Relevant results included “white erasure” (in French, “génocide des blancs”), “Muslim invasion” (“invasion musulmane”), “population replacement”, and more conventional terms like “mass migration”. Other examples include so-called hybrid keywords, that is, terms that refer both to the great replacement or white genocide conspiracies. Some examples are “Kalergi”, “mass migration”, “demographic replacement”, or “dieversity” (a pun on “diversity”), as well as slurs like “race mixer”, “rapefugee”, or “Amerimutt”, which refer to both conspiracies in colloquial, internet slurs (see, with discretion advised, Know Your Meme 2017; Urban Dictionary 2023a, 2023b, 2023c for vernacular definitions of each term). The latter vernaculars were selected from a list of racial and other slurs collected from 4chan/pol/ and Reddit by Peeters et al. (2020). Our total list of synonymous, complementary, or vernacular keywords contained 23 terms (see Figure 9.2). This list included 3 terms related to the white genocide conspiracy theory (labelled as “white genocide”), 8 terms related to “great replacement” (2 of which were in French), 5 terms related to either conspiracy (labelled as “hybrid terms”), and 7 terms from Peeters et al.’s (2020) list of slurs (labelled “extreme speech”). Using these keywords to further filter our datasets (particularly our YouTube archive), we narrowed results down to 3,127 4chan posts, 58,387 comments, and 2,881 video transcripts. In anticipation of our analyses, we find that it is not specific conspiracies that are most mentioned – with the exception of “white genocide” – but complementary concepts or vernaculars (see Figure 9.2). To find any evidence of ideological convergence between the French and American concepts of demographic replacement, we first needed to establish that they appeared in the same online spaces observed in this study. This was done by counting the number of times any of our 23 keywords were mentioned on 4chan, YouTube videos, and YouTube comment sections, using two datasets. To trace the dissemination of the two concepts across platforms, we counted the number of times that 4chan posts, YouTube comments, and YouTube video transcripts mentioned any of 20 keywords related to the great replacement and white genocide queries over time (Figure 9.4). We then looked at whether any of these queries were mentioned in the same comment sections of the same YouTube channels (Figure 9.6). Further, we attempted to measure the extent to which YouTube commenters mentioned the great replacement or white genocide conspiracies interchangeably – that is, whether these two concepts began to converge

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FIGURE 9.3 List

of queries divided by the categories and frequency of resulting 4chan posts, YouTube comments, and videos (in the form of video transcripts).

Source: authors

ideologically. This implied measuring the semantic similarity of these concepts in YouTube comments. Technically, this meant finding words synonymous and frequently collocated to any of our 23 keywords, using two natural language processing techniques: word2vec and bigrams. While word2vec works to find words that are semantically similar to a given keyword, bigrams find terms that are frequently mentioned in the same context as these. Results were displayed in a network graph that shows the words that users tend to mention frequently or synonymously to great replacement and white genocide (Figure 9.7).

of YouTube comments, videos, and 4chan posts that mention “great replacement”, “white genocide”, and related terms, 2008–2019.

Source: authors

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FIGURE 9.4 Number

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The Cross-platform Dissemination of the Great Replacement and White Genocide Conspiracy Theories

Due to each platform’s affordances, we find different levels of conversations around the white genocide and great replacement theories over time (see Figure 9.4). On 4chan/pol/, white genocide is a concept far more prominent than great replacement due to the fact that it is an English-speaking and largely Americancentric forum. One important exception that illustrates the cross-platform dynamics of semantic diffusion is when mentions of the great replacement increase in June 2017 because Canadian far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern posted a video where she extols and explains Renaud Camus’ theory in layman’s terms. The video generally increases mentions of the latter concept across all platforms. The substance of relevant posts on 4chan/pol/ on white genocide is primarily antisemitic, racist, and preoccupied with an idea of racial identity, where, in the eyes of users, interracial relations threaten to dissolve the uniqueness of various ethnicities. As an example, we can look at a selection of two images pertaining to two posts with the most engagement, in the form of post replies (see Figures 9.5a and 9.5b). The image on the left includes the antisemitic “Happy

FIGURES 9.5A The

Happy Merchant and Amerimutt memes, and an infographic on the “Kalergi plan” found on 4chan/pol/.

Source: 4chan/pol/

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FIGURES 9.5B (Continued)

Source: 4chan/pol/

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FIGURE 9.6 Channel

comment sections where users commonly mention “white genocide”, “great replacement” and related terms.

Note: Edges in green represent comments that only mention “white genocide”; in red are those that mention both “white genocide” and “great replacement”; and in orange those that only mention “great replacement”. Source: authors

FIGURE 9.7  Terms

frequently mentioned next to “great replacement”, “white genocide” and related keywords in YouTube comments.

Source: authors

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Merchant” meme, who in this image grinds individuals from a variety of ethnic backgrounds into a mass-produced mixed-race “Amerimutt” (see Hagen 2018). The antisemitic twist of the white genocide narrative may be attributable to the influence of the work of Kevin MacDonald, whose book Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Political Movements (2002) is one of the most mentioned references in 4chan/pol/ (de Keulenaar & Kisjes 2019). MacDonald’s antisemitic argument is that Jews use their disproportionate influence as cultural gatekeepers to dilute “white culture”, in an attempt to prevent racially cohesive nations from expelling them. YouTube’s speech affordances arguably bore an impact on the kinds of language being circulated around the white genocide and great replacement conspiracies. Despite not having been as actively moderated as it was in 2013, YouTube videos were, by 2017, already subject to demonetization practices if found to have uttered language not friendly to advertisers (Dunphy 2017). This may be one of the reasons why conventional words such as “mass migration” were more prominent than “white genocide” or “great replacement”. At first sight, this may suggest that more extreme variants of concepts may be expressed in the comment sections and are otherwise concealed by the more polished language of video uploaders (for an example, see de Keulenaar et al. 2021b). Still, mentions of “white genocide” did at times exceed that of more conventional terms like “mass migration”. One such instance was in June 2018, when Donald Trump echoed Tucker Carlson in claiming that “white farmers” in South Africa were victims of “land seizure” and “large-scale killing” (Wilson 2018). In contrast, YouTube comments – with comparatively less content moderation – contained far more mentions of white genocide, extreme speech, and mentions of the great replacement. There, we find evidence that the white genocide and great replacement conspiracies are mentioned in similar frequencies, at the same times, and, as well, find later, in the same channels and comment sections (see Figures 9.6 and 9.7). Frequent mentions of the “Kalergi plan”, in particular, are in themselves evidence of convergence between the white genocide and great replacement theories. The “Kalergi plan” evokes both the question of a systematic invasion of European lands via mass migration and of the replacement of a specific demographic rather than culture. It alleges that the European Union is a Jewish and Bolshevik project to “undermine the white race through mass immigration” (Orofino et al. 2023, 252; see also Figure 9.7). Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972) was an early advocate of European unification and founding president of the Paneuropean Union, an organization opposed by Nazis on the basis that it was allegedly under the control of Freemasonry. In the early 2010s, a conspiracy theory developed in the far right concerning the “Kalergi plan”, accusing the European Union of conspiring to intentionally encourage mass immigration into Europe in order to replace its original population. This theory was even aired within the European Parliament, in a speech in which the British National

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Party MEP Nick Griffin referred to Kalergi as the “godfather of the European Union” and spoke of Kalergi’s plan as the “biggest genocide in human history” and a “breeding-out” of “indigenous Europeans” via “the encouragement of mass non-white immigration” (Thorpe 2018, 227). When looking closer at how the great replacement and white genocide conspiracies converge in comment sections, we find that these concepts coalesce in videos by a handful of English and North American far-right YouTubers preoccupied by both American and European affairs: Tommy Robinson, Stefan Molyneux, Millennial Woes, Lauren Southern, and Paul Joseph Watson (highlighted in red in Figure 9.6). These channels, particularly Lauren Southern, arguably act as “bridges” for the “great replacement” and “white genocide” conspiracies, as she introduced the French theory to her largely American and English-speaking audiences. Another factor is that most of these YouTubers partook in a broader effort to “internationalize” the American and European far right through debates on issues common to both continents, particularly migration (HOPE not Hate 2018). Some far-right European politicians in Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands have since been heard echoing such ideas more or less implicitly through an understanding that migration causes European culture to “dilute”, that is, to lose its “purity”, through interracial relations and multiculturalism (Kaval 2023; Peacock 2017; Walker & Garamvolgyi 2022). On the other hand, we also find evidence of comments where “great replacement” and “white genocide” are distinct. This is the case in comments under videos by channels of European political parties or movements, like the Irish branch of the originally French Génération Identitaire (in yellow). Dissolved in 2021, Génération Identitaire proposed a form of identity based on culture and “ethnicity” rather than “race”, particularly under the guise of “ethno-differentialism” as opposed to racial superiority (Spektorowski 2003). The same can be said about the term “white genocide”, which is mentioned in comment sections of a majority of North American or British channels (in green). Looking closely at terms mentioned by commenters that refer to “great replacement” and “white genocide”, we find that the two conspiracies converge around equivalences of “Europeans” as “ethnicities” or “whites”. Words mentioned in combination with both concepts include allusions to a given culture (“Western”, “European”), race (“whites”, “ethnic”), reproduction (“women”, “children”), and government conspiracies (“left”, “plan”, “real”). A slight distinction should be made with comments in French, which allude not to race but to ethnicity (“épuration ethnique”, “asiatiques”, “congolais”, “blanches”) and culture (“paganisme”, “occidentale”). Content in French bears little connection to that in English, and words like “white genocide” and “great replacement” only converge around English-speaking conversations. In this sense, we deduce here that convergences between “white genocide” and “great

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replacement” mostly occur in English-speaking comment spaces, where we see equivalences between the concept of “white” and “European” (Figure 9.6). Conclusion: Countering Mainstreaming

As the French philosopher and commentator on the French New Right Pierre-André Taguieff argues, the primary “ideological achievement” of the French New Right has been the “reformulation of ‘racism’ in the vocabulary of difference” (Taguieff 2001, 5). On the right, this strategy has had the effect of seeming to undermine the arguments of antiracist activism, which is mocked for sometimes inaccurately mistaking newer “alternative” forms of right-wing Western supremacy with old-fashioned biological racism. In fact, it is crucial that to moderate whichever of these ideological traditions out of the public sphere, one needs to discern these narratives and their intellectual history, even in the most general forms of counter-speech. The resurgence of these narratives takes place in a moment of significant transformation of deeply contentious concepts (“race”, “ethnicity”, and “heritage”) whose meaning, if conflated, continues to fuel the deeply problematic aspects of racial political language in Europe – a continent that has formed anti-discriminatory ideas and traditions distinct from that of the United States. The media theorist Neil Postman described a medium as “a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture’s politics, social organisation, and habitual ways of thinking” (Postman 2000, 10). If we apply Postman’s biological metaphor to our empirical analysis, it would appear that the speech affordances of 4chan/pol/ and YouTube comments constituted a hospitable environment for a variety of racist discourses that would be otherwise distinct. This becomes even more urgent with the convergence of politically extreme content in the poorly moderated “fringe” spaces of public debates, such as 4chan, the YouTube comment section, and various alternative (“alt-tech”) platforms that seek to operate as “counter” public spheres. We note how the convergence of the white genocide and great replacement concepts functions on the basis of specific speech affordances. In studying them, we observe how extreme speech is not necessarily concentrated in a handful of extreme forums like 4chan/pol/ but distributed as more-or-less explicit language in more-or-less moderated public spheres. This poses a problem for counter-speech and speech moderation as strategies whose fundamental goal is to demote extreme language out of the public sphere in order to facilitate long-term social change. To what extent does “deplatforming” an extreme idea guarantee that it is no longer thought or felt? To a lesser extent, perhaps, insofar as speech moderation focuses merely on the surface of public debate – be it mainstream social media platforms rather than the whole of social media ecology, or the personal aesthetics of political ideas rather than their substance.

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Peeters, S., Hagen, S., & Das, P. (2020). Salvaging the Internet Hate Machine: Using the Discourse of Extremist Online Subcultures to Identify Emergent Extreme Speech [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3676483 Phillips, W. (2015). This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. MIT Press. Pohjonen, M., & Udupa, S. (2017). Extreme Speech Online: An Anthropological Critique of Hate Speech Debates. International Journal of Communication, 11, 1173–1191. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/5843/1965 Postman, N. (2000). The Humanism of Media Ecology. Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 1. Raspail, J. (1975). Le Camp des saints. Éditions Robert Laffont. Rogers, R. (2020). Deplatforming: Following Extreme Internet Celebrities to Telegram and Alternative Social Media. European Journal of Communication, 35(3), 213–229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922066 Schwartz, M. (2008, August 3). The Trolls Among Us. The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html Shao, C., Hui, P.-M., Wang, L., Jiang, X., Flammini, A., Menczer, F., & Ciampaglia, G. L. (2018). Anatomy of an Online Misinformation Network. PLoS ONE, 13(4), e0196087. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196087 Shields, J. (2013). Marine Le Pen and the “New” FN: A Change of Style or of Substance? Parliamentary Affairs, 66(1), 179–196. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gss076 Spektorowski, A. (2003). The New Right: Ethno-regionalism, Ethno-pluralism and the Emergence of a Neo-fascist “Third Way”. Journal of Political Ideologies, 8(1), 111–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310306084. Taguieff, P.-A. (2001). The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles (H. Melehy, Trans; Vol. 13). University of Minnesota Press. Thorpe, B. J. (2018). The Time and Space of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s PanEurope, 1923–1939 [Doctoral dissertation, University of Nottingham]. http:// eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/51778/1/Thesis%20%5B10.05.18%5D.pdf Tokmetzis, D. (2019, October 28). How They Did it: Exposing Right-Wing Radicalization on YouTube. Global Investigative Journalism Network. https://gijn. org/2019/10/28/how-they-did-it-exposing-right-wing-radicalization-on-youtube/ Tufekci, Z. (2018, March 10). YouTube, the Great Radicalizer. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical. html Tuters, M. (2019). LARPing & Liberal Tears: Irony, Belief and Idiocy in the Deep Vernacular Web. In F. Maik & N. Thurston (Eds.), Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US (pp. 37–48). Transcript Verlag. Tuters, M., & Hagen, S. (2019). (((They))) Rule: Memetic Antagonism and Nebulous Othering on 4chan. New Media & Society, 22(12), 2218–2237. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444819888746 Tuters, M., Jokubauskaitė, E., & Bach, D. (2018). Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit. M/C Journal, 21(3). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1422 Twitter. (2022). Report Abusive Behavior. Twitter. https://help.twitter.com/en/ safety-and-security/report-abusive-behavior Urban Dictionary. (2023a). Urban Dictionary: Dieversity. Urban Dictionary. https:// www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dieversity

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Urban Dictionary. (2023b). Urban Dictionary: Kalergization. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Kalergization Urban Dictionary. (2023c). Urban Dictionary: Rapefugee. Urban Dictionary. https:// www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rapefugee Valeurs Actuelles. (2022, March 8). Eric Zemmour assume une différence entre “immigration blanche chrétienne” et “immigration musulmane”. Valeurs actuelles. https://www.valeursactuelles.com/politique/eric-zemmour-assume-une-difference-entre-immigration-blanche-chretienne-et-immigration-musulmane/ Walker, S., & Garamvolgyi, F. (2022, July 24). Viktor Orbán Sparks Outrage with Attack on “Race Mixing” in Europe. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/world/2022/jul/24/viktor-orban-against-race-mixing-europe-hungary Waterson, J. (2019, June 6). YouTube Blocks History Teachers Uploading Archive Videos of Hitler. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/ jun/06/youtube-blocks-history-teachers-uploading-archive-videos-of-hitler Wendling, M. (2018). Alt-Right: From 4Chan to the White House. Pluto Press. Wilson, J. (2018, August 24). White Farmers: How a Far-Right Idea Was Planted in Donald Trump’s Mind. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ aug/23/white-farmers-trump-south-africa-tucker-carlson-far-right-influence YouTube. (2019). Our Ongoing Work to Tackle Hate. Official YouTube Blog. https:// youtube.googleblog.com/2019/06/our-ongoing-work-to-tackle-hate.html YouTube. (2020). Hate Speech Policy—YouTube Help. YouTube. https://support. google.com/youtube/answer/2801939?hl=en Zemmour, É. (2021, April 2). Éric Zemmour: “Cette gauche qui encourage le retour du racism”. Le Figaro. https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/ eric-zemmour-cette-gauche-qui-encourage-le-retour-du-racisme-20210402

10 MAINSTREAMING THE GREAT REPLACEMENT The Role of Centrist Discourses in the Mainstreaming of a Far-Right Conspiracy Theory Nik Linders

Introduction

Population replacement conspiracy theories have long genealogies with different points of origin and articulations. In this chapter, I investigate the mainstreaming of a specifc iteration that currently has considerable traction in Europe and focuses on Muslims specifcally – elaborating a Eurocentric “us” versus “them” rhetoric in which “they” (i.e., Muslims) do not belong “here”.1 This narrative, moreover, conveys a sense of urgency as it argues that Europe will soon be governed by Muslims and Islamic laws unless something is done to prevent this. This is the iteration portrayed in Le grand remplacement by Renaud Camus in 2011, which is very similar to Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia from about a decade earlier.2 This iteration has become increasingly mainstream over the past decades, by which I mean that its articulation has spread from the extreme right to actors and politicians that operate within mainstream journalism and the democratic political arena. In this chapter, I refer to this specifc European iteration when I point to the (great/population) replacement conspiracy theory.3 Two populist radical-right parties currently holding seats in the Dutch national parliament, Forum voor Democratie (FvD) and Partij Voor de Vrijheid (PVV), have endorsed and repeated some of the core arguments of this conspiracy theory, and their members and followers have praised terrorists who have enacted violence in its name (van Dijk 2020). The embrace of this conspiracy theory, Ebner and Davey (2019) argue, plays a role in accounting for the electoral success of populist right-wing parties. As of February 2023, these parties together poll around 28 parliamentary seats out of 150 (EenVandaag/IPSOS 2023).4 The electoral success of these parties and the way DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-13

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they have incorporated population replacement conspiracy theories raise the question of how this conspiracy theory has become a permissible discourse in the Netherlands. The discourse of the great replacement conspiracy theory is fexible (Ekman 2022), rendering it particularly useful to be invoked (selectively) by diferent groups using diferent rhetoric. This fexibility comes from its wide range of claims and (discursive) iterations, as Bracke and Hernández Aguilar (2020, 9) have shown. Overall, the conspiracy theory consists of various loosely associated claims about population replacement and can, thus, posit or emphasize diferent tenets depending on context and arbiter. Far-right actors online have used this fexibility, for example, to push their ideas about immigration by couching their claims diferently depending on their target audience (Ebner 2018). Seeking to dominate the discussion, they adapt their language to gain hegemony (cf. Gramsci, see Bates 1975; Moufe 2014, see also later in this chapter) over the frame of reference (see Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020; Ebner 2018; Ebner & Davey 2019). The implication for analysing the mainstream appeal of this conspiracy theory is twofold. First, it means that, depending on the context, diferent tenets may be relevant for its spread from fringe to mainstream. I address these concerns specifcally in the Dutch context, recognizing that other tenets might need to be foregrounded in other contexts. Second, it means that mainstream actors and far-right actors may use diferent articulations or discursive constructs to refer to very similar ideas. In this chapter, I explore how centrist politicians incorporate some components of population replacement conspiracy theories and inquire what the efects of such endorsement are, considering the growing prevalence of this conspiracy theory in the Dutch public domain.5 The question guiding my research is the following: how do relatively centrist (political) actors draw on and, therefore, disseminate tenets of the great replacement conspiracy theory? The Dutch centrist party most often said to compete for voters of the far-right parties that openly embrace the great replacement conspiracy theory is the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD) (conservative-liberal party). The VVD, moreover, has also been briefy in government together with the PVV (Van Klingeren et al. 2017), implying that these parties have worked together as coalition partners. That government was led by Mark Rutte, who was the political leader of the VVD and prime minister from 2010 until 2023, rendering him the longest-sitting prime minister in Dutch history (four consecutive terms). After providing a brief genealogy of population replacement conspiracy theories in recent Dutch history, I proceed with an in-depth analysis of a VVD campaign ad. I show signifcant parallels between its message and the great replacement conspiracy theory. In conclusion, relying on scholarship on the discursive reproduction of systemic racism, I argue that the catering of centrist (political) actors to far-right voters, by mimicking part of their discourse, may result in mainstreaming their ideology.

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Cultural Hegemony and the Reproduction of Systemic Racism

Scholarship on the great replacement conspiracy theory has highlighted its Islamophobic nature (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020), its intensifcation of antisemitic narratives (Winston 2021), and its spread on the internet as a push from the far right (Chatterton Williams 2017; Ebner 2018). Less attention has been paid, however, to how political actors from centrist parties may also be infuential in mainstreaming tenets of this conspiracy theory. Pushes from the far right are more likely to permeate into mainstream belief systems if mainstream politicians provide fertile ground to do so, especially if they are successful in translating its tenets into more mainstream palatable language. For example, great replacement conspiracy theory believers explicitly deny that they are racist(s) (see Chatterton Williams 2017), while, at the very least, the type of Islamophobia that specifcally addresses Muslim people (vs. Islamic religion or culture) should be considered as racism (see Lauwers 2019). This denial can more easily be accounted for if we acknowledge that society at large systemically incorporates similar beliefs. If beliefs are generally accepted in society, people are more unlikely to perceive such beliefs as racist (as the idea of being racist is generally less accepted). Correspondingly, Edward Said (2003) shows a systemic Orientalizing of non-Western subjects in European history. His work uncovers a normalized dichotomized defnition of “us” and “them” in European thought that relates to the same in- and outgroups that are central to the great replacement conspiracy narrative. Orientalism, Said argues (2003, 6–7), is culturally hegemonic. Like domination, cultural hegemony has the possibility to construct an almost absolute frame of reference. An important part of Europe’s historical cultural hegemony, as Said shows (2003, 255–283), is the collective belief that European people and culture are superior to non-European people and cultures. Democratic party politics entail a struggle for hegemony (cf. Gramsci, see Moufe 2014), and as such, political leaders have to deal with, but can also infuence, hegemonic cultural beliefs. Thus, catering to beliefs (i.e., for political gains) also entails disseminating discourse that validates/reinforces those beliefs. Accordingly, we may ask whether relatively centrist actors are helping the spread of the great replacement conspiracy theory by catering to the vote of those to their political right. In a society built on Orientalist hegemonic beliefs (Mepschen et al. 2010; see also Legêne 2017), political leaders catering to far-right anti-immigrant voters may fnd the fexible discourse of the great replacement conspiracy theory’s tenets instrumental – whether they are aware that these tenets constitute a violent conspiracy theory or not. In tandem with a push for certain ideas about immigration from the far right, such seemingly milder (at least comparatively) discourse from centrist actors may lead to the reproduction of systemic racism (Essed 1991; Wekker 2016).

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To explore this, I use a critical discourse analysis (CDA) method developed by Teun van Dijk (2015) to analyze the role of discourse in reproducing systemic racism. Van Dijk’s work shows that (1) knowledge and past discourse are important in the dissemination and interpretation of subsequent discourse, and (2) the interpretation of discourse infuences and depends on preexisting opinions related to issues perceived and theories held to be true. These observations are in analogue to how cultural hegemony determines what politicians can say to gather support, while those politicians, at the same time, have an infuence on this cultural hegemony. Additionally, authors can construct discourse to mean something diferent to diferent audience members, which scholars have called multivocality (Albertson 2015) or doublespeak (Lutz 1989). CDA usually investigates this in terms of intentionality, but multivocality can also happen inadvertently and still have detrimental efects. The reproduction of “common-sense” arguments indeed often happens unconsciously (Fairclough 2001, 2). Such arguments, through cultural hegemony, may include a reinforcement of Orientalism and its tenets – and the fexible discourse of the great replacement conspiracy theory is an ideal candidate for such multivocality. I would like to stress the point that thorough CDA studies should also investigate the unintentional reproduction of systemic racism. My analysis is, therefore, further informed by Anne Ferber’s (2012) framework of oppression-blindness (see Linders 2020). “Silent Majority”

In the 1980–1990s, far-right politician Hans Janmaat alleged that the Netherlands was experiencing “unnatural demographic developments” (Van Buuren 2016, 87). He was criminally convicted of inciting hatred and racism in 1995. A conspiracy theory then spread within the Dutch far right: a “silent majority” wanted to criticize immigration but was silenced, as such claims were deemed “racist” (Van Buuren 2016). “Regular people” discontent with immigration were allegedly denounced by mainstream and left-wing political actors.6 This sentiment expanded in 1990 when De ondergang van Nederland: Land der naïeve dwazen (The Demise of the Netherlands, Land of Naïve Fools) was published by Mohamed Rasoel (Schulte 2019). Rasoel announced that Muslims in the Netherlands were a “time bomb with no means to defuse it”. “Weak and facilitative Dutch people” (who let themselves be called racists) would be no match for “tough Muslims, medieval warriors, ready to take over the country” – touting Muslim birth rates as an instrument of conquest.7 The identity of Rasoel is contested (see Schulte 2019), but in the book, the author positions himself as Muslim. His warning, therefore, resembles (and predates) a warning in one of the most infuential replacement conspiracy

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theory publications in the European context: Oriana Fallaci’s La forza della ragione (The Force of Reason).8 A fabricated (see Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020) quote in this publication has Houari Boumédienne in 1974 – then chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Algeria – proclaiming that “victory will come to us from the wombs of our women”. Around 2000, centrist politicians Paul Schefer (Labour Party) and Frits Bolkestein (VVD) argued (independently) that the Dutch “multicultural project” had failed.9 They asserted that other politicians never considered the possibility that labour migrants may decide to stay and many (especially Muslims) may not want to adapt to Dutch customs. In their view, this posed a threat to Dutch norms and values. About a year later, Pim Fortuyn entered national politics with a populist anti-Islam agenda (Schulte 2019; Van Buuren 2016). Fortuyn railed against the “cultural backwardness” of Muslims and their failure (or “refusal”) to embrace Western values like gay rights (Poorthuis & Wansink 2012). He also protested that he was demonized as a racist and bigot for “only stating facts”. Fortuyn was assassinated for his anti-Islam message in 2002 (Evans-Pritchard & Clements 2003), less than a year after 9/11. To many Dutch people, both events confrmed the urgency of Fortuyn’s warnings about Islam, and these warnings have remained centre stage through reiterations by various politicians after his demise. Omvolking: Dutch Population Replacement Conspiracy Theory

These events also increased the (online) prevalence of conspiracy theories about Islam and the alleged inability to say anything negative about immigration for fear of reprisal by either Islamist extremists or ridicule by leftist elites: the same sentiment that initially surged after Rasoel’s publication (Schulte 2019). The conspiracy theories on Dutch online forums became more congruent following the 2004 publication of Eurabia by Bat Ye’or. Various interviews were published with authors like Ye’or,10 and forums and blogs became flled with topics about the “Islamization of the Netherlands”, the “loss of Dutch culture”, and the decreasing safety of Jews, young girls, and gay people in public.11 Here, we fnd the tropes of the population replacement conspiracy theory that became central in the Dutch context: non-Western (especially Muslim) “immigrants” (many of whom are actually citizens) were depicted as sexually aggressive, backward, having more children, and, for these reasons, a threat to Western norms and values: an “imminent Muslim takeover of Europe”. These assertions were often accompanied by complaints that those who dared to speak this “truth” were discarded as “racist”. Renaud Camus’ Le grand remplacement was embraced by these online communities almost immediately after its publication in 2010, despite only being released in French.12 Camus refers to Muslims as “replacements”

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(remplaçants) and summarizes their “anti-Western behaviour” in a demeaning fashion as a “nuisance” (nocence). The term “replacement” is new in Camus’ version, and it signifcantly adds to the perception of Muslims as a threat. The “us vs. them” rhetoric is turned into “them instead of us”, morphing the dichotomy from a clash of cultures into the complete eradication of European society. Inspired by its terminology, several Dutch blogs started using the term omvolking,13 a term that is exceedingly troubling because of its linguistic proximity to the Nazi term Umvolkung.14 Many of these posts reveal that these online communities view immigration as a zero-sum game of “Dutch people” versus Muslims. This genealogy shows which core discursive strands of the great replacement conspiracy theory were increasingly present in the Netherlands from the 1990s onwards. Far-right parties have successfully claimed ownership of the political and public debate on immigration since Fortuyn. Increasingly, far-right politicians use rhetoric from or adjacent to the great replacement idea. The anti-immigrant and Islamophobic tropes that are central to the great replacement conspiracy theory have not remained exclusive to far-right online forums but are also present in Dutch mainstream society, journalism, and politics (Smits Akılma 2020). A prominent example of similar assertions in mainstream media is a series of columns by journalist Martin Sommer in De Volkskrant that started around 2013 (see Linders 2020). This discourse impacted immigration debates profoundly, and several parties adapted their immigration rhetoric accordingly – briefy culminating (around 2010) in a government coalition wherein two mainstream parties committed to part of the PVV’s immigration agenda (Van Klingeren et al. 2017). This chapter traces whether such rhetorical adaptation to far-right framing also includes the core tenets of the great replacement conspiracy theory. As outlined previously, vying for political power entails a struggle for cultural hegemony. If in this context, centrist politicians have become convinced they need to invoke far-right frames on immigration, their discourse is likely to include (and mainstream) tenets of the great replacement. Mainstreaming Tenets of the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory

To answer my research question, I analyze a 2017 campaign ad that was published by the VVD and Mark Rutte, who was then the Dutch prime minister. I selected this text for analysis based on criteria that are crucial for this study: it was published by an infuential political actor from the centre-right party most likely to cater to far-right voters while aimed at a broad (Dutch) audience, thus carrying the possibility of mainstreaming far-right discourse. The text introduced the VVD’s strategy throughout its election campaign, so it is also representative of a larger body

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of discourse. In terms of vying for cultural hegemony, moreover, a campaign ad is particularly relevant as it distinctly seeks to garner support from as many people as possible. Finally, the text deals with topics central to the great replacement conspiracy theory: it problematizes immigration, and it contains many of the tenets outlined in the previous genealogy. The text particularly touches on Islamophobia, “reverse racism”, the hypermasculinization and -sexualization of Muslim men, and the (urgent) threat to national culture/values. It selectively incorporates some of the tropes of the great replacement but uses vocabulary that is more permissible to mainstream audiences. The full-page ad (Appendix A; Appendix B for English translation) was published on January 23, 2017, in all major Dutch newspapers and on social media. In the lower-left corner, the VVD logo is accompanied by a slogan: “Normaal. Doen”. (“Act/Do. Normal”.). The ad shows half of Mark Rutte’s face, with a confdent look, suggesting that Rutte is exemplary for someone who “acts normal”. The message is written as a personal letter, shaped around Rutte’s head, signed with his public signature, and addressed “To all Dutch people”. Message

The text asserts that “something is happening” in the Netherlands: problematic behaviour by “some people” that is “not normal” and “destroying our country”. These people are allegedly prepared to destroy the foundations of Dutch society. Their infuence on public life “seems to be increasing”, and their behaviour is characterized as “not normal”. This behaviour is described as antithetical to the “decency” of Dutch culture – even though, Rutte adds, “they came to the Netherlands for its liberal values”. Overtly, the text thus problematizes a perceived increase in antisocial behaviour by non-native people and uses typical conspiracy theory phrasing (vague language) to do so (see Moore 2016; Van Prooijen 2018). Like allegations found in Camus’ Le grand remplacement, Rutte depicts the behaviour of specifc groups of immigrants as a nuisance. The examples he uses draw from well-known stereotypes often used by the (Dutch) far right to describe “non-Western immigrants” (i.e., Muslims) and their threat to white European values: dumping garbage in the streets, spitting on tram conductors, loitering, and assaulting passers-by.15 Examples also include the stereotypical depiction of Muslims harassing gay people and women wearing miniskirts.16 This stereotyping of Muslims is very similar to the great replacement’s core tenets: they are hypermasculinized and -sexualized, seen as a threat to Western values, and assumed to be immigrants. Rutte then calls upon all Dutch people to stop the “increasing infuence” of “those who do not (wish to) adhere to Dutch values”. The message for the latter group is: “if you reject our country, then please leave” – which, he

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alleges, is how “the silent majority” of Dutch people feel. This “silent majority”, as mentioned before, is a moniker often found in conspiracy theories and far-right discourses, including in the Netherlands (Bolwijn & Van Walsum 2017; Van Rossem 2011). It is an empty signifer that is used to defend the legitimacy of what is being conveyed as if it is only logical, but most people do not (dare to) say it out loud. Rutte suggests that this may be because “regular Dutch people” are allegedly called racists when they speak up. This exposes a critical assumption in Rutte’s argument: those who are causing problems are not “regular” Dutch people, and this is at least partially based on a racialized distinction. The signifer “regular” further communicates that, in Rutte’s view, anyone could be called “racist” in this way, but that (white) Dutch people have done nothing to deserve to be called racists. It naturalizes the idea that if immigrants (nonwhite citizens) perceive Dutch society to be racist, this cannot be the result of actual (systemic) racism. Through the minimization of racism (cf. Ferber 2012), this argument discounts the lived experience of nonwhite people in the Netherlands and shows an unawareness of (or indiference to, or strategic disarming of) the systemic racism that has been mapped out in the scholarship (Essed 1991; Wekker 2016). Instead, Rutte implies that “immigrants” play the race card to get ahead, when “regular” Dutch people have done nothing to deserve this. This is the “reverse racism” argument that is also a central tenet of the great replacement conspiracy theory in the Dutch context and is often made by Wilders as well as others on the Dutch far right.17 Finally, Rutte motivates the reader to actively defend Dutch values. The decline of Dutch values is depicted as an imminent and existential threat: “their infuence on society is increasing”; “this moment is defning for the future of our country”; “sometimes it already seems like nobody is acting normal anymore”. These sentences suggest a sense of urgency that is also found in the great replacement conspiracy theory, responsible for its most violent consequences (Ebner & Davey 2019). In the last part of the text, Rutte even states that the only important question for the future of the Netherlands is “what kind of country do we want to be?” Rutte’s own equivocal suggestion is that the Netherlands should be a place in which “we” feel at home, and in which “we” act on clearly defned “normal” behaviour. Like the great replacement conspiracy theory, this renders immigration a zero-sum game in which it is either “their” culture or “ours” – asserting the need to defend the country in biopolitical terms (cf. Foucault, see Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020). Discursive Strategies

Rutte conveys his message using doublespeak: the suggestion that “something is happening in our country” leaves readers free to attach their own perceived issues to Rutte’s message. His distinction between a “regular” Dutch public

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(“us”) and an ill-defned antagonistic other (“they”), although partially furnished by the examples he uses, results in the construction of largely arbitrary in- and outgroups. The phrasing allows readers to determine whom exactly they consider “us” and “them”, which makes the message appealing to a broader audience. This is exactly the type of strategy that the far right uses in its push for hegemony online (Ebner 2018). This multivocality translates the tropes that Rutte borrows from the far right into more mainstream palpable language. In his bid for political hegemony, he is talking to a broad audience while catering to what he appears to have identifed as important (hegemonic) beliefs in (the far right) part of his potential electorate. As argued, however, catering to beliefs means also disseminating them. In this case, Rutte’s assertions match the great replacement conspiracy theory in several ways (whether he is familiar with it or not), but he rhetorically reconstructs these assertions into vague statements that are more acceptable in mainstream political discourse – thus (further) mainstreaming them. In addition, Rutte naturalizes certain expectations for Dutch society. Throughout the text, Dutch values are made synonymous with liberalism, which matches the party ideology of the VVD. Liberal equal opportunity, however, is assumed as a quality of Dutch society and then used to discredit the position of immigrants – a move which Anne Ferber (2012) has called abstract liberalism. Immigrants, however, are often not allowed to work, and Muslims face systemic disadvantages in the job market (Fernández-Reino et al. 2022). By stating that “normal” Dutch people “work for their money” and “make the best of their lives”, Rutte suggests that unemployed immigrants are lazy and unmotivated. In this context, Rutte’s assertion that immigrants come to the Netherlands specifcally for its liberal values takes on another meaning: it positions immigrants as profteers. Especially over the last decade, however, non-Western immigrants have come to Europe to be safe from harm – not to celebrate European cultures. Further, since the 1950s, many (Muslim) immigrants were actively recruited for low-wage work by Dutch policies (Zimmermann 1995). What is reiterated here is the normative superiority of liberal values, which is equated with Dutch culture. If successfully reproduced performatively (i.e., made hegemonic), the efect of this constructed expectation will be for Dutch people to reject immigrants (used here, importantly, as a proxy also for Muslim citizens) categorically if their unemployment numbers are higher. Similar rejections will ensue if immigrants receive more benefts from the state or if they fail to understand some of the (liberal) societal expectations that seem logical to “native” Dutch people. With a hegemonization of such expectations, the allegations in the great replacement conspiracy theory of Muslims coming to Europe to deliberately live solely of welfare benefts will also seem more tenable to the mainstream public.

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The Result of Catering to the Far Right

In sum, in the struggle for cultural and political hegemony, Rutte and the VVD chose to publish a campaign ad in the form of a letter “to all Dutch people” that signifcantly mimics (and renders more palpable) core tenets found in the great replacement conspiracy theory. As they cater to voters to their right on the political spectrum, they reiterate tropes used by far-right politicians and publicists, thereby adapting them for more mainstream audiences. Whether or not Rutte was aware of this, some of these tropes are instrumental in the appeal of the population replacement conspiracy theory in the Dutch context. The strategy “worked”: Rutte’s VVD remained the largest party after the elections (one month after the publication of this ad), and Rutte became prime minister for the third consecutive term since 2010. At the same time, it is conceivable that this strategy increased the prevalence of (parts of) the great replacement conspiracy theory in Dutch public consciousness. Catering to far-right discourses using more palpable language has the efect of also disseminating and mainstreaming these discourses. The implications are twofold. First, taking this strategy long-term is likely to mainstream more of the far-right discourse into cultural hegemony. Far-right parties, by their nature, are more extreme than the current hegemonic order (at least while not in power). Therefore, when part of their discourse is hegemonized, more extreme tenets of their discourse will surface. In turn, then, catering to far-right discourses in this way in the long term requires the mainstreaming of increasingly extreme ideas. Second, this radicalization of the far right is also intrinsically problematic. Empowered by the cultural hegemonization of part of their discourse, far-right actors are emboldened to publicly call for increasingly extreme measures (e.g., see Schinkel & Reekum 2019). This also helps them in their push for the domination of certain debates in online spaces (cf. Ebner 2018), where they can push for more extreme ideas as a result. The pathway for mainstreaming the great replacement conspiracy theory that I have shown here should be further investigated. More extensive research is needed to verify whether the connections I found here can be observed on a larger scale as well. Also, I have only focused on the Dutch context whereas the great replacement conspiracy theory is gaining mainstream traction in other countries as well and, signifcantly, spreading crossnationally online (which, again, works to both embolden the far right and to necessitate centrist politicians to deal with this). Apart from case studies in other countries, this also necessitates a comparative study that includes cross-country links between politicians. A multi- or international perspective may also investigate the links of the great replacement conspiracy theory to other conspiracy theories (e.g., on COVID-19), as well as to nationalist and anti-EU movements like Brexit.

APPENDIX A Mark Rutte’s Open Letter – Original Text

Aan alle Nederlanders, Er is iets aan de hand met ons land. Hoe komt het toch dat we als land zo welvarend zijn, maar sommige mensen zich zo armzalig gedragen? Mensen die in toenemende mate de stemming in ons land aan het bepalen zijn. Die bereid zijn om alles waar we als Nederland zo hard voor hebben gewerkt, omver te gooien. Dat laten we toch niet gebeuren? Verreweg de meesten van ons zijn van goede wil. De stille meerderheid. We hebben het beste met ons land voor. We werken hard, helpen elkaar en vinden Nederland best een gaaf land. Maar we maken ons wel grote zorgen over hoe we met elkaar omgaan. Soms lijkt het wel alsof niemand meer normaal doet. U herkent het vast wel. Mensen die zich steeds asocialer lijken te gedragen. In het verkeer, in het openbaar vervoer en op straat. Die van mening zijn dat ze altijd maar voorrang hebben. Die afval op straat dumpen. Die conducteurs bespugen. Of die in groepjes rondhangen en mensen treiteren, bedreigen of zelfs mishandelen. Niet normaal. We voelen een groeiend ongemak wanneer mensen onze vrijheid misbruiken om hier de boel te verstieren, terwijl ze juist naar ons land zijn gekomen voor die vrijheid. Mensen die zich niet willen aanpassen, afgeven op onze gewoontes en onze waarden afwijzen. Die homo’s lastigvallen, vrouwen in korte rokjes uitjouwen of gewone Nederlanders uitmaken voor racisten. Ik begrijp heel goed dat mensen denken: als je ons land zo fundamenteel afwijst, heb ik liever dat je weggaat. Dat gevoel heb ik namelijk ook. Doe normaal of ga weg. Dit gedrag mogen we nooit normaal vinden in ons land. De oplossing is niet om dan maar groepen mensen over één kam te scheren, uit te schelden of hele groepen simpelweg het land uit te zetten. Zo bouwen we toch geen

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samenleving met elkaar? De oplossing is vooral een mentaliteitskwestie. We zullen glashelder moeten blijven maken wat normaal is en wat niet normaal is in dit land. We zullen onze waarden actief moeten verdedigen. In Nederland is het namelijk normaal dat je elkaar de hand schudt en gelijk behandelt. Het is normaal dat je van hulpverleners afblijft. Dat je leraren respecteert en mensen niet sart met vlogjes. Het is normaal dat je werkt voor je geld en het beste uit je leven probeert te halen. Elkaar helpt als het even moeilijk gaat en een arm om iemand heen slaat in zware tijden. Het is normaal dat je je inzet en niet wegloopt voor problemen. Dat je fatsoenlijk naar elkaar luistert. In plaats van elkaar te overschreeuwen als je het ergens niet mee eens bent. De komende tijd is bepalend voor de koers van ons land. Er ligt slechts één vraag voor: wat voor land willen we zijn? Laten we ervoor strijden dat we ons thuis blijven voelen in ons mooie land. Laten we duidelijk blijven maken wat hier normaal is en wat niet. Ik weet zeker dat we dit voor elkaar gaan krijgen. Dat we alles wat we met elkaar bereikt hebben samen overeind houden. U, ik, wij allemaal. Laten we samenwerken om dit land nóg beter te maken. Want echt, we zijn een ontzettend gaaf land. Ik zou nergens anders willen wonen. U wel? Praat vanavond mee om 19:00 uur tijdens een Facebook live sessie op www.facebook.nl/vvd

APPENDIX B Mark Rutte’s Open Letter – English Translation

To all Dutch people, Something is happening in our country. Why is it that we as a country are so prosperous, but some people still behave so poorly? People who increasingly determine the mood in our country, who are willing to knock down everything that we have worked so hard for as the Netherlands. We will not let that happen, will we? By far, most of us are of good will. The silent majority. We want the best for our country. We work hard, help each other out and think the Netherlands is quite a cool country. Nonetheless, we are very concerned about how we interact with each other. Sometimes it seems like no one is acting normal anymore. You probably recognize this. People who seem to be behaving increasingly antisocial. In trafc, public transport, and on the street. People who believe that they can always go frst; who dump their trash on the street; who spit on conductors; or hang around in groups and taunt, threaten, or even assault passers-by. Not normal. We feel a growing discomfort when people abuse our freedom to disrupt things here, when in fact they have come to our country for that very freedom. People who don’t want to adapt, resent our habits, and reject our values, who harass gays, hiss at women in short skirts or call ordinary Dutch people racists. I understand very well that people think: if you reject our country so fundamentally, I prefer that you leave. I have that feeling too. Act normal or go away. We should never accept this behaviour as normal in our country. The solution is not, however, to paint groups of people with the same brush, to call

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them names, or to simply deport entire groups from the country. That is not how we build a society together, is it? The solution is primarily a question of mentality. We will have to keep making it crystal clear what is normal and what is not normal in this country. We will have to actively defend our values. It is, in fact, normal in our country that you shake hands and treat each other as equals. It is normal that you don’t bother rescuers; that you respect teachers and don’t bully people with vlogs. It is normal to work for an income and try to get the best out of your life; that you help each other when the going gets tough and put an arm around someone in difcult times. It is normal that you put in an efort and not walk away from problems; that you listen to each other properly, instead of yelling over each other when you disagree about something. The coming period will determine the course of our country. Only one question is at stake: what kind of country do we want to be? Let us fght to make sure we keep feeling at home in our precious country. Let us keep making clear what is normal here and what is not. I’m sure that we will get this done; that we can keep up everything we have achieved together. You, me, all of us. Let us work together to make this country even better. Because, really, we are an incredibly cool country. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Would you? Join the conversation tonight at 7 p.m. in a Facebook live session at www. facebook.nl/vvd

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Notes 1 Although recent developments in the Netherlands show a shift towards other targets of exclusion, including antisemitism (e.g., Theirlynck 2022). 2 Camus, R. (2012). Le grand remplacement suivi de Discours d’Orange; Bat Ye’or. (2011). Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. 3 What makes it a conspiracy theory (cf. Coady 2006) is that its proponents argue that this alleged replacement is a deliberate plot by immigrants, aided by “leftist elites”. 4 Two parties have since split of from FvD but not specifcally because FvD embraced the population replacement conspiracy theory. Therefore, these parties (JA21 and Groep Van Haga) have been added to the total count. 5 This is just a part of what mainstreaming can entail, as it is a complex process which can also be instigated bottom up (see Bogerts & Fielitz 2018; Tuters 2018) 6 Westerloo, G. van. (2003). Niet spreken met de bestuurder. De Bezige Bij. 7 Rasoel, M. (1990). De ondergang van Nederland: Land der naïeve dwazen (54). Timmer Prods. 8 Fallaci, O. (2004). La forza della ragione. BUR Rizzoli. 9 This became a widespread sentiment at the time. For example, Angela Merkel in Germany used similar language in 2003 (see www.youtube.com/ watch?v=am1iKqzY9G4). 10 Oostheim, B. (2009, July 3). Het grote Bat Ye’or interview. Hoeiboei. http:// hoeiboei.blogspot.com/2009/07/het-grote-bat-yeor-interview-in-drie.html 11 Brendel, C. (2009, December). Bos is voor een Nederland waar allochtone vrouwen gedwongen een hoofddoek dragen. Hoeiboei. http://hoeiboei.blogspot. com/2009/12/bos-is-voor-een-nederland-waar.html, Jansen, H. (2008, November). De overbrugbaarheid van de kloof tussen de Islam en het Westen. Hoeiboei. http://hoeiboei.blogspot.com/2008/11/de-overbrugbaarheid-van-de-kloof-tussen. html, Selim, N. (2008, April). Islamisering is allang binnengeslopen. Hoeiboei. http://hoeiboei.blogspot.com/2008/04/islamisering-is-allang-binnengeslopen. html, De Geus, (2018, June 2). Scheefpraat. Verzamelde Vertalingen van E.J. Bron. https://ejbron.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/scheefpraat/ 12 Lucky9. (2012, May 12). De geschiedenis van het intellectueel verval van Frankrijk. Verzamelde Vertalingen van E.J. Bron. https://ejbron.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/ de-geschiedenis-van-het-intellectueel-verval-van-frankrijk/, Lucky9. (2012, August 27). Frankrijk is al in staat van oorlog, maar niemand wil het zeggen. Verzamelde Vertalingen van E.J. Bron. https://ejbron.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/ frankrijk-is-al-in-staat-van-oorlog-maar-niemand-wil-het-zeggen/ 13 Jansen, H. (2015, April 25). Hans Jansen – Vervanging. GeenStijl. www.geenstijl. nl/4406121/hans_jansen_6/, Pritt Stift. (2019, December 21). Wereldkaart. Zo snel gaat De Omvolking. GeenStijl. www.geenstijl.nl/5151139/wereldkaart-zosnel-gaat-de-omvolking/; Stef. (2019, August 22). Omvolking. Verzamelde Vertalingen van E.J. Bron. https://ejbron.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/omvolking-6/ 14 The Dutch blog GeenStijl has an entire section that is accessible using the hashtag ‘#omvolking’, which includes a weekly topic discussing the number of asylum seekers that entered the country that week. See www.geenstijl.nl/tag/omvolking (accessed 2022, June 13). 15 See Westerloo, G. van. (2003). Niet spreken met de bestuurder. De Bezige Bij; Bosma, M. (2015). Minderheid in eigen land. Hoe progressieve strijd ontaardt in genocide en ANC-apartheid. Bibliotheca Africana Formicae; Fortuyn, P. (2016). De islamisering van onze cultuur: Nederlandse identiteit als fundament: het woord als wapen. Karakter Uitgevers B.V. 16 See Brendel, C. (2010). De onzichtbare Ayatollah. Van Praag; Fortuyn, P. (2016). De islamisering van onze cultuur: Nederlandse identiteit als fundament: het

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woord als wapen. Karakter Uitgevers B.V.; Hirsi Ali, A. (2015). Ketters: Pleidooi voor een hervorming van de islam. Uitgeverij Augustus; Van Straaten, F. (2016, June 14). Hoort homohaat bij de islam? NRC. www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/06/14/ hoort-homohaat-bij-de-islam-2716701-a1507182 17 E.g., Boiten, J. H. (2016). Nee, Wilders ondermijnt de rechtstaat niet. De Nieuwe Realist. Retrieved June 20 2020, from https://joostniemoller.nl/2016/12/ nee-wilders-ondermijnt-rechtsstaat-open-brief/. Misdefnitie. (2007, June 16). Term “racist” verliest zijn waarde. Misdefnitie. www.misdefnitie.nl/index. php?nieuws=245&pagina=1

References Akilma, A. S. (2020). Islamophobia in the Netherlands. In E. Bayrakli & F. Hafez (Eds.), European Islamophobia Report 2019 (pp. 531–562). SETA. Albertson, B. L. (2015). Dog-Whistle Politics: Multivocal Communication and Religious Appeals. Political Behavior, 37(1), 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11109-013-9265-x Bates, T. R. (1975). Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony. Journal of the History of Ideas, 36(2), 351–366. https://doi.org/10.2307/2708933 Bogerts, L., & Fielitz, M. (2018). “Do You Want Meme War?” Understanding the Visual Memes of the German Far Right. In M. Fielitz & N. Thurston (Eds.), PostDigital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Ofine Consequences in Europe and the US (pp. 137–154). Transcript Verlag. Bolwin, M., & Van Walsum, S. (2017, March 11). Dit zin de tegenhangers van de boze Nederlander. Financieel Dagblad. https://fd.nl/weekend/1345295/populisten-veranderen-vooral-de-prioriteiten-van-kiezers-niet-zozeer-hun-meningen Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. The British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12742 Chatterton Williams, T. (2017, November 27). The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”, The European Thinkers Behind the White-Nationalist Rallying Cry. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/ the-french-origins-of-you-will-not-replace-us Coady, D. (2006). Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate. Routledge. Ebner, J. (2018 ). Counter-Creativity: Innovative Ways to Counter Far-Right Communication Tactics. In M. Fielitz & N. Thurston (Eds.), Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Ofine Consequences in Europe and the US (pp. 169–182). Ebner, J., & Davey, J. (2019, July 7). The “Great Replacement”: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism. ISD. https://www.isdglobal.org/ isd-publications/the-great-replacement-the-violent-consequences-of-mainstreamed-extremism/ EenVandaag/IPSOS. (2023). Zetelpeiling. EenVandaag. https://eenvandaag.avrotros. nl/peilingtrends/politiek/zetelpeiling/ Ekman, M. (2022). The Great Replacement: Strategic Mainstreaming of FarRight Conspiracy Claims. Convergence, 28(4), 1127–1143. https://doi. org/10.1177/13548565221091983 Essed, P. (1991). Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory. SAGE Publications.

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Evans-Pritchard, A., & Clements, J. (2003, March 28). Fortuyn Killed “to Protect Muslims”. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ netherlands/1425944/Fortuyn-killed-to-protect-Muslims.html Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power (2nd ed.). Longman. Ferber, A. L. (2012). The Culture of Privilege: Color-Blindness, Postfeminism, and Christonormativity. Journal of Social Issues, 68(1), 63–77. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2011.01736.x Fernández-Reino, M., Di Stasio, V., & Veit, S. (2022). Discrimination Unveiled: A Field Experiment on the Barriers Faced by Muslim Women in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. European Sociological Review, XX, 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1093/esr/jcac040 Lauwers, A. S. (2019). Is Islamophobia (Always) Racism? Critical Philosophy of Race, 7(2), 306–332. https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.7.2.0306 Legêne, S. (2017). The European Character of the Intellectual History of Dutch Empire. BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 132(2), 110–120. https://doi. org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10344 Linders, N. (2020). Normalizing “The Great Replacement” Theory [Unpublished Master’s thesis, Radboud University]. https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/handle/123456789/10533 Lutz, W. (1989). Beyond Nineteen Eighty-Four: Doublespeak in a Post-Orwellian Age. National Council of Teachers of English. Mepschen, P., Duyvendak, J. M., & Tonkens, E. H. (2010). Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands. Sociology, 44(5), 962–979. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038510375740 Moore, A. (2016). Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theories in Democratic Politics. Critical Review, 28(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2016.1178894 Moufe, C. (2014). Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci. In Gramsci and Marxist Theory (pp. 168–204). Routledge. Poorthuis, F., & Wansink, H. (2012). Pim Fortuyn op herhaling: ‘De islam is een achterlike cultuur’. De Volkskrant. https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/ pim-fortuyn-op-herhaling-de-islam-is-een-achterlijke-cultuur~bee400ca/ Prooijen, J. (2018). The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge. Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism. Penguin Books. Schinkel, W., & van Reekum, R. (2019). Theorie van de kraal: kapitaal - ras - fascisme. Boom. Schulte, A. (2019). De strid om de toekomst: over doemscenario’s en vooruitgang. Cossee. Theirlynck, T. (2022, May 29). Waarom antisemitisme bi FVD niet meer tot ophef leidt. NRC. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/05/29/hoe-antisemitismeterugkwam-in-het-publieke-domein-2-a4130041 Tuters, M. (2018). LARPing & Liberal Tears. Irony, Belief and Idiocy in the Deep Vernacular Web. In M. Fielitz & N. Thurston (Eds.), Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Ofine Consequences in Europe and the US (pp. 37–48). Transcript Verlag. Van Buuren, J. (2016). Doelwit Den Haag? Complotconstructies en systeemhaat in Nederland 2000–2014 [Doctoral dissertation, Universiteit Leiden]. Van Dik, T. A. (2015). Critical Discourse Analysis. In D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton & D. Schifrin (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 466–485). Wiley Blackwell.

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11 FROM CLASHING CIVILIZATIONS TO THE REPLACEMENT OF POPULATIONS The Transformation of Dutch Anti-Immigration Discourse Merijn Oudenampsen

Introduction

In January 2018, the Freedom Party (PVV) of the right-wing populist Geert Wilders organized a demonstration in Rotterdam against the “Islamization” of the Netherlands. Hundreds of sympathizers from a motley collection of far-right groups had heeded the call. Among the participants was an elderly French intellectual, who had travelled there from his illustrious residence – a 14th-century castle on a hilltop in the southwest of France. This was Renaud Camus, the famous author of Le grand remplacement, the book that gave rise to the global far-right conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement”. At the demonstration, Camus was warmly welcomed by Martin Bosma, Wilder’s speechwriter and right-hand man. Bosma shared a selfe with Camus on his Twitter account, stating that he was “impressed” by the “theoretician of Le Grand Remplacement” (Vermaas 2018). As the Dutch journalist Tom Jan Meeus (2020) later pointed out, this was not an isolated remark. Of all Dutch politicians, Bosma has referred to the theory of “replacement” (omvolking, in Dutch) the most, having mentioned the term publicly at least ten times from 2015 onwards. For Meeus, it “underlined the radicalization on that fank and the normalization of that radicalization in the country at large”, considering that the PVV consistently captures around 10–15 per cent of the Dutch vote.1 It is tempting to see the appearance of Camus on the streets of Rotterdam as marking the arrival of replacement conspiracy theory on Dutch shores, inaugurating a new phase of radicalization on the right. Indeed, for many observers, the global spread of replacement conspiracy theory marks a novel phase of radicalization, infuenced by the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-14

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and the global reach of the alt-right movement online (Bleakley 2021; Faber 2018; Main 2018; Stern 2019). But the idea of replacement itself is not all that novel in the Netherlands and is less intellectually indebted to either Camus or the alt-right than often thought. Geert Wilders and Martin Bosma popularized the Eurabia theory as early as 2007, which posits a conspiracy by the European Union to replace the original European population with Muslim immigrants. Even before that, in 2002, the Dutch right-wing populist Pim Fortuyn portrayed Muslim immigrants as a “ffth column”, aiming to “Islamize” the Netherlands with the help of relativist Dutch elites. While Fortuyn’s discourse of clashing civilizations does not amount to a replacement conspiracy theory as such, the basic building blocks are already there: the depiction of Muslim immigration as a deliberate project to undermine the West and the portrayal of elites as accomplices. This chapter argues that the rise of replacement conspiracy theory can only be understood against the background of the decades-long development of the clash of civilizations discourse, which frst rose to prominence in the 1990s. At the time, the end of the Cold War cleared the way for a new Western self-understanding: no longer in opposition to communism and the Soviet Union but, rather, to Islam and Muslim immigrants. Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory played an important role in establishing this worldview. In the Netherlands, right-wing politicians such as Frits Bolkestein, Pim Fortuyn, and Geert Wilders built their political careers on a Dutch version of this theory. Dutch culture, they stated, was under threat by (fundamentalist) Islam. Western civilization needed defending by the right since progressive elites were plagued by cultural relativism. Gradually, the clash of civilizations evolved into a theory of “replacement”. The danger was no longer Islamic fundamentalism but Islam itself, while relativist elites were considered not merely incompetent but actively complicit. Such a longer-term perspective also brings the role of mainstream political parties into play. The conventional view sketches the development of Dutch anti-immigration discourse as a trajectory “from the margins to the mainstream” (Akkerman et al. 2016; Van Kessel 2021; Vossen 2012). It portrays the development of anti-immigration discourse as the prerogative of the extreme right and populist radical right, while the role of the mainstream parties is largely reactive, restricted to accommodating and normalizing that discourse. In-depth analysis, however, shows a more complex dynamic. The frst politician who successfully politicized immigration was the right-wing liberal leader Frits Bolkestein, who kickstarted the Dutch immigration debate years before the emergence of right-wing populism. Right-wing populists such as Fortuyn and Wilders subsequently built on Bolkestein’s legacy and radicalized his immigration critique. Only then did the mainstream parties accommodate these views.

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The Origins of the Clash of Civilizations

The origins of the clash of civilizations theory can be traced back to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Politicians and intellectuals scrambled to make sense of the newly emerging world order. In the summer of 1989, in an essay in The National Interest, Francis Fukuyama (1989) launched his famous thesis on the end of history. In the next issue of the journal, Samuel Huntington, Fukuyama’s former supervisor, dismissed the “end of ideology” argument as an intellectual whim. Instead, Huntington (1989) argued that cultural and religious identities had replaced socioeconomic ideology as “the dominant bases of political action in most societies” in the 1980s. With this response, Huntington already hinted at his own grand narrative. In the summer of 1993, he published “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Afairs. In this essay, he predicted that old ideological oppositions of the Cold War would increasingly give way to confict defned by cultural and religious identity. Huntington (1993, 29) explained that “as people defne their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to see an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ relation existing between themselves and people of diferent ethnicity or religion”. By the end of the 20th century, he contended, the world could be divided into eight world civilizations. Confict would increasingly take place at their borders, as “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future” (Huntington 1993, 22). Especially Western Christian civilization, on the one hand, and Islamic and Confucian civilization, on the other, were seen as likely candidates for future confict. Huntington’s essay could be read in two ways: as a descriptive analysis or as a prescriptive recommendation for elites to make political use of identity. As a descriptive analysis, the argument was rather crude. Critics soon pointed out that historically, most sizable conficts had occurred within rather than between civilizations. The prescriptive nature of Huntington’s theory came to the fore in the introduction of the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. In a famous passage, Huntington (1996, 20) quoted a passage from Michael Dibdin’s novel Dead Lagoon, in which a nationalist demagogue proclaimed: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are”. According to Huntington (1996, 20), this friend/enemy logic was “a grim Weltanschauung for this new era” that simply had to be given heed. “For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity”, Huntington (1996, 20) wrote, “enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations”. He pointed specifcally to Islamic civilization as a potent source of enmity for the West: “[The] centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent” (Huntington 1996, 32).

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While Huntington’s name would become intrinsically connected with the “clash of civilizations”, he did not coin the term. In fact, the British-born Orientalist Bernard Lewis was the one to coin this term, ultimately popularizing it in The Atlantic essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, published in 1990, one month after the beginning of the First Gulf War. Lewis wrote on the rise of Muslim fundamentalism, which he depicted as the return of a deep-seated hostility that Islam as a civilization had always harboured towards the West. “This is no less than a clash of civilizations”, Lewis (1990, 48) contended, “the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both”. In his opinion, it wasn’t Western interventions in the Middle East or Western support for Arabic dictators that led to widespread hostility to the West. He believed that anti-Western sentiment was, above all, culturally and religiously motivated: It goes beyond hostility to specifc interests or actions or policies or even countries and becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such, not only what it does but what it is, and the principles and values that it practices and professes. These are indeed seen as innate evil, and those who promote them or accept them as the “enemies of God”. (Lewis 1990, 48) This became a common trope after the attacks on the Twin Towers. As U.S. president George W. Bush (The White House 2001b) said after 9/11: “Why do they hate us? . . . They hate our freedoms”. Lewis came to this startling conclusion through his view of the entire Muslim world as fundamentalist and inherently opposed to the “godless” West. In his eyes, Muslim fundamentalism was not an extreme or radical interpretation of Islam but rather an authentic revival, a return to the “classical Islamic view”. Samuel Huntington copied this analytical move. In his theory, fundamentalist movements play an important role as authentic representatives of civilizations: they give civilizations their religious identity and “unify” them (1993, 26). As a new ideological discourse, the theory of the clash of civilizations had several concrete political implications. As the French Islam scholar Gilles Kepel noted, Huntington repurposed the Cold War “enemy” image of a centrally organized ideological rival (the Soviet Union) and transposed it onto a world religion that was, in fact, deeply divided. “Islamic civilization” was more in confict with itself than with the West, Kepel (2004, 62–63) dryly commented, pointing to the geopolitical rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia, where the majority of 9/11 hijackers came from, had long been an important Western ally. Islam

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as a civilization was much more fragmented politically, ideologically, and religiously than the Soviet Union was; Mecca was not the Moscow of Islam. At the same time, the rhetoric of the clash of civilizations led to a redefnition of Western identity. Lewis and Huntington emphasized the Christian character of the West’s identity, portraying Western secular modernity as a product of Christianity, as “Judeo-Christian” heritage. Modern liberal values in the West were, thus, assigned a Christian origin and were defned as culturally alien to Islam. The theory suggested that the West and Islam were two cultural monoliths that were fundamentally incompatible and antagonistic to one another. It implied a new ideological confict on a global scale defned by two extreme poles: Muslims’ rejection of the West or Muslims embrace of Western liberal values. In this new civilizational struggle, the strength and vitality of cultures were of central importance. Those who questioned the superiority of Western culture – the “cultural relativists” – came to be seen as dupes at best and traitors at worst. A Cold War Against Islam

The Netherlands soon adopted its own version of the clash of civilizations theory. The beginning can be traced to December 1989, when Francis Fukuyama visited the Netherlands and debated his essay on the end of history at Leiden University with Frits Bolkestein, the soon-to-be leader of the conservativeliberal party (VVD). Bolkestein was a rather exceptional fgure on the Dutch political scene. Having worked for the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Shell in the 1960s and 1970s, Bolkestein had an international outlook. He closely followed the intellectual debates in American neoconservative journals. As a former director of Shell in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, he developed a special interest in Islam. Bolkestein (1992, 101) admitted to being an avid reader of Elie Kedouri, an Iraqi-born British conservative historian of the Middle East, who had worked with Bernard Lewis on a series of publications and shared his hostile view of Islam. Bolkestein’s reaction to Fukuyama, duly published in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant as the “end of history is still some time of”, closely mirrored the response of Huntington. Bolkestein bluntly dismissed Fukuyama’s thesis as “a load of rubbish” and contended that history was far from over. Bolkestein (1989) identifed Islam as a new “ideological rival” for the West: “The fact remains that the world is home to a billion Muslims, many of whom consider their religion superior to the ‘godless, materialistic and selfsh liberalism’ of the West”. He also pointed to demographic factors, to the members of the frustrated Islamic intelligentsia who “see night after night the television images of our postmodern society”, to the fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie and the French controversy over the veil. Bolkestein expanded on his argument in a controversial 1991 lecture at the Congress of the Liberal International in Luzern, Switzerland. When the text

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was published in the Dutch press (Bolkestein 1991), it provoked a storm of reactions. The opinion piece kickstarted the Dutch immigration debate that would shape newspaper headlines in the decade that followed: European civilization, whatever else it may have on its conscience, is imbued with the values of Christianity. Even a liberal politician will recognize that. After a long history with many black pages, rationalism, humanism, and Christianity have spawned a number of fundamental political principles, such as: the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, tolerance and non-discrimination. Liberalism claims universal validity and value for these principles. That is its political view. This means that according to liberalism, a civilization that upholds these principles is superior to one that does not. (Cited in Oudenampsen 2021, 84) According to Bolkestein, the presence of a large number of Muslim migrants posed a threat to European values, which were in need of defending. This was even more urgent because of the “cultural relativism” of progressive intellectuals, who denied the superiority of Western civilization. Much like Lewis and Huntington, who defned Western modernity as a product of “JudeoChristian heritage”, Bolkestein presented European liberalism as rooted in Christian culture and, therefore, as culturally alien to Muslims. In this way, Bolkestein framed the integration of Muslim immigrants into Dutch society as a clash of civilizations, a confict with a rival ideology. When Bolkestein left the Dutch political scene in 1999 to become the European commissioner of the internal market and taxation, it was the rightwing populist Pim Fortuyn who continued and radicalized the Dutch clash of civilizations discourse. He introduced himself to American journalists as “the Samuel Huntington of Dutch politics” (Kaminski 2002). Fortuyn (1997) had written the book Tegen de islamisering van onze cultuur (“Against the Islamization of our Culture”), in which he embraced the use of friend-enemy distinctions. In the book, Fortuyn praised Ronald Reagan and his description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”. According to Fortuyn (1997, 37), it was a “very successful strategy, defnitely worth repeating” when it comes to Islam; a cold war against Islam could provide the West with a renewed sense of purpose. Fortuyn’s opposition to Islam was a key part of his groundbreaking election campaign that began in the autumn of 2001. In the week before 9/11, Fortuyn had published a column in the right-wing weekly Elsevier, calling for a “Cold war against Islam” (Koude oorlog met Islam). “The role of communism” as a threat to Western values “had been taken over by Islam”, Fortuyn (2001) wrote. For obvious reasons, this discourse caught on after the attacks on the Twin Towers. The breakthrough of Fortuyn in the Dutch opinion polls coincided with the global geopolitical shifts in the wake of 9/11. In the second edition

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of Against the Islamization of our Culture, published in response to the Twin Tower attacks, Fortuyn (2001, 9) clarifed the meaning of his call to arms: Before the attacks in the U.S., I called for a cold war against Islam in my penultimate column in Elsevier. I meant by this, just like the previous Cold War – I referred to a war with arguments and words, not a hot, armed war – against communism, an ideological struggle with Islam, with the aim of convincing its adherents to loyally and generously embrace the core norms and values of modernity. Strikingly, a modernized, Western Islam is unattainable in this discourse since Western “modernity” and Islamic “backwardness” are construed as monolithic opposites. Fortuyn (1997, 109) explained that there were “irreconcilable diferences” between the Dutch “Judeo-Christian humanist culture” and the culture of Islam, even in its “liberal guises”. His cold war against Islam is essentially a battle of ideas to win the hearts and minds of Dutch Muslims, to convince them to leave their faith behind and opt for the norms and values of the West. It is important to note that, in the United States, Muslim immigration would not be politicized in this fashion, at least not until the installation of Donald Trump in 2017. Huntington’s book emphasized geopolitics and foreign policy but not domestic immigration. President George W. Bush couched the War on Terror as a struggle against the “axis of evil”: hostile regimes such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that were accused of sponsoring terrorism. But Bush (The White House 2001a) underlined that his administration was fghting terror not Islam as such. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam”, he stated shortly after 9/11. The American people needed to know that attacks on innocent civilian victims “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith” and that the domestic Muslim population should be treated with respect. Shortly before the Dutch parliamentary elections of 2002, Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by an animal rights activist. The murder sent seismic shockwaves through the country. Fortuyn’s now leaderless party (LPF) went on to score a historic election victory, only to quickly implode in the years after because of relentless in-fghting. The Dutch controversy over Islam and immigration, however, had only just begun. In November 2004, columnist and flmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a Dutch Muslim fundamentalist. The country polarized further, and the image began to take root that the Netherlands was, indeed, a local front in the global clash of civilizations. From Clashing Civilizations to the Replacement of Populations

The mantle of Fortuyn was taken over by Geert Wilders, a parliamentarian and former assistant of Frits Bolkestein at the right-wing conservative-liberal party (VVD). It was not immediately apparent that Wilders would follow in

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Fortuyn’s footsteps. While Wilders was an outspoken proponent of a hardline approach towards Muslim fundamentalism and Islamic regimes in the Middle East, he initially adopted a similar stance as the Bush administration. Shortly after 9/11, on a leading talk show on Dutch television, Wilders had distanced himself from Fortuyn’s Islamophobia: In contrast to Pim Fortuyn who calls for a crusade, or what is it, a cold war against Islam – which is reprehensible because it lumps together all Muslims – I have said from the start: there is nothing wrong with Islam . . . It is that small fringe of Muslim extremism. (Thie 2010) After leaving the VVD and founding his own right-wing populist Freedom Party (PVV), Wilders would radically change his position. What he had initially condemned as a “crusade against Islam” would become the all-important focus point of his party. The change was not immediate. In Kies voor vrijheid (“Choose for Freedom”) from 2005, the book in which Wilders frst outlined his ideas and his reasons for breaking away from the VVD, he still distinguished between diferent groups of Muslims. Wilders (2005, 75) explained that the Islamist group who “in fact adheres to a fascist ideology” is an extremist minority. In the Netherlands, it consisted of “a few hundred people” at most; most Muslims were “not extreme, terrorist or criminal”. Strikingly, Wilders accused the Dutch government of “having failed to distinguish between radicals and non-radicals”, which fosters “the image that all imams and all mosques are no good, and in fact all Muslims are no good either”. “The majority of moderate Muslims”, Wilders (2005, 76) complained, “are wholly unjustifably lumped together with malicious people”. With the frst ofcial Freedom Party program Klare Wijn (“Straight Talk”, in English) from 2006, a more generalizing language on Islam appeared. It declared that, “in its political-theological elaboration”, Islam is a “movement that targets Western civilization as such”. Liberal, “truly moderate Muslims”, on the other hand, deserve support. Also, this last caveat disappeared the following year. “I have been saying it for years: there is no such thing as a moderate Islam”, Wilders (2007) wrote counterfactually in an opinion piece in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. He now pleaded for a ban on the Qur’an as such: “The core of the problem is fascist Islam, the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed as laid down in the Islamic Mein Kampf: the Qur’an”. Whereas Wilders had long equated Muslim fundamentalism with fascism, he now targeted the entire religion. As a report by the Council of Europe (2010) pointed out, this deliberate confusion of Muslim extremism and the religion as such was a prominent strategy among European radical rightwing parties at the time. In the aforementioned opinion piece, Wilders (2007)

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wrote that “the pathological aspiration” of Dutch politicians to realize a “utopian moderate Islam” cleared the way for “the transformation of the Netherlands into Netherarabia, a province of the Islamic superstate Eurabia”. At this point, the clash of civilizations theory had morphed into a replacement theory. The Jump to Replacement Theory

One of the fnal feats of Fortuyn’s party before its electoral annihilation in the Dutch parliamentary elections of November 2006 was to organize a conference on Islamic jihadism in May of that year (Ten Hoove 2006). The conference gathered a series of well-known Islamophobic scholars and publicists, including Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Bruce Bawer, Douglas Murray, and Bat Ye’or. They would become key references in the Islamophobic discourse of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party. In particular, the ideas of the Egyptian-born amateur historian Bat Ye’or (a moniker of Gisèle Littman) would become a returning reference in Wilders’ speeches (Vossen 2011). In her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Bat Ye’or (2005) described the existence of a secret conspiracy to replace the European Judeo-Christian population with Muslim immigrants. Central to the story is the Euro-Arab Dialogue, an organization created by the European Economic Community (the precursor to the EU) and the Arab League in the 1970s, in the wake of the oil crisis (Bangstad 2019). In the eyes of Bat Ye’or, this modest diplomatic outft was, in fact, a large covert operation to turn Europe into an Islamic caliphate. This would make the Judeo-Christian population into dhimmis, a traditional Arabic term for the subservient position of Jewish and Christian religious minorities living in Islamic states. According to Bat Ye’or, Western Europe was already living in dhimmitude, a state of mind in which the Western population submitted to Islam since no one dared to criticize Islam out of fear of reprisals. It became one of Wilders’ favourite attack lines. In 2006, he accused the Dutch queen and prime minister Balkenende of being “dhimmis”; they had been too respectful when visiting a Dutch mosque. This replacement theory builds on the clash of civilizations but radicalizes its premises. First, a central characteristic of the clash of civilizations theory is that it projects a centralized rationality on Muslims. Diferent states with majority Muslim populations are supposed to think and act in unison. The Eurabia theory extends this logic to Muslim immigration. The Freedom Party uses the theory to portray immigration from Muslim countries as a coordinated and deliberate project aimed at the gradual colonization of Europe. During a hate speech trial against him in the years 2010–2011, Geert Wilders spoke of “the multiculturalist elites who are fghting an all-out war against their population. The aim is the continuation of mass immigration, resulting in an Islamic Europe – a Europe without freedom: Eurabia” (Van der Valk 2012, 55).

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Second, as we see before, the attitude towards the political establishment has hardened. The complaint towards elites is no longer that they are sufering from political correctness or cultural relativism. Political elites are accused of active complicity. The Freedom Party’s main ideologue and speechwriter Martin Bosma wrote in his bestselling book De schijn-élite van de valsemunters (“The Fake Elite”) about a pact between leftist, multicultural elites, and Islam to turn the Dutch population into dhimmis. “Islam has already won to a degree. Dhimmitude has made its mark”, Bosma (2011, 121) wrote. Third, the tone has turned grim and apocalyptic. Originally, the idea behind the “clash of civilizations” was that it could be won. Bolkestein, Fortuyn, and Wilders originally argued that Muslims could be won for the West. Gradually, this optimism faded away. Wilders began speaking of a “tsunami of Islamization”. “All over Europe the lights are going out”, he declared at the end of his hate speech trial (Van der Valk 2012, 46). In the following years, he repeatedly threatened with civil war: “I hope that we can say farewell to Prime Minister Rutte in the Netherlands, to make sure there is no civil war” (HP/De Tijd 2016). This development was further enhanced when Thierry Baudet and his right-wing populist party Forum for Democracy (FvD) emerged as competitors during the parliamentary elections of 2017. Both parties now compete in ofering a range of conspiracy theories that seem to be able to happily coexist, from cultural Marxism to the Great Reset, from the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan to Le grand remplacement. Most of these theories contain similarities to the work of Bat Ye’or but are less focused on the Islamic nature of immigration, and the latest theories contain more traditional racial and antisemitic undertones. Conclusion

In the 1990s, a new anti-immigration discourse emerged in the Netherlands, which depicted Muslim immigration as a threat to Western civilization. Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory served as the most prominent intellectual inspiration. A central characteristic of this discourse was to attribute a centralized rationality to Islam. Dutch right-wing politicians soon expanded and radicalized this discourse, applying it to immigration from Muslim countries. With the Eurabia conspiracy theory, immigration was seen as a deliberate project to colonize the West. In recent years, the Eurabia theory has given way to a larger proliferation of replacement conspiracy theories, with more traditional racial and antisemitic undertones. Note 1 Thierry Baudet, the other well-known right-wing populist in the Netherlands, has also captured attention with his references to replacement conspiracy theory, but his party Forum for Democracy is electorally a far more marginal force.

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References Akkerman, T., Lange, S. D., & Rooduijn, M. (2016). Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Into the Mainstream? Routledge. Bangstad, S. (2019). Bat Ye’or and Eurabia. In S. Mark (Ed.), Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (pp. 170–183). Oxford University Press. Bat Ye’or. (2005). Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Farleigh Dickinson Press. Bleakley, P. (2021). Panic, Pizza and Mainstreaming the Alt-Right: A Social Media Analysis of Pizzagate and the Rise of the QAnon Conspiracy. Advance online publication. Current Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921211034896 Bolkestein, F. (1989, December 9). Einde geschiedenis laat nog even op zich wachten. De Volkskrant. Bolkestein, F. (1991, September 12). De integratie van minderheden. De Volkskrant. Bolkestein, F. (1992). Woorden hebben hun betekenis. Prometheus. Bosma, M. (2011). De schin-élite van de valsemunters: Drees, extreem rechts, de sixties, nuttige idioten, Groep Wilders en ik. Bert Bakker. Faber, S. (2018, April 5). Is Dutch Bad Boy Thierry Baudet the New Face European Alt-Right? The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ is-dutch-bad-boy-thierry-baudet-the-new-face-of-the-european-alt-right/ Fortuyn, P. (1997). Tegen de islamisering van onze cultuur: Nederlandse identiteit als fundament. Bruna. Fortuyn, P. (2001, August 25). Koude oorlog met islam. Elsevier/Pim Fortuyn. https:// www.pimfortuyn.com/pim-fortuyn/archief-columns/101-koude-oorlog-met-islam Fukuyama, F. (1989). The End of History? The National Interest, 16, 3–18. HP/De Tijd. (2016, July 19). De oorlogstaal van Wilders: Eerst “revolte”, nu “burgeroorlog”. HP/De Tid. https://www.hpdetid.nl/2016-07-19/oorlogstaalwilders-revolte-burgeroorlog/ Huntington, S. P. (1989). No Exit: The Errors of Endism. The National Interest, 17, 3–11. Huntington, S. P. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Afairs, 72(3), 22–49. Huntington, S. P. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster. Kaminski, M. (2002, May 7). Pim’s Misfortune. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com Kepel, G. (2004). The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. Harvard University Press. Lewis, B. (1990, September 1). The Roots of Muslim Rage. The Atlantic, 266(3), 47–60. https://www.theatlantic.com/world/ Main, T. J. (2018). The Rise of the Alt-Right. Brookings Institution Press. Meeus, T. J. (2020, November 24). Baudet, Wilders en de term “omvolking”. NRC. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/11/24/baudet-wilders-en-de-term-omvolkinga4021157 Oudenampsen, M. (2021). The Rise of the Dutch New Right: An Intellectual History of the Rightward Shift in Dutch Politics. Routledge. Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. (2010). Islam, Islamism and Islamophobia in Europe. https://pace.coe.int/en/ Stern, A. M. (2019). Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination. Beacon Press. Ten Hoove, S. (2006, February 18). Bi de LPF zeggen ze nu wat Pim niet durfde. De Volkskrant. www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/bi-de-lpf-zeggen-ze-nuwat-pim-niet-durfde~b1ad5a02/

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Thie, M. (2010, February 24). Geert Wilders had in 2001 niets tegen de Islam, maar nu wel. NRC. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2010/02/24/geert-wilders-had-in2001-niets-tegen-de-islam-maar-nu-wel-a1481501 Van der Valk, I. (2012). Islamofobie en discriminatie. Pallas Publications. Van Kessel, S. (2021). The Netherlands: How the Mainstream Right Normalized the Silent Counter-Revolution. In C. R. Kaltwasser & T. Bale (Eds.), Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis (pp. 193–215). Cambridge University Press. Vermaas, P. (2018, January 22). “Omvolking” komt uit een Frans kasteel. NRC. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/01/22/kasteelheer-slaat-alarm-over-cultuurvan-europa-a1589332 Vossen, K. (2011). Classifying Wilders: The Ideological Development of Geert Wilders and His Party For Freedom. Politics, 31(3), 179–189. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9256.2011.01417.x Vossen, K. (2012). Van marginaal naar mainstream? Populisme in de Nederlandse geschiedenis. BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 127(2), 28–54. https:// doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.8072 The White House: President George W. Bush. (2001, September 17). “Islam is Peace” Says President [Press release]. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ index.html The White House: President George W. Bush. (2001, September 20). Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People [Press release]. https://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/index.html Wilders, G. (2005). Kies voor vriheid: Een eerlik antwoord. Groep Wilders. Wilders, G. (2007, August 8). Genoeg is Genoeg: verbied de Koran. De Volkskrant. https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/genoeg-is-genoeg-verbied-dekoran~b014930c/

PART III

Islamophobia and Replacement

12 THE BODY NEVER “FALLS OUT” OF ISLAMOPHOBIA Sahar Ghumkhor

Introduction

What happened to the bodies of the victims of the World Trade Centre? In the months and years after the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, the answer to this question has evolved but remains unsatisfactory. The debris taken to a Staten Island landfll called Fresh Kills was carefully and painfully examined, which proved to be an impossible task considering the small bodily fragments found from the power of the explosions. In addition, ofcials faced demands from the victims’ families, who had not only been urgent in their request to have the victims identifed but also the hijackers, insisting they did not want the bodies of their loved ones to have any traces of the hijackers’ DNA (Bhattacharya 2016). Such traces were perceived as a continued violation and afiction – an unbearable proximity between the victims and the perpetrators. Not all bodies were recovered, and the project continues. In the months and years that followed Fresh Kills, the original kill zone claimed more bodies – construction workers, medics, and others – from the toxins of the debris (Picard 2021). The US$80 million that went into these eforts and the national memorials that were set up indicate that the pieces of fesh that formed the symbolic boundaries of the nation had been shattered and desired restoration. By identifying in the debris of this shattering event and putting together the uncontaminated fesh, the national body imagined as a whole could be restored. As for the hijackers, no one claimed what was left of their bodies. They remained foreign to all. I narrate these facts not to add to the seemingly sacred afective architecture built around the events of 9/11 but to identify, in this loss and efort of DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-16

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restoration, a stirring racial imagination. It is not simply a powerful nation staggering back from the shock of its own vulnerability but the collision of worlds and bodies and the suspected violence of the Other’s will fnally realized and found unbearable. The “suicide bomber” in the Western imaginary has marked a transgression of modern sensibilities on and about the integrity of the body and liberal conditions for “just war” (Asad 2010). Its horror lies not simply with the shock at someone’s willing self-annihilation but its capacity to blur victim and perpetrator, its inside/outside, destroying and contaminating those who are in proximity (Wilcox 2015). A will that is willing to destroy the self is the intruding presence of what Jacques Lacan (2006, 690) calls the Other’s question – “who are you and what am I to you?” The suicide bomber “within” is the most potent expression of what Derrida has observed as the West’s autoimmunity in its war against terrorism (Borradori 2003) – or in Lacanian parlance, the return of the repressed as an internal aggression against faux boundaries of military/civilian, civilization/barbarism, secular/ religion, freedom/unfreedom. This autoimmunity that undermines the democratic ethics of liberal states is not a spiralling calculation, which Derrida seems to suggest, but rather is inherent to the racial confgurations of the liberal nation-state and its desire for white restoration. It is this investment in white restoration that this chapter traces in the atmosphere of securitized concerns with Islam and Muslims. Ruptured skin and vulnerable fesh taint the racial imagination, exposing white paranoia that has only fuelled and corroborated the neurotic preoccupation with Islam and its proximity, as what is now called Islamophobia. Islamophobia is not simply about fear and hostility towards Muslims but a problematization of Muslims as Muslims (Sayyid 2014; Kundnani 2014). Muslims are spoken of and depicted as a menace whose cultural incompatibility lingers. Islam, in the paranoid imagination, has come to embody a “culture of death” (Asad 2007, 1) that threatens the demographic future of a nation and the cultural integrity of what it means to be the West. Islam holds an “innate sense of violence that, at best, [is] barely contained, and lurks in Muslim subjectivities, waiting to be activated through processes of radicalization, extremism, Islamism, and ultimately terrorism” (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020, 681). What is curious is how much the body has been central to Islamophobia and detecting the menacing presence of the plotting Muslim and how its imagined organic feshly surface can both secure and challenge meaning, restore the nation, and imagine its destruction. In the past two decades, we can consider that Western interrogations of the “Muslim Question” (Norton 2013; Farris 2014) have not strayed too far from the interrogation of what Muslims are doing with their bodies. It appears often in national debates with this subtext, if not directly, with charges of misogyny and sexism (the veil, honour crimes, and forced marriage), sexual perverseness (polygamy, FGM), and innate violence awaiting activation.

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The body in Islamophobia is vulnerable. It is imagined as a sufering which stems from an ailment but whose symptoms can only be spoken of. Yet it causes the decline of the entire nation’s health. In this chapter, I examine how the securitized political climate around Muslims after 9/11 has induced paranoia in the body politic, manifesting in a hypochondriac state where knowledge of terror against the nation, the national body, is never enough. The Muslim as a foreign agent is like a virus; it both infects and devastates the healthy body. The national body is at risk of conversion that must be monitored and surveilled for any signs of contamination. The body can turn against itself and self-destruct. The “Muslim Question” is steeped in the paranoia of the Other’s question: Che vuoi? What does the Other want from me? Or, in this case, in the plotting Muslim’s desire to replace “us”. To turn to the body is also to remind us that Islamophobia is rooted in nativist fears of what it means to be Western. This chapter examines the reoccurring themes of demographic threats and white extinction in the problematization of Muslims as Muslims by the increasing mobilization of Europeans, Australians, and Americans as “white people” under calls against white genocide and replacement anxiety. To turn to the body in Islamophobia allows us to recognize, as Salman Sayyid (2014) argues, the persistence of the racial in the post-racial world (cf. Goldberg 2015). The body, to borrow from Derek Hook (2012, 3), “never ‘falls out’ of” Islamophobia, despite the repetitive disavowal of its status as a racism. Like the Jew who is almost but not quite the same (Bhabha 1984), the Muslim body’s racial ambivalence produces intense anxiety about boundary crossing. Violation of boundaries occurs in all kinds of ways. In our time of disease, for instance, the pandemic has veiled us all in our masks. To cover one’s face today is no longer an antisocial act but the observance of the public good. That slippage to sameness, to disappear into obscurity, invokes histories of fascist anxieties about the swarming “mass” of inner entrails that spills out from pierced skin, projected onto Otherness, women and children who lurk within, threatening the structural rigidity required to defend the nation, the phallic armour of skin and boundary of the “national body” (Theweleit 1989). The terror of the mass haunts current anxieties of “white genocide” and “replacement”, signalling fragmentation. Racism Without Race: The Other’s Question

After the 2019 shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by Australian Brenton Tarrant, which killed 51 Muslims, then Australian senator for the Conservative National Party Fraser Anning stated, “The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration programme which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the frst place” (Lewis 2019). While Anning’s statement was condemned across

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political party lines, its delivery in a mainstream political setting tells us what has often been declared about Islamophobia: it has passed the dinner table test – a reference to how speaking of Muslims as a problem has gone mainstream and become a shared sentiment. Anning’s statement requires a critical examination of what it tells us about how contemporary racism functions, in particular, through Islamophobia. The emphasis on the “real cause of bloodshed” is not the massacre of 51 Muslims and dozens injured but concerns about bodies in contact, demographic threats, and cultural menace, which has reinvigorated white supremacist and extreme right movements throughout the country and around the globe. During his maiden speech a year earlier in the Australian Parliament, Anning had suggested a ban on Muslim immigration as a “fnal solution” and insisted that most migrants should come from European, white Christian backgrounds (Yaxley & Borys 2018). A reference to the extermination of Jews during the Nazi period as the fnal answer to the “Jewish Question” inspires putting a stop to Muslims arriving at the borders in the frst place. Anning here exemplifes another key feature of the white supremacist current today, by re-casting a race agenda in support of a European Christian identity through opposition to Islam and Muslims. The Australian political landscape has been increasingly shaped by the extreme right consisting of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, skinheads, and conservative nationalists. At its core, the prevailing sentiments across these diverse groups are hostility towards equality and a fear of invasion (Mondon 2013). Examples of the efects of this alliance around a feeling of being besieged were witnessed in the 2005 Cronulla riots, which served as a catalyst for a racial re-awakening, a “White civil uprising” (Fleming & Mondon 2018; Fleming 2021). The emergence of Reclaim Australia in 2015 with several rallies held throughout the country has also been seen as the most signifcant mobilization of the extreme right since the Hanson years. After Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential win in 2016, another wave of extreme right was discerned. These communities regularly splinter, persistently resurface in different forms, and proliferate online. In addition to the Christchurch attacks where Tarrant was reported to have frequented the forums of these groups, their online activities have spilt onto the streets of major Australian cities in opposition to multiculturalism, such as the clashes in 2016 in Melbourne as well as transnational terror plots with the white supremacist network, The Base (Wilson 2021). The turn to the far right as a reaction to perceived loss that cultivated a state of “worrying about one’s nation” (Hage 2003), whether provoked by immigrants, multiculturalism, Muslims, Jews, Black people, Aboriginal peoples, and, in recent years, critical race theory has fed a “defence nationalism”, which re-establishes fantastical boundaries of “inside” and “outside” (Gillespie 2021). In the disillusioned fallout with mainstream parties and

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proclamations of “crises” (real or otherwise) where a narrative construction lays bare truth claims about what it is that is being claimed (Roitman 2013, 3), the “white nation” (Hage 1998) has found new defences that quickly slip into paranoia. In Anning’s speech, what can be discerned is a yearning for renewal of a White Australia policy, which had prioritized immigration from Europe and North America and formally ended in the 1970s, recast as a national security concern and a culturalist defence against refugees, immigration, and particularly Muslims, who occupy both categories (Fleming & Mondon 2018). A multiculturally diverse Australia reasserted in the wake of white supremacist acts of “defence” provokes a paranoid nationalism evolving into the dominant cultural expression of the national character while fuelling current waves of the extreme right. As a result, one is called to fear and care more for the nation (Hage 2003, 22). As Hage explains, paranoid nationalism emerges when such fears frst managed at the borders are turned inwards, within the nation, where borders are “disordered” (Hage 2003, 32). We see the creeping terror which plagued the 20th-century fascist imagination of the soft feminine mass spilling into the body politic, threatening to engulf the phallic wholeness that shields the nation (Theweleit 1989). Paranoia, for Hage, emerges when fear grows in the imagined national subject who fails to get nurtured by “the motherlands” (Hage 2003, 39), and yet hope remains as a “desire for the breast”, for exclusive recognition (Hage 2003, 41–42). But as Theweleit (1989) notes in his examination of white terror in European fascist literature, this search for security is neither an oedipal desire for the mother (as there was never a union to begin with) nor a desire for a father. Rather, it is a desire for a cohesive body with clear perimeters to announce an exalted self. Violence and exclusion become a way of fnding a post-oedipal security that is fatherless and motherless. At the same time, the racial paranoia in the “exalted subject”, who is distinct for nation-building (Thobani 2007, 3), is stirred in a liberal multicultural Australia and its new sensibilities towards diversity and post-racial aspirations. The emphasis on multiculturalism and Muslim immigration enables the extreme right to position themselves as defenders of democratic values such as free speech (Tyrer 2013, 26), women’s rights, and “sexual politics” (Butler 2008). A growing fear of civilizational decline frames concerns for white genocide and replacement theory. Racial themes of contagion, demographic shifts, and miscegenation have been revisited under the veneer that Islam is a religion but proceeds to racialize it as a dangerous diference that exhibits boundary crossing, transgressing the borders of bodies, cultures, and futures. Emphasis on declining white populations mobilizes biological forms of racism but increasing emphasis on “Western civilization” in opposition to Islam has enabled not only a more sophisticated form of racism to appear via Islamophobia –

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to have one’s racism without racism – but it has also made other forms of racism possible. What is the provocation that drives the interrogation of Muslim bodies? At the base of the “Muslim Question” is the haunting ontological tension that Jacques Lacan calls the Other’s question (2006): At the heart of Islamophobia are a series of probes about Islamic jouissance – what do Muslims do with their bodies? What does the Other’s enjoyment mean to us? These questions are riddled with a sense of being overwhelmed by the Other, stirring a paranoia that demands answers yet refuses a satisfactory answer (Ghumkhor 2020). Paranoia is also about proximity and the body is central to its surveillance. It is not surprising then that Islamophobia fnds frequent expression through Muslim bodies, eating habits, dress codes, and sexual and gender practices. Islamophobia signals the phobic dimension of racism, which attests to its preoccupation with proximity. Racism, as Stuart Hall (2007) reminds us, is a “fear of living with diference”. This fear of racial proximity is evident in Anning’s statement about the presence of Muslims within Australia as a provocation for violence. Islamophobia materializes through worrying about what Žižek (1993) describes as a theft of jouissance (“our” enjoyment) and how contact with other bodies or the possibility of an Other jouissance will be inevitable and all-consuming. The Other’s question – percolating in debates about the veil, halal certifcation, sharia law, and mosque construction – is simply more than an irrational hostility towards Muslims. They are symptoms of a crisis of border disintegration, bodies in contact, and the haunting question: what do those bodies mean for the nation? Bodily Terror

If we consider the post-9/11 condition as a continuous misdiagnosis of security by pursuing dangerous phantasms to secure the body politic in paranoid nationalism, Islamophobia presents as a hypochondriac condition with the question: what ails the body? Like hypochondria, Islamophobia presents the body as a question, a body that can only be reconstituted by attending to the foreign symptom, the source of its ailment. The Other’s perennial question – what is more than oneself – in psychoanalytic terms, is a state of hysteria. The hysterical subject is a believer who commits to total knowledge and is in search of an Other to reafrm the possibility of its truth. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud (2001, 9) identify hysteria as a “memory of a trauma . . . [that] acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that continues to work”. Haunted by this disruption of the foreign, the hysteric’s question is driven by a belief that there is a truth to be had that can satisfy what troubles it. What is the link between hysteria as a condition that sufers from perpetual failed recollection and that of paranoia, which in the psychoanalytic sense is

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a condition of refusing lack as an exalted (knowing) subject? As Paul Verhaeghe (2006) observes, the hysteric searches for an authority who knows, and the paranoid looks for believers to lead. The growing presence of Muslims in the West, under the embrace of refugees and the multicultural diversity of those who enjoy diferently yet have equal rights, raises hysterical questions that are shot through with paranoid nationalism about the national body: what does it mean for Western jouissance? Where do I locate my jouissance? Is my body enough? This calls for a phallic authority, such as the nation and Western civilization, which race ofers and only the body can secure. If hysteria is a memory of a trauma that acts like a foreign body, knowledge in the Islamophobic imagination is already known through a perfect memory of a nation once whole but intruded upon, bringing disease. The prevailing proclamations in the extreme right of white genocide and replacement anxiety presuppose a healthy body politic before infection. The anxious preoccupation with the body in the paranoid imaginings of Islamophobia is a form of what Julia Borossa and Caroline Rooney call “collective hypochondria”. Hypochondria is a condition of searching for symptoms where there are none (Borossa & Rooney 2014, 13). It is a hysterical preoccupation (what if?) with the health of the body, a terror of the invisible that lurk, and a dissatisfaction with knowledge. The nation is imagined not only as a unifed biological body but also as a political body (Mitchell 2007) subject to fragmenting. In Derrida’s immunity metaphor, which he uses to diagnose the post-9/11 condition, the body is both an internal enemy needing protection and, in a “quasi-suicidal fashion”, working to destroy its own protection (cited in Borradori 2003, 92). Terrorism and its racialized formation of Muslims as the enemy have been compared to that of a cancer, a virus, with hidden sleeper cells waiting to be activated. We can see this fear of Islam as a contagion in the halal certifcation campaign in Australia, which called for a ban on halal-certifed brands. Campaigners, including senators such as Pauline Hanson, insisted certifcation fees fund terrorism and support the “Islamifcation” of Australia. The foreign that potentially contaminates fuels stories of undisciplined bodies of young Muslims, mainly men but increasingly women, who are susceptible to external codes of meaning, such as receiving radical ideas of jihad from abroad and then being “groomed” into acting on these violent ideas in their Western “host” country. The threat, once perceived as everywhere, has penetrated the national and corporeal border. In this paranoid hypochondriac state, the body becomes the source of terror. A thesis of “white decline” emerges in this paranoid preoccupation with the body politic, centred on genocide and replacement, driven by a conspiracy with a calamity befalling “Western civilization”. Paranoia perforates the motives of Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, who released his “manifesto” the morning before he attacked two mosques. Titled The Great

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Replacement (2019), the manifesto is focused on mass immigration and high fertility rates of immigrants replacing white Westerners and the inevitability of a race war. Throughout the text, Tarrant is fxated on the Other’s desire that appears as a biological weapon that invades, out-breeds, and overpopulates Western countries, eventually replacing them and bringing on “ethnic”, “cultural”, and “racial” replacement – what he declares as “white genocide”. If words do not express this existential crisis, images have proven to be efectual in mainstreaming white supremacist concerns with the widespread use of memes in extreme right networks (McSwiney et al. 2021). Often these memes will include heavily veiled women and angry bearded men as a mass of invaders. In contrast, blonde, blue-eyed fathers, mothers, and children are depicted as innocent and vulnerable to invasion. Demonstrating the international sentiments around white decline, the replacement thesis is borrowed from French novelist Renaud Camus’ book The Great Replacement (2011), which centres on attacks on French citizenship, language, and culture and their increasing meaninglessness to Muslims who insist on being French and being culturally diferent. But, as many contributions in this book show, the notion of replacement has a longer history and fnds a recent predecessor in the conspiracy of “Eurabia” – a plot centred on elites selling out European natives for oil and allowing for Muslim demographic shifts (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020). Islam as a contagion has reappeared in Western moral panics about Muslim plots such as the 2005 Cronulla riots, where Arabs and Muslims were spoken of as a cultural menace and an “ethnic cleansing unit” was brandished. It circulates in government policies of counterterrorism, countering violent extremism, and conspiracies about “Islamifcation” by a radical Islam, such as “Londonistan” (2006) or the Trojan Horse afair (2014). While the extreme right may show symptoms of this Islamophobic hypochondria more openly, the same paranoia has seeped into the body politic and the public imagination about Muslims. The body that carries excess belief or an Other belief is an alien body that can compromise the nation. Islam is often imagined as a “disease” that is now metastasizing. In 2017 in Australia, One Nation’s leader Pauline Hanson described Islam as a disease that “we” need to “vaccinate” against (Remeikis 2017). Refecting on disease as a metaphor, Susan Sontag (1978) discerns it as a marker of wrong, the alien, and social disorder. Even in our time of disease where the metaphor has expanded to project suspicion on all bodies, pandemic anxiety is still expressed by casting Muslim social life as particularly contagious and dangerous for public health. In Australia, a third lockdown saw public housing towers with a signifcantly higher population of Muslims go into immediate lockdown not done to any other community, later described by the Victorian ombudsman as a human rights violation. Even in a pandemic, some bodies seemed to be more contagious.

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Seeking refuge from the foreign body, the extreme right ofers an answer to the exhausting questions that drive Islamophobia even as it goes mainstream by ofering an ideal healthy body that has been violated and needs restoration. The body as the source of all knowledge projects ideals as was the case in fascist ideology, which Mangan (2000, 58) identifes in the image of the “superman”: the ideal and immortal physical being. This is what Theweleit (1989, 162) traces in the fascist fantasy of a “mechanized body”, an outer shield, holding and disciplining the multicultural feminine masses so they do not spill out. Imagined loss has given new life to the politics of the fesh and its entanglement with nationhood, the defence of “Western civilization”, and the body that occupies its exalted values spanning the globe from Europe to New Zealand. This singular body comes to represent a “white ummah” (Bhatt 2021), a perverse appropriation of the Islamic notion of a community united before God but here invoked to unite under the shield of whiteness, galvanizing its exclusive members and its ardent warriors who are willing to violently cleanse it from contamination. The Fear of Sameness

Echoing the extreme right’s claims of a superior Western civilization needing to be defended, in 2015 former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott declared “all cultures are not equal” and insisted that a problem resides within Islam that requires fxing (Conifer 2015). The refusal to see Islam as equal but to insist on its diference, however, gestures to a deeper anxiety that fuels replacement theory. What is at the heart of the white fear of being replaced is the possibility that the Other’s jouissance will not only be recognized but potentially more desirable, overwhelming who we think we are. Antagonism to multiculturalism, liberalism, diversity, and globalism is perceived as accommodating for the Other’s jouissance and, therefore, having equalizing efects. We can consider this “crisis” as ironically pitting whiteness against sameness. A fear of the communist efect that fattens diference to sameness is transposed to white genocide. What of a greater terror than white people who have historically been in a position of privilege – imagined in full recognition – seeing themselves as no longer superior to others but as equals? The paranoid fear of losing privilege is decried as replacement, being rendered irrelevant, or equating it with being extinguished. A death by equality. This hysteric frustration is discerned in the failure of knowledge of Western security and its capacity to protect the body, wrestling with the historical hauntings of a vision of freedom that was never guaranteed nor uniformly interpreted. Therefore, it is obvious that when corporeal and cultural boundaries blur, violence often comes to displace language as the symbolic basis for the perfect memory, cleansing hysterical ambiguities.

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To return to Derrida’s autoimmunity metaphor, what is revealed is the Western defence of “our” freedom turns against the body as the internal enemy creating the very condition for replacement and white genocide. The point here is not that Western values are what constitutes the West (as Derrida seems to be suggesting), but if the War on Terror is turned towards an internal enemy, it has destabilizing efects in two ways: just as Western values of freedom can potentially be actualized in all bodies, the internalized enemy also means that all bodies are potentially suspect. Not only is the image of the Muslim riddled with the existentialist threat of a biological weapon, but “replacement” gestures to a rejection. What is this rejection but a feeling of exclusion, driving the determination of One Nation’s leader Pauline Hanson’s defence that “it’s okay to be white” (cf. Bourke 2018); in the mood of Trumpism, the demand to maintain historical monuments and symbols of colonial fgures; or repressed in Tarrant’s (2019) paranoid repetition “It’s the birth rates, it’s the birth rates, it’s the birth rates”? This traumatic experience with sameness raises the possibility that Muslims might be more productive to the nation. Conclusion

In a highly securitized climate where communities are increasingly defenceless against the necropolitics of sovereign will (Mbembe 2003), the feeling of being rejected and, therefore, replaced is a symptom of the blurring conditions of postcolonial recognition. Just as all bodies can potentially be recognized within the liberal multicultural, in the biopolitical calculus of the security state, all bodies are potentially vulnerable. White fear of decline and replacement is animated by this vulnerability experienced as perceived loss in an exalted status where white jouissance can be had. With such high stakes, the body matters for Islamophobia, both in what body it defends against as well as the body it exalts as the one whose enjoyment alone matters. Seen as a hypochondria, Islamophobia’s anxiety about racial proximity imagines Muslims as a contagion, infecting the body, which presents with “radicalization” and “extremism” that compromises the integrity of the national body and drives a deeper fear of what diversity and inclusion mean for “Western civilization”. The body exhibiting symptoms of contamination reappears in one other form with destructive consequences: how it can incite extreme reactions to cure it. Anning’s Senate speech that describes non-European immigration in Australia as a problem needing a “fnal solution”, casts immigration as blurring national boundaries and the contact of bodies as a provocation. The fear of being replaced turned violent appears as a defence, a rational inevitability to contain the disease where it is most concentrated: their places of worship and community, such as a mosque. In Anning’s

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response, we see traces of the conversion anxiety witnessed in the fear of the “suicide bomber” and halal certifcation debates as a mode of replacement while presenting “suicide bomber” Tarrant’s actions as being radicalized. Yet, there is a deeper unconscious at work. Like the “suicide bomber” whose mutilated body is the original scene of “9/11” trauma, Tarrant’s violence, too, is self-sacrifcial for a higher purpose. The blurring and risk of contamination has already been realized, not where Anning identifes it in immigration, but in the very identifcation with the Muslim as a potential suicide bomber threatening to rip apart the national body, confessing that the plotting Muslim spoken of already belongs to the Islamophobic imagination. The fear of an equalizing jouissance signals the disappearance of the exalted national subject into mass diversity, which is the hysterical preoccupation that drives Islamophobia. References Asad, T. (2007). On Suicide Bombing. Columbia University Press. Asad, T. (2010). Thinking About Terrorism and Just War. Cambridge Review of International Afairs, 23(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557570902956580 Bhabha, H. (1984). Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. October, 28, 125–133. https://doi.org/10.2307/778467 Bhatt, C. (2021). White Extinction: Metaphysical Elements of Contemporary Western Fascism. Theory, Culture & Society, 38(1), 27–52. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276420925523 Bhattacharya, S. (2016, October 19). Who Owns the Dead? The Atrocity of 9/11 Casts a Long Shadow. New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/ mg23230961-100-picking-up-the-pieces/. Borossa, J., & Rooney, C. (2014). Fortress Hypochondria: Health and Safety. In L. Auestad (Ed.), Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (pp. 5–19). Karnac. Borradori, G. (2003). Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. In Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. University of Chicago Press. Bourke, L. (2018, October 15). Coalition Backs Pauline Hanson’s “It’s OK to Be White” Motion. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/coalition-backs-pauline-hanson-s-it-s-ok-to-be-white-motion-20181015-p509tw.html. Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12742 Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (2001). The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume 24. Vintage Publishing. Butler, J. (2008). Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00176.x Conifer, D. (2015, December 9). Tony Abbott Calls for “Religious Revolution” Inside Islam, Defends Controversial 2014 Budget Measures as “Justifiable and Right”. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-09/ tony-abbott-defends-controversial-2014-budget/7012190.

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Farris, S. R. (2014). From the Jewish Question to the Muslim Question. Republican Rigorism, Culturalist Diferentialism, and Antinomies of Enforced Emancipation. Constellations, 21(2), 296–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12087 Fleming, A. (2021, March 21) How Do You Solve a Problem Like Extremism? Overland. https://overland.org.au/2021/03/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-extremism. Fleming, A., & Mondon, A. (2018). The Radical Right in Australia. In J. Rydgren (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (pp. 650–666). Oxford University Press. Ghumkhor, S. (2020). The Political Psychology of the Veil: The Impossible Body. Palgrave Macmillan. Gillespie, L. (2021). The Psychosocial Imaginaries of Defence Nationalism: Far-Right Extremism in Australia and the UK. Palgrave Macmillan. Goldberg, D. T. (2015). Are We All Postracial Yet? Polity Press. Hage, G. (1998). White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Pluto Press Australia. Hage, G. (2003). Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Pluto Press. Hall, S. (2007). Living with Diference: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Bill Schwarz. Soundings, 37, 148–158. Hook, D. (2012). A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid. Psychology Press. Kundnani, A. (2014). The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. Verso. Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton. Lewis, S. (2019, March 16). Teen Eggs Australian Senator Who Blamed Immigration for New Zealand Mosque Shootings. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ teen-eggs-australian-senator-fraser-anning-today-who-blamed-muslim-immigration-new-zealand-mosque-shootings-2019-03-16/. Mangan, J. A. (2000). Global Fascism and the Male Body: Ambitions, Similarities, and Dissimilarities. In J. A. Mangan (Ed.), Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon – Global Fascism (pp. 1–26). Frank Cass Publishers. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. https://muse.jhu. edu/article/39984 McSwiney, J., Vaughan, M., Heft, A., & Hofmann, M. (2021). Sharing the Hate? Memes and Transnationality in the Far Right’s Digital Visual Culture. Information, Communication & Society, 24(16), 2502–2521. https://doi.org/10.1080/13 69118X.2021.1961006 Mitchell, T. (2007). Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity. Critical Inquiry, 33(2), 277–290. https://doi.org/10.1086/511494 Mondon, A. (2013). The Mainstreaming of Extreme Right in France and Australia: A Populist Hegemony? Routledge. Norton, A. (2013). On the Muslim Question. Princeton University Press. Picard, M. (2021, September 7). 9/11: The Controversial Story of the Remains of the World Trade Center. Conversation. https://theconversation.com/9-11-the-controversial-story-of-the-remains-of-the-world-trade-center-167481. Remeikis, A. (2017, March 24). Pauline Hanson Says Islam is a Disease Australia Needs to “Vaccinate.” Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/pauline-hanson-says-islam-is-a-disease-australia-needs-to-vaccinate20170324-gv5w7z.html.

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Roitman, J. (2013). Anti-Crisis. Duke University Press. Sayyid, S. (2014). A Measure of Islamophobia. Islamophobia Studies Journal, 2(1), 10–25. https://doi.org/10.13169/islastudj.2.1.0010 Sontag, S. (1978, February 23). Disease as a Political Metaphor. New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/02/23/disease-as-political-metaphor/ Tarrant, B. (2019). The Great Replacement. Self-published. Theweleit, K. (1989). Male Fantasies, Volume 2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. University of Minnesota Press. Thobani, S. (2007). Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. University of Toronto Press. Tyrer, D. (2013). The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power, and Fantasy. Pluto Press. Verhaeghe, P. (2006). Enjoyment and Impossibility: Lacan’s Revision of the Oedipus Complex. In J. Clemens & R. Grigg (Eds.), Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Refections on Seminar XVII (pp. 29–49). Duke University Press. Wilcox, L. B. (2015). Bodies of Violence: Theorising Embodied Subjects in International Relations. Oxford University Press. Wilson, J. (2021, November 26). Far-Right Groups Like the Base Will Radicalise Australians Until We Confront Their Beliefs. TheGuardian. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2021/nov/26/far-right-groups-like-the-base-will-radicaliseaustralians-until-we-confront-their-beliefs. Yaxley, L., & Borys, S. (2018, August 15). MPs Condemn Fraser Anning for Controversial Maiden Speech Which Called for a Ban on Muslims. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-15/fraser-anning-condemnedfor-using-phrase-of-nazi-germany/10121844. Žižek, S. (1993). Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Duke University Press.

13 THE GASTRO-POLITICS OF REPLACEMENT How Imaginations of a Muslim Takeover Become “Real” Through Food Margaretha A. van Es

Introduction

To understand anti-Muslim racism in Europe today, it is crucial to analyze the fears and anxieties about a “Muslim takeover” that are expressed in diferent social and political arenas. Anti-Muslim racism is sustained through racist phantasmagorias1 about “the Muslim” as a threat to European civilization and even to the “purity” of the population (Werbner 2013; Mondal 2018). Conspiracy theories proliferate about a deliberate and combative strategy by Muslims to “Islamize” European societies. Depending on the specifc trope, this Muslim takeover is imagined in terms of (1) an already ongoing, stealthy cultural transformation propelled by over-assertive Muslim minorities making all sorts of demands; (2) a population replacement by means of immigration and high Muslim birth rates; and/or (3) an imminent political takeover by Islamist movements (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020).2 These racist imaginaries have been critically addressed by a small but growing number of scholars who have taken on the task of deconstructing public discourses about a Muslim takeover, pointing out that they tell more about racism in Europe than about Muslims (cf. Bangstad 2013; Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020). In this article, I aim to do something diferent. Building on theories and methods developed in the feld of material religion, I propose to take a material approach and ask: how do imaginations of a Muslim takeover become tangible for people in the here and now? What objects, buildings, images, and other material forms do people mobilize to convince themselves and others of the “reality” of these imaginations? Essentialist truth claims – for example, about history, communities, or identities – would not be so powerful and convincing if they were limited to the realm of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-17

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mind. Hence, scholars should not stop at the conclusion that these “truths” are social constructions with strong power implications but also study how specifc truth claims “materialize through the structuring of space, architecture, ritual performance, and by inducing bodily sensations” (Meyer 2009, 5). As aptly formulated by Van de Port and Meyer (2018, 6): “what resources do people tap to make their real, real, and their certain, certain?”3 In my view, such a material approach can – and should – also be applied to imaginations of a Muslim takeover to gain new empirical insights and grounded conceptual refections. As materiality is ultimately about everything, a material analysis always needs to focus on a specifc category of material forms (Meyer 2023). In this chapter, I limit myself to food. Food is increasingly highlighted in the study of confict, coexistence, and exclusion in culturally and religiously plural environments, not in the least because of its specifc material afordances. Food is not only fundamental to our existence, but it is also ingested as a substance (Meyer 2023). Eating is a transformative, embodied performance that blurs the boundaries between the self and the outside world. As such, it is always tied up with questions of identifcation and diference, desire and disgust, and purity and impurity, and it is not surprising that the alimentary tract is fercely policed (Roy 2010). My question is: how are foodstufs and foodways mobilized in theories of “Islamization”, and how do they make imaginations of a Muslim takeover feel “real” – at least for those who are susceptible to these fears and anxieties? In the following sections, I will frst zoom in on a public protest by the far-right group PEGIDA-Netherlands in the Dutch city of Eindhoven in 2019, where the participants attempted to march through a street famous for its many kebab restaurants and demonstratively eat pork in front of the local mosque.4 I will also briefy address other pork-related contestations in Europe. Then, I will analyze the role of food in Michel Houellebecq’s much-discussed fctional novel Submission (2015), which is centred around the Islamization of the French Republic and the male protagonist’s conversion to Islam. Based on these case studies, I will refect on eating as a spatial practice and on the relationship between imaginaries of a Muslim takeover and ingestion. Eating Pork in Front of a Mosque

On Sunday evening, 26 May 2019, a small group of about ffteen PEGIDANetherlands supporters gathered in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. They wanted to march through the Kruisstraat – a street famous for its many kebab restaurants, located in the ethnically diverse, working-class district of Woensel – and end their march in a parking lot in front of the Al-Fourqaan mosque. Their original plan was to roast pork on a barbecue in protest against the

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“Islamization” of the Netherlands, but since the municipality did not allow open fre, the PEGIDA protesters had brought a box of pre-grilled, seasoned bacon rashers instead. Armed with protest banners saying “Islam Destroys Civilizations” and “No Islam but Freedom” and playing protest songs such as “Imagine No Islam”, they began their march. To maximize the provocative efect, PEGIDA-Netherlands leader Edwin Wagensveld had planned the protest in the month of Ramadan during the last few hours before sunset, just before Muslims break their fast. PEGIDA-Netherlands, a Dutch ofshoot of the German PEGIDA movement,5 was already famous for its provocative (but generally nonviolent) anti-Islam protests, which often included references to pigs or pork. During the weeks before the event, the upcoming protest had stirred much debate. The mosque board had called on Muslims not to respond to the provocation but to no avail. Later that Sunday evening, news reports described how hundreds of young Muslim counter-protesters prevented the PEGIDA supporters from reaching the mosque, shouting insults at them, waving Turkish fags, and throwing stones at the police. Ultimately, the police forced PEGIDA to end its protest because it could no longer guarantee the safety of the protesters and local residents (Hoof 2019; Koenis 2019; Verschuren 2019). However, for Edwin Wagensveld, the self-proclaimed “national barbecuer” (barbecuer des vaderlands), the event was anything but a failure. For the protest to succeed, it did not really matter whether he mobilized ffteen supporters or dozens of them nor did it matter whether they ultimately reached the parking lot near the mosque. Wagensveld had managed to create a spectacle generating broad media coverage, which allowed PEGIDANetherlands to share its view. A central claim made by PEGIDA-Netherlands is that the political establishment willingly tolerates that Islamic customs and conventions gradually displace the Dutch way of life (Van der Valk 2017). In a one-hour-long interview with Önder Kaya in Café Weltschmerz that was recorded a few weeks after the event, Wagensveld explicitly said that he wanted to convey a particular image to a wide audience. “If too many people from a particular culture enter our country who do not want to adapt, and who try to impose their culture on us, danger will arise”, he argued. And he continued: “If you criticize them, you are being attacked, you are being threatened. This causes a wave where we limit our own freedom more and more; where we have to adapt because they cannot cope with that criticism” (Café Weltschmerz, 6 July 2019).6 Pushing Back Against Islamization

The protest can be seen as a theatrical performance set up by Wagensveld, with the local authorities and the counter-protesters unwittingly playing important

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roles. Hundreds of “angry young Muslim men” supposedly “proved” that Dutch people cannot do “normal Dutch things” (such as eating pork) anymore in certain parts of Eindhoven without having a mob of angry Muslims coming for them. The Eindhoven mayor, who had already been reluctant to provide a protest permit, ultimately could not guarantee the democratic right of the PEGIDA supporters to fnish their protest, and thereby “proved” that the political establishment allows the “Islamization” to happen. Wagensveld assigned both himself and his protestors the role of a martyr, the role of a small group of peaceful protestors who face an angry crowd and who have to persist in speaking the truth in order to save Dutch culture as we know it. The Eindhoven protest, however, was not only a means to share a particular view. It can also be seen as an attempt to “push back” against the perceived Muslim takeover in this particular neighbourhood and in wider Dutch society. This becomes all the more clear when looking at statements made by PEGIDA-Netherlands in other contexts. For example, the PEGIDA online newsletter of June 2018 says: Where is the respect for the [native] Dutch population, and where is the resistance? . . . We are losing our country! Moreover, because of the construction of more and more mosques and the Islamized areas surrounding them, there are occupied territories in this country where nothing is Dutch anymore! The newsletter of October 2018 calls for action: Giving up is no option: our country is increasingly occupied. Every area where there is a mosque – or where a mosque is planned to be built – is lost Dutch territory and belongs to Islam. Everyone who loves his/her country, and most of all, his/her loved ones, must take action. So, keep an eye on the Pegida-Netherlands Facebook page for the latest updates! Based on these statements and the overall protest design, it is difcult not to read the Eindhoven protest as a theatrical attempt to “reclaim Dutch territory” that was “lost to Islamization”.7 For PEGIDA-Netherlands, this “Islamization” materialized frst and foremost in the presence of mosques. But the phrase “the Islamized areas surrounding the mosques” points to much more. It can be no coincidence that PEGIDA-Netherlands chose the Kruisstraat for its march. What apparently made the perceived Muslim takeover tangible, were, among other things, the many Muslim-owned shops and restaurants in the street selling kebab and other halal food items, especially in combination with the alleged impossibility to eat pork in this area. Crucially, the PEGIDA protesters mobilized pork to turn the Kruisstraat and the parking lot near the Al-Fourqaan mosque into

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a gastro-political battlefeld,8 and the perceived Muslim takeover momentarily became all the more “real” through the strong responses from the counter-protesters.9 The PEGIDA protest also shows how conspicuously eating particular food items can be a means to claim a physical location as one’s own and thereby claim a certain position in society that is explicitly being denied to others. Alimentary Replacements and Gastro-Political Battlefelds

The PEGIDA protest in Eindhoven was not the only case where food was mobilized in relation to a perceived Muslim takeover, and this phenomenon is certainly not limited to far-right fringe groups. In 2017, for example, Joost Eerdmans, a Rotterdam city councillor and party leader of Liveable Rotterdam – a local (and much more mainstream) right-wing populist party known for its anti-Islamization rhetoric – lamented the ubiquity of halal butcher shops and the gradual disappearance of traditional Dutch vegetable and butcher shops. He proposed a new law to give the municipality more control over the establishment of new shops (Beek 2017). In 2012, the French National Front leader Marine Le Pen wrongly claimed that all the meat sold in the greater Paris region was slaughtered halal, without non-Muslim consumers being aware of it (Irish 2012). And in 2019, Italian conservative Catholic opinion makers accused Pope Francis of succumbing to a “suicidal multiculturalist ideology” when the pontif served pork-free lasagna as part of a special lunch for the poor of Rome, instead of sticking to the traditional recipe that requires a mixture of beef and pork (Ghiglione 2019). For years, school canteens in France have been turned into gastro-political battlefelds by right-wing nationalist mayors in small towns trying to ban public schools from providing pork-free alternative meals to Muslim and Jewish children. On days when pork is on the menu, these children were to be ofered nothing but the side dishes. A frequently used argument was the “preservation of laïcité” (Chrisafs 2015; McAuly 2018). Julien Sanchez, the National Front mayor of Beaucaire who scrapped pork-free school lunches in 2018, called the substitution meals a “religious intrusion in the school system”. Referencing Renaud Camus’ (2011) conspiracy theory about the “great replacement” of the French population by Muslim immigrants, he added: “I do not want to assist in the great replacement of pork at the cafeteria. . . . Less and less pork is being served year by year” (d’Ornellas 2018). What seems to be at stake in all these examples is a perceived “alimentary replacement” that supposedly points to a much broader replacement of civilizations and populations. One could argue that, in the eyes of those who harbour strong anti-Muslim sentiments, anything Islam-related that

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is perceptible in the public sphere can be a symptom of the Islamization of European societies (van Liere 2014). However, food is not just any random category of material forms through which imaginations of a Muslim takeover become “real” for some people. To eat means to make the outside world part of oneself. As the historian Laurier Turgeon and the sociologist Madeleine Pastinelli write: “Eating puts the outside world into the body; it internalizes the exterior” (2002, 251). In their critical analysis of white, highly educated, and afuent Canadians frequenting so-called “ethnic restaurants”, Turgeon and Pastinelli (2002) argue that for many of these self-professed “cosmopolitans”, eating food from faraway places in an “authentic” setting is, among other things, a way to ingest “exotic” cultures and thereby assert a cosmopolitan identity, without leaving their home town. I think that this conceptualization of eating as “internalizing the exterior” is also relevant to imaginations of a Muslim takeover. But those Europeans who worry about “Islamization” do not look at halal food from the perspective of happy consumers seeking exotic experiences. In their perception, the Islamization of European societies is shoved down their throats. Ingesting the Muslim Takeover

The idea of an alimentary replacement and the relationship between Islamization and ingestion are also discernable in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015). The futuristic novel builds on and reproduces the trope of the Muslim takeover in such a well-written and sophisticated way that it (almost) seems a plausible scenario. As such, the international bestseller has sparked great controversy – in academia as well as in wider society (see also Van den Brandt forthcoming). The book is situated in Paris, where the morally nihilistic antihero François, an assistant professor of literature studies at the Sorbonne, witnesses the French election campaign, the unforeseen rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood (aided by the Socialist Party to thwart a possible National Front victory), and the subsequent transformation of French society into an Islamist dystopia. Ultimately, the protagonist decides to convert to Islam in an attempt to regain his academic position, which the author implicitly equates with the suicide of the French civilization: “civilizations die not by murder but by suicide” (Houellebecq 2015a, 213).10 Food plays a subtle but important role in Houellebecq’s story. In the frst part of the book, before the Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral victory, François tries to live a hedonistic life but fails to actually enjoy it. He never cooks his own food but passively – and rather unenthusiastically – consumes a wide array of international food items. If he does not have a microwave meal for dinner, he eats wherever and whatever his colleagues

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select for him (halal tajine in a Moroccan restaurant, 25) or whatever he thinks his latest sex partner will appreciate (sushi delivered to his home, 32). Describing an encounter between François and his colleague Steve, Houellebecq writes: [Steve] would almost always invite me for a drink – usually mint tea in the Paris Mosque, a few blocks from the university. I didn’t like mint tea, or the Paris Mosque, and I didn’t much like Steve, but I still went. (Houellebecq 2015a, 20)11 In Submission, globalization has long since eroded French society and its culinary traditions, and in the case of François, this is enhanced by his general lethargy and lack of backbone. The nearby presence of the mosque with its café serving mint tea and the ubiquity of halal food in Paris appear as harbingers for the imminent Muslim takeover. In Part II of the book, when the initial election results come in and the political negotiations start between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Socialist Party, François daydreams about the times when French housewives still “bought and peeled the vegetables, trimmed the meat, and spent hours simmering the stew” – the times when “a tender, nurturing relationship could take root” (77).12 In Part III, François drives to the countryside to escape from the political tensions and the violence in Paris, looking forward to buying conft de canard and other regional food products. In the village of Martel, he coincidentally meets his former colleague Marie-Françoise and her husband, who invite him to their country house. Marie-Françoise treats him to an elaborate, homemade meal: tartlets stufed with duck’s necks and shallots, a salad of fava beans and dandelion with shaved Parmesan, conft lamb rump with baked potatoes, and an apple-nut crumble for dessert (124–130). It is the frst time in a long time that he really enjoys his food, but the delicious dishes appear as remnants of a bygone era. In Part IV, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed ben Abbes has become the new president of the French Republic. François is back in Paris, but, as a non-Muslim, he is no longer allowed to continue his work at the recently renamed “Islamic University of Paris IV-Sorbonne”. His health deteriorates, and he seems incapable of enjoying anything at all. In Part V, François starts to consider converting to Islam, which will enable him to take up his position at the university again. Only one page later, he decides to attend a reception at the Institute of the Arab World, where he tries a few Lebanese appetizers. To his own surprise, he relishes them: “I wisely accepted several mezes – they were excellent, the hot and the cold ones, too. So was the wine, a Lebanese red” (Houellebecq 2015a, 196).13 A while later, he visits the influential French convert Rediger to

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discuss his own possible conversion. One of Rediger’s two wives brings warm, homemade pasties: “The canapés were delicious, spicy but not too; I tasted coriander” (Houellebecq 2015a, 206).14 While eating so many of them that he almost becomes nauseous, he becomes all the more convinced of the benefits of a conversion to Islam. In Houellebecq’s Submission, the protagonist’s conversion is an embodied process, a “rebirth”, where the protagonist is in a progressive state of decay until he submits to the Muslim takeover and comes back to live again (or perhaps we should say “undead” instead of alive). The body of the Muslim François replaces the body of the post-Christian François, and this becomes evident through food: the more François submits to the new status quo, the more he enjoys “Muslim” food, and the ingestion of this food seems to further his submission. Discussion

Taking a material approach is of great beneft when studying the fears and anxieties of a Muslim takeover that are at the heart of anti-Muslim racism today. An analytical focus on food reveals a widespread concern with a perceived “alimentary replacement” that is taken as a harbinger of a broader Muslim takeover and that purportedly causes a need to fght all sorts of gastro-political battles to save Western civilization. In this fght, pork is often heritagized to the extent that it becomes the “totem” of (post-)Christian Europe. Although I analyze the Muslim takeover as a racist phantasmagoria, this does not mean that it is limited to the realm of the mind. The aforementioned fears and anxieties anchor themselves in tangible phenomena and, hence, become “real” for those who are susceptible to them. There is a growing presence of halal food in Europe, and this goes beyond the ubiquity of kebab restaurants. As a result of the steep upward social mobility among young Muslims, pioneering Muslim entrepreneurs in many large West-European cities have started new, mid-priced restaurants where all items on the menu are halal – varying from lavish Ottoman restaurants to Tex-Mex eateries, and from steakhouses to sushi bars. Moreover, more and more restaurants that are not owned by Muslims serve halal-certifed meat (often in addition to pork and other non-halal items) to attract Muslim consumers, and some of the major supermarket chains have included halal food items (including microwave meals and baby foods) in their product range (Armanios & Ergene 2018; van Es 2022). For many Muslims and non-Muslims alike, these simply are opportunities to eat something tasty, or at most, they make a positive contribution to the normalization of being Muslim in Europe. But for others, the same tangible phenomena are, yet again, proof that their way of life is at risk and that Western civilization is going down.

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Notes 1 The phantasmagoria was a popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century form of horror theatre where magic lanterns, smoke, and sound efects were used to project ghosts, demons, and other frightening images before an audience. 2 Prominent examples of such conspiracy theories are the books published by Oriana Fallaci (2004) and Bat Ye’or (2005) about an alleged plot between Arab and European government elites to turn Europe into “Eurabia”: an Islamized colony of the Middle East that is no longer recognizable as Europe. Somewhat similar ideas can be found in the works of Melanie Phillips (2006), Bruce Bawer (2006), Thilo Sarrazin (2010, 2018), and Renaud Camus (2011). These conspiracy theories have become highly popular in far-right circles, and they have gradually gained infuence in wider society during the past two decades (Bangstad 2013; Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020). 3 These questions are also central to the ongoing research project Religious Matters in an Entangled World, led by Birgit Meyer: www.religiousmatters.nl. 4 My analysis is based on my own feld notes from the protest, a collection of news reports, the PEGIDA-Netherlands Facebook page and online newsletters, and interviews with PEGIDA leader Edwin Wagensveld by various mainstream and alternative media channels. See van Es (2020) for a more elaborate analysis of this protest. 5 PEGIDA emerged as a far-right protest movement in Germany in October 2014. PEGIDA stands for “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident” (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes in German, or Patriottische Europeanen tegen islamisering van het Avondland in Dutch) (Vorländer et al. 2018; Hartz 2019). 6 All quotes have been translated from Dutch by the author. 7 Elsewhere (van Es 2020), I argue that PEGIDA’s pork serves to symbolically cleanse such territories from Islam. 8 The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1981) coined the term “gastro-politics” to theorize how social transactions around food can express all sorts of (implicit) power struggles between diferent social actors. I hereby introduce the term “gastro-political battlefeld” to refer to a setting in which particular power struggles are intensifed, brought to the surface, and fought out openly in relation to food. 9 Discussions about how to respond (and whether to respond at all) emerge almost every time when provocative statements against Islam and Muslims are made (cf. van Es 2019; van Es 2020). The question of whether to rise up against those who insult you or to remain silent in order to prevent an Islamophobic backlash leads to deep divides among Muslims – and it also did in Eindhoven. 10 In the French original, Houellebecq writes: “les civilisations ne meurent pas assassinées, mais qu’elles se suicident” (255). For an in-depth analysis of the gendered implications of this equation, see van den Brandt (forthcoming). 11 French original: “[Steve] me proposait presque toujours d’aller prendre un verre – généralement un thé à la menthe à la grande mosquée de Paris, qui était située à quelques rues de la fac. Je n’amais pas le thé à la menthe, ni la grande mosquée de Paris, je n’amais pas non plus tellement Steve, je l’accompagnais pourtant” (28). 12 French original: “à l’époque où la femme achetait et épluchait elle-même ses legumes, apprêtait ses viandes et faisait mijoter ses ragoûts pendant des heures” (95). 13 French original: “j’acceptai donc avec sagesse quelques mezzes – ils étaient excellents, les chauds comme les froids, et le vin rouge libanais qui les accompagnait n’était pas mal du tout” (235). 14 French original: “Les petits pâtés chauds étaient délicieux, épicés mais pas trop, je reconnus la saveur de la coriandre” (247).

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References Appadurai, A. (1981). Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia. American Ethnologist, 8(3), 494–511. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1981.8.3.02a00050 Armanios, F., & Ergene, B. (2018). Halal Food: A History. Oxford University Press. Bangstad, S. (2013). Eurabia Comes to Norway. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 24(3), 369–391. https://doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2013.783969 Bawer, B. (2006). While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Broadway Books. Beek, M. (2017, September 30). D66 woest op Eerdmans over uitspraak halalslagerien. AD/Rotterdams. Dagblad. https://www.ad.nl/rotterdam/d66-woest-opeerdmans-over-uitspraak-halal-slagerijen~ab132b86/ Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12742 Camus, R. (2011). Le grand remplacement. David Reinharc. d’Ornellas, Charlotte. (2018, January 8). Julien Sanchez: “Il y aura du porcchaquelundi dans les cantines”. ValeursActuelles. https://www.valeursactuelles.com/ politique/menus-de-substitution-julien-sanchez-il-y-aura-du-porc-chaque-lundi-dans-les-cantines Fallaci, O. (2004). The Force of Reason. Rizzoli. Ghiglione, G. (2019, December 24). Pope Francis’ Heretical Pasta. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/24/pope-franciss-heretical-pasta/ Hartz, R. (2019). “The People” and its Antagonistic Other: The Populist Right-Wing Movement Pegida in Germany. In T. Marttila (Ed.), Discourse, Culture and Organization: Inquiries into Relational Structures of Power (pp. 223–244). Palgrave Macmillan. Hoof, R. van. (2019, May 26). Politie maakt einde aan demonstratie Pegida in Eindhoven. Hart van Nederland. https://www.hartvannederland.nl/nieuws/politiemaakt-einde-aan-demonstratie-pegida Houellebecq, M. (2015). Soumission. Flammarion. Houellebecq, M. (2015). Submission (L. Stein, Trans.). Vintage. Irish, J. (2012, February 19). France’s Far-Right Returns to Roots with Halal Claims. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-france-election-lepenidUKTRE81I06D20120219 Koenis, C. (2019, May 26). Politie breekt Pegida-demonstratie Eindhoven af wegens rellen. NRC Handelsblad. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/05/26/politie-breektpegida-demonstratie-eindhoven-af-vanwege-rellen-a3961631 Meyer, B. (2009). Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding. In B. Meyer (Ed.), Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses (pp. 1–28). Palgrave Macmillan. Meyer, B. (2023). Religion and Materiality: Food, “Fetish”, and Other Matters. In M. Freudenberg et al. (Eds.), Stepping Back and Looking Ahead: Twelve Years of Studying Religious Contact at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Bochum (pp. 267–301). Brill. Mondal, A. (2018). The Trace of the Cryptic in Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and Anticommunism: A Genealogy of the Rhetoric on Hidden Enemies and Unseen Threats. In A. Yaqin, P. Morey & A. Soliman (Eds.), Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism: New Directions (pp. 27–50). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Phillips, M. (2006). Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within. Encounter Books. Roy, P. (2010). Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Duke University Press. Sarrazin, T. (2010). Deutschland schaft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Sarrazin, T. (2018). Feindliche Übernahme: Wie der Islam der Fortschritt Behindert und die Gesellschaft Bedroht. FinanzBuch Verlag. Socci, A. (2019, November 24). Papa Francesco, l’afondo di Antonio Socci: “Il suo slogan in sintesi? Prima gliislamici”. Libero Quotidiano. https://www.liberoquotidiano.it/news/italia/13533604/papa-francesco-prima-musulmani-antoniosocci-resa-islamici-carne-maiale.html Turgeon, L., & Pastinelli, M. (2002). “Eat the World”: Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City’s Ethnic Restaurants. The Journal of American Folklore, 115(456), 247–268. https://doi.org/10.1353/jaf.2002.0023 van den Brandt, N. (forthcoming). Religion, Gender and Race in Western European Arts and Culture: Thinking Through Religious Transformation. Routledge. van de Port, M., & Meyer, B. (2018). Introduction: Heritage Dynamics – Politics of Authentication, Aesthetics of Persuasion and the Cultural Production of the Real. In Sense and Essense: Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real (pp. 1–39). Berghahn Books. van der Valk, I., & Törnberg, P. (2017). Monitor moslimdiscriminatie: Derde rapportage [Monitor Muslim Discrimination: Third Report]. IMES. van Es, M. A. (2019). The Promise of the Social Contract: Muslim Perspectives on the Culturalization of Citizenship and the Demand to Denounce Violent Extremism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(16), 141–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2 019.1600710 van Es, M. A. (2020). Roasting a Pig in Front of a Mosque: How Pork Matters in Pegida’s Anti-Islam Protest in Eindhoven. Religion, 11(7), 359. https://doi. org/10.3390/rel11070359 van Es, M. A. (2022, October 3). Multi-Scalar Cosmopolitanism. Religious Matters in an Entangled World. https://religiousmatters.nl/multi-scalar-cosmopolitanism/ van Liere, L. (2014). Teasing “Islam”: “Islam” as the Other Side of “Tolerance” in Contemporary Dutch Politics. Journal of Contemporary Religio, 29(2), 187–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2014.903669 Verschuren, C. (2019, May 26). Rust keert terug na grimmige demonstratie bi Al Fourqaan Moskee in Eindhoven, tien aanhoudingen. Omroep Brabant. https:// www.omroepbrabant.nl/nieuws/3004814/rust-keert-terug-na-grimmige-demonstratie-bi-al-fourqaan-moskee-in-eindhoven-tien-aanhoudingen Vorländer, H., Herold, M., & Schäller, S. (2018). PEGIDA and New Right-Wing Populism in Germany. Palgrave Macmillan. Werbner, P. (2013). Folk Devils and Racist Imaginaries in a Global Prism: Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the Twenty-First Century. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(3), 450–467. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.734384 Ye’or, B. (2005). Eurabia. Farleigh Dickinson University Press.

14 STRIVING FOR TRANSPARENCY Mosques as Sites of Public Interrogation in Contemporary Germany Iskandar Ahmad Abdalla

Introduction

Der Moscheereport is a series of eight feature stories that aired on the German public broadcasting service ARD between March 2017 and December 2019. Constantin Schreiber, a German author and journalist, is the creator and presenter of the series. He delivers the voice-over that introduces it: It is a threshold only few Germans can cross, that of the numerous mosques in our country. It is a foreign world to most of us. Who is preaching there? What do they preach? And who is going there? What role do mosques play in the integration of Muslims in the German society? I want to answer these questions, I want to go to Germany’s mosques and fnd out what is going on there. (Tagesschau 2017) As the usage of the frst-person suggests, Schreiber positions himself as a main protagonist of the series. He visits mosques, observes the attendees, listens to the sermons, and talks with the imams, seeking to bring the truth of a hidden foreign world into light. In the intro of the series, we see him while he takes of his shoes at the entrance of a mosque and walks through the congregation. The camera follows him as he sits amidst the gathered men, waiting for the call to prayer, and his eyes wander through the place. His face reveals a sense of confdence but also an eager alertness for his surroundings. Parallel to the airing of the frst episode, Schreiber published Inside Islam, a book in which he expands his investigations to thirteen mosques around Germany. “We know so little about mosques”, he writes in the introduction. DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-18

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“Are mosques solely spaces for prayers? Or are many of them refuges for anti-democratic ideas? Do Muslims misuse the free spaces our free-democratic principles guarantee just for the purposes of conspiring against these same principles?” (Schreiber 2017, 9–10).1 If Schreiber portrays the space of the nation as free, he does so less to celebrate this freedom but rather to protect it from the misuse of Muslims – from the dangers of not seeing them properly, thus not being able to identify dissident plots and acts. His arguments are reinforced by conspirational fantasies and fears of Muslim control. At the book launch, Jens Spahn, a key fgure in the German Christian Democratic political party (CDU) – and state secretary of fnance at the time before later becoming the federal minister of health – was invited to speak and demanded a legal framework that would enable the state to register and collect data about mosques. Der Moscheereport triggered, or rather reactivated, a debate about mosques – their members, their fnancial status, their preachers, and the values and ideas that the latter embrace and communicate. In sum, this was a debate about the state’s lack of knowledge and legal measures to regulate mosques (Zeit Online 2017) and, thus, to preventively intervene in combating radicalization (Tagesschau 2019). Schreiber’s portrayals and illuminations of the “foreign” world of mosques involved a call for action. They compelled public attention and necessitated and legitimized political intervention in the name of more knowledge and an urgent need for transparency (Pape 2017). Transparency is a key notion here not only for its presence as a central demand of these interrogative endeavours targeting mosques but also for how it shapes the discursive realms of debating Islam and representing Muslims in Germany; for how it efectively vindicates vigilance, exposure, and surveillance as public utilities to dispel fear and ensure order; and fnally, for how it coerces visibility and seeks to reorder bodies in ways that reconfgure and stabilize racial formations. In this chapter, I trace how Muslim bodies, spaces, and discursive traditions are imagined and narrated in relation to the claims of their intransparency, as well as the modalities of seeing, knowing, and political action that are activated by the demands for transparency. In this vein, I look at Der Moscheereport and Inside Islam not as individual works with characteristic qualities but as snapshots within a broader discursive operation. I consider Schreiber’s authorship here not as a self-contained agency that stands outside of what it produces but, rather, horizontally, in terms of its function within certain circulating discourses (Foucault 1984, 107–108) and, vertically, in terms of its embeddedness in racial legacies that give representation a life of their own. This chapter addresses the discourse on the intransparency of Muslims across diferent registers – notably, in terms of how it urges for visibility, how it grounds itself by appealing to the necessity of certain modes of translation and knowledge production, how it impels movement in certain directions, and, fnally, how it reproduces and maintains a particular racial order.

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Transparency as an Urge for Visibility

One episode of Der Moscheereport is set in Hamburg, where Schreiber selects a random mosque on Google Maps. After arriving at the designated location, he notes that “if one does not know that there is a mosque here, no one would ever recognize it” (Tagesschau 2019), thus raising the concern that many mosques in Germany are not visibly recognizable for passers-by and thus can hardly be identifed as such. To verify his observation, Schreiber takes another “random sample” and visits the specifed address. Once more, he frst failed to fnd the mosque, only to be “surprised” to discover a “lavishly equipped” prayer room without “any hints” of its existence, hidden behind an “inconspicuous” (unscheinbar) door. Intransparency is narrated and visualized by emphasizing the secrecy of mosques and the difculty of accessing them as, often, no accurate online information is available nor are there clear signs indicating their presence or verifying their location. Even when signs do exist, Schreiber notes, they tend to be “small”, “hidden”, and not in German (Schreiber 2017, 104). In the same vein, mosques are often associated with qualities that articulate their opaqueness: they are described as “cold” (Tagesschau 2017), very narrow and with low ceilings (Schreiber 2017, 198), and having “dark staircases and corridors” (140). Sometimes they are associated with shabbiness, ugliness, and dirt (119–120) and other times with “lavish endowments”. In both cases, one is often caught by a surprise upon fnding them, or fnding them is often presented as a coincident discovery (60). The deplored intransparency of mosques in such narratives is not to be confused with their inaccessibility. Schreiber states that his hosts received him and his camera team in a friendly manner and were often open for questions. This, too, it seems, caught him by surprise (Schreiber 2017, 235). However, he is quick to add that this openness should not be thought of as a genuine quality but rather as the efect of an external gaze which impels Muslims in mosques to present themselves as open. “I think Muslims have enough awareness to present themselves as friendly as possible to journalists – in times, when they particularly stand under observation”, he notes (Pape 2017). While outsiders must ask, search, and might eventually manage to discover them, “Muslims know where mosques are and exchange this knowledge among each other” (Pape 2017). Accessibility to mosques is then primarily contingent upon internally exchangeable knowledge, while their openness to outsiders is purported as a tactic, a reluctant act of submission to a powerful observer. It is an openness that conceals as much as it reveals. Behind inconspicuous doors, walls, and “milk glass windows” (Schreiber 2017, 197), there is a hidden world to be discovered and uncovered to the public. “He casts a glimpse behind the walls of mosques” is how a German local newspaper pays tribute to what Schreiber managed to publicly reveal

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(Junginger 2017). Another popular magazine pictured him while opening a mosque’s iron gate (Gassen et al. 2017). Contrary to what some studies on the debates concerning mosque building projects in Germany have shown, what stirs anxieties here is not the demonstrative visibility of mosques in the cityscape (Beinbauer-Köhler & Leggewie 2009). In other words, what seems to be controversial – what seems to yield “disruptive efects” – is not the appearance of Muslim diference in the public sphere (Göle 2016, 9) but, rather, its alleged concealment, its invisibility. Inasmuch as Muslims’ presence in European cities has become indisputable, the narrative at stack here doubles this presence into two: a presence on display that is visible and accessible and a presence that falls beyond reach and eludes the feld of vision – a present absence that suggests intrigue and dubious behaviour. The demands for transparency at work here call to mind the panoptic style of power as analysed by Foucault (1975/1997). The observation that knowledge in and on mosques circulates internally among Muslims and that Muslims act among each other as “subjects in communication” instead of “objects of information” seems too suspicious to be tolerated (Foucault 1975/1997, 200). Calling for transparency entails a desire for a spatial arrangement that allows one “to see constantly and recognize immediately”, that makes surveillance “permanent in its efects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (201). In this vein, Schreiber is not just opening doors to render the invisible visible. The gaze sliding into mosques is not confned to observation; rather, it seeks to correct its objects of sight, to catch them red-handed, to seize their deviance and report it to the public. In the introduction to Inside Islam, he tells a story about what motivated him to conduct his investigations. At the behest of a journalistic commission, he was sent to a mosque in Berlin to cover a Friday prayer. There, he found a suspicious book on the mosque’s shelves. When he started to browse through its pages, he was “shocked” to fnd ideas he characterized as anti-democratic and hostile to the state (Schreiber 2017, 12). After the prayer [the imam] hurries to me, hands me his right hand, while gently, with his left, trying to take the book away, but I hold it tight in my hand. Then the cameraman came and directed his camera at him. Now the imam tries much stronger to grab the book. Eventually he gave it up, smiling and saying: “I thought that is your book, you brought it here”. I negated. “Ok”, says the imam. “Then someone has put it up there”. (Schreiber 2017, 13) The imam’s attempt to hide the crime, to hinder the interrogative query of the author, seems thwarted by the intervention of the camera. Schreiber observes,

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while his camera team scans, records, and discloses. The aim is to capture dubious behaviour, to render it publicly visible. Schreiber accentuates the fact that, in doing so, he was never under cover. He explicitly discloses his mission as a journalist entitled to ask, observe, analyse, and eventually report (Schreiber 2017, 236–238). His interrogations are a demonstration of power, a power that manifests itself through his presence but whose exercise is a process “supervised by society as a whole” (Foucault 1975/1997, 207). Media exposes a hidden “truth”, experts are consulted, the audience makes use of its right to see and know, and politicians are eventually entitled to react. The threat of exposure is supposed to efectively embarrass and daunt deviance. It deters counter-threats and defuses potential conspiracist plots. Schreiber (2017, 12) noted that his presence caused unease, that the camera was an object of disturbance in so far that it might have managed to compel those in its line of view to adjust their behaviour. “The sermons were far more conservative when the camera was of”, he states (Pape 2017) and wonders what else he would have experienced if the camera was of or if his presence would have remained unrecognizable. “What else has been said? What books would have been there, if we were not there?” (Schreiber 2017, 14). The Politics of Fear

While stressing the importance of transparency for enabling “an open debate about problematic Weltanschauungen”, Schreiber notes that, if what he managed to see and understand about mosques was shocking and fearful, it remains less fearful than what he could not see or understand. “What one understands triggers less fears” (Pape 2017). It is instructive to examine how fear is invested in such portrayals – how it crucially works to narrate the demands for transparency in relation to the visibility or invisibility of the objects of fear. Sara Ahmed’s take on the afective politics of fear might be helpful here. Ahmed notes that “the more we don’t know what or who it is we fear, the more the world becomes fearsome” (Ahmed 2014, 69). For her, following Heidegger, what distinguishes anxiety from fear is that the latter must have an identifable object (64–65). Losing the object of fear – and, by the same token, the inability of identifying it properly – “makes what is fearsome all the more fearsome” (65). Subsequently, overcoming fear does not mean to eliminate its object but rather to contain it, to fx it within the purview of the fearing subject. Fear does not statically dwell in an a priori fxed object. Fear is triggered by the unruly movement of its assumed object, and its efects are promised to be reduced in the sheer attempts of fxating that object or rather of redirecting its movement so that it can be assigned to a secure place. Furthermore, the labour of fear can be understood in temporal terms. Ahmed notes that “the object of fear is not simply before us . . . but impresses upon

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us in the present, as anticipated pain in the future” (Ahmed 2014, 65). We fear an object that approaches us; we fear not what is simply here but what will be here in the future and for which one must always remain alert in order to identify it on time and successfully counter its anticipated harms. Fear impels movement – not simply the movement of the fearing subjects away from those objects identifed as fearful, as such movement might render the objects of fear even more fearful by virtue of losing them – but, rather, movements that re-establish the distance between fearing subjects and objects of fear in ways that secure the apartness of the former and the containment of the latter within the feld of view. Moreover, fear sustains a constant condition of vigilance. Identifying certain objects as fearful goes along with questioning the integrity or the full realization of their ontological qualities. It means identifying their presence as deceptively double-faced, a professed outer appearance in the here and now and a hidden threatening reality that will become present in the future. If Muslims are constructed as objects of fear, the demands for their transparency can be understood here as demands to dispel fear, and constant vigilance and management of movement are emphasized as political necessities. The following section investigates how vigilance is called for and maintained through acts of translation and knowledge production that promise transparency. It also relates the notion of transparency to a larger discourse on the integration of Muslims in Germany by reading it as a discourse of managing movement. Translation

Transparency implies not only the capacity for unhindered seeing but also stipulates an intelligible communication based on an act of translation. The latter is a process that never takes place in a power void (Asad 1993; Robinson 1997; Massad 2015). Rendering Muslims transparent is a process in which modes of seeing and knowing are coupled. Seeing is not merely confned to the operation of catching sight of what is simply there; rather, it surpasses the displayed surfaces of bodies and objects so that one can see through them and extract an enshrouded “truth” from the insides of Islam. Each chapter of Inside Islam is centred on a translated Friday sermon (khutbā aj-jumʿah). Experts comment on the content of the sermons, delivering a diferent kind of translation; they are asked to interpretatively decode the content as a linguistic translation does not sufce to “truly grasp (wirklich erfassen) what the sermons are all about and what message the attendees receive [from them] upon their mosque visit” (Schreiber 2017, 39). Here, translation contributes to transparency in a broader sense that transcends communicating the content in another language, to an elucidative act of decoding that not only construes meaning but also seeks to trace its

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impact on the attendees. The fact that sermons are mostly held in Arabic or Turkish and not in German is considered to be a major indication of the mosques’ lack of transparency. There’s a recurring complaint in the book that the imams do not speak German, and if they do, it is often a “broken” one (Schreiber 2017, 27). Meanwhile, despite Schreiber’s alleged fuency in Arabic, the sermons remained incomprehensible to him. They were often too long, too difcult to understand (138), and embellished with cryptically formulated theological or spiritual details that hinder comprehension (3nach9 2017). The sermons’ incomprehensibility is also demonstrated by their presumed irrelevance. It appears as if the sermons are concerned with “a very diferent world”, of “camels and dates” (Schreiber 2017, 55), of Jinns and wizardry (138–140) – a world that has nothing in common with Schreiber’s Germany. Complaints are made about the sermons for having a language frequently deployed with metaphors and references from the Hadith or the Qu’ran. The intransparency of this language is demonstrated not only by its linguistic difculty but also by its assumed incapability to voice what is timely and relevant, thus falling short in fulflling certain functions that mosques are expected to pursue. For anthropologist Susanne Schröter, one of the experts fguring in Schreiber’s book, such language is a program in itself. It incites one to “live in the magical world it vividly pictures, aspiring to hold the [Muslim] community under its sway precluding its arrival in Germany. It shields the community from getting infected by the virus of freedom” (Schreiber 2017, 55). On this view, the opacity of the linguistic realms with which Muslims identify and in which they articulate does not only render them temporally noncontemporaneous and spatially alien, but it is also, in itself, a conspiracist plot that impedes their arrival, that defantly resists translation to secure the community’s detachment from the timely and the relevant. The “Muslim problem” becomes a problem of translation. Despite the availability of sources and expertise, Muslims remain insufciently intelligible. Their presence is murky and indefnite, but by virtue of their indefnability – of their resistance to modes of introspective knowledge and exhaustive translation – they become recognizable in an alerting manner, fearsome for what we know about them and more fearsome for what we do not know. The call for transparency is impelled by a desire for less fear, a desire whose fulflment lies in activating certain modes of knowing and seeing, for which translation is inevitable. In fact, the claims about the intranslatability of Muslim discourses and practices are grounded in secular modes of reasoning. Talal Asad (2018) critically sheds light on the proclamations of liberal thinkers – most prominently Jürgen Habermas – who hold that religious discourses must be translated into a secular and, thus, supposedly publicly accessible language as both a precondition and an instrument for accessing the principles of liberal

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equality. According to Asad, a secular translation in the Habermasian sense allows believers to be recognized as equals by virtue of their movement from the particular to the universal, from the obscure language of religion to the clear language of secular reason. Asad’s reading of Habermas is instructive here. First, because it demonstrates how secular reasoning itself is predicated on transparency, holding on to the inevitability of rendering religious beliefs “accessible to everyone, especially to citizens for whom religious discourse is obscure” (Asad 2018, 44) so that they can be admitted recognition. Second, because through translation, “the secular can lay claim to be the true heir to the proper function of religion in the modern state” (46). Translation is thought of beyond enabling believers to be audible in an assumingly nonreligious public sphere. The translatability of religious vocabularies and traditions becomes the very means by which their value is measured in accordance with their eligibility to fulfl certain functions. In this logic of secular governmentality, mosques are not confned to the private function of cultivating spirituality. Rather, they are expected to positively contribute to shaping the sensibilities of their attendees in ways that respond to public concerns and feed into preestablished scripts of common good. Mosques should address their attendees not just as members of a specifc religious community but as specifc subjects of the state, set on its temporal scale and located within the realms on which it bestows relevance. But how and where to draw the boundaries of the temporally correct and the spatially relevant? To fnd an answer for this question, one must delve into secular reasoning and how it grounds itself meaningfully by reinstituting the need to (re)draw such boundaries (Asad 2003; Fernando 2014), a task whose exhaustive accomplishment goes beyond the intentions of the current analysis. Nevertheless, two observations might give us a better understanding of how these boundaries are imagined. First, Schreiber begins each of his book chapters with a section entitled Die Woche (the week), in which he lists news incidents that took place during the time he visited each mosque under scrutiny (e.g., the rise of the far right in Europe, Islamist terrorist attacks, the war in Syria, the refugee crisis, Erdogan’s persecution of the Turkish opposition, and Merkel’s increasing popularity). Thus, before the interrogation starts, a temporal setting is laid out to typify urgent matters, to mark a primordial position, to delineate a horizon of expectations, and to insinuate certain responses. Second, expectations are made more concrete towards the end of the book, when Schreiber notes in a lamenting tone what he wished he would hear in a mosque and eventually never did: sermons that stress the commonalities with Christians, that highlight the readiness of many Germans to help Iraqi or Syrian refugees, that appreciate the “lucky coincidence (Glücksfall)” that enabled Muslims to live in Germany instead of “complaining about imperialist intervention in Turkey”. In sum, he hopes for mosques that foster integration instead of running counter to it (Schreiber 2017, 244).

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Integration

In Germany, the notion of integration has increasingly been used and understood to target Muslims and to characterize their presence a priori as a political problem (Amir-Moazami 2011). Despite the ambivalence of the qualities it denotes, the concept of integration takes shape as a frame of reference by implicitly presuming its concrete targets whenever it is invoked or circulated (Hernández Aguilar 2018). In the current case, the work of mosques “against integration” (93) is evident not necessarily in what the sermons entail but in what they obviate about Germany, not only for the opacity of the language used but for its failure to make certain things transparent. A corrective intervention is needed to enforce transparency, and it requires, as Jens Spahn had noted, interventive measures – not only to assess whether preachers promote hate speech or act against the law but also to ensure that “integration [itself] is preached” (Lanz 2017), that values understood as “ours” are “positively formulated” so that Muslims can be pushed to enact them (Oliver-Heckmann & Spahn 2017). Countering anticipated dangers does not imply casting those fearsome objects away, nor restricting their mobility so that they cannot move. Rather, it is about containing them within, thus managing their mobility. The state’s intervention is called upon not to detain illegal actions or beliefs but to foster integration. To foster integration is to enforce movement, in our direction, on those to be integrated. Unlike modes of governmentality that enable some bodies to move by shrinking the movement of other bodies (Ahmed 2014, 70), the governmentality of integration works through permitting movement in specifc directions, deemed as culturally legitimate and politically necessary. To manage such movement, sight is set forth and visibility is conditioned. Power is exhorted through mobility and exposure of those bodies to be governed, not through blockage and banishment. Talal Asad noticed that mobility became a prominent feature of modern power, and for that, it should not be understood as an event in itself “but a moment in the subsumption of one act by another” (Asad 1993, 10–11). Power can insert itself into preexisting structures “by means of geographical and psychological movement” (Asad 1993, 11). If Muslims’ modes of engagement with Islamic traditions, by the virtue of their untranslatability into secular vocabulary and temporality, are rendered as a hindrance to integration, then the postulation of transparency is also an urge to move out and to remove the directives that secure an internal fow of communication, of ways of collective learning and living that block vision and supervision from outside. Conclusion: Whiteness as Power

I want to end this analysis by returning to the introduction of the series and drawing attention to its fnal image: a full shot of a black Muslim man

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meekly kneeling in prayer. The man is gradually rendered out of focus, while the title, Der Moscheereport, in a white font, is highlighted in the foreground instead (Figure 14.1). Whether ending the introduction this way was a random or a deliberate choice, the juxtaposition of this specifc image with Schreiber’s demonstrative appearance, with his body wandering through the crowd in cautious vigilance, shows us how whiteness is established as a “location of power” (Linke 1999, 31) that acts on surfaces of blackness to constitute itself. Whiteness does not only mark racial diference, but it also manifests itself ostentatiously as an urge to expose and subject to surveillance those bodies and surfaces it comes closer to. What I call here ostentatious whiteness is also demonstrated in the book cover of Inside Islam. The cover depicts Schreiber himself in a white shirt and a dark elegant coat, with his blond hair neatly styled and his white face revealing a confdent half-smile. His body is pictured between two minarets, probably hiding an entrance to the mosque. His whole fgure is illuminated, emphasizing the contrast between his body and the dark ominous clouds above the mosque. It is as if whiteness is etched into dark surfaces and black bodies, as if it is rendered visible and powerful “against the grain of bodies that are constructed as nonwhite” (Linke 1999, 37). Although the analysis in this chapter has in parts taken its cue from a Foucauldian panoptical model of power, the power involved here operates at a diferent register. It does not necessarily dwell on seeing without being seen. Rather, it intends to visibly

FIGURE 14.1

A screenshot from Der Moscheereport Teil 1 tageschau24, 28.03.2017.

Source: © NDR – tagschau24 (used with permission)

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demonstrate its presence as an indispensable efort to inspect and correct deviance, to deter potential threats and fearful fantasies of infltration and replacement. Whiteness here is ostensibly visible as a marker of certain norms others fail to embrace, of a normalizing power through which this failure is detected and culturally marked. In this vein, it urges spectators associated with it to recognize themselves as the embodiment of a norm by virtue of catching sight of others’ deviant bodies and practices. To fear is not necessarily to look away but to behold the fearful objects closely and meticulously. The common view – the common experience of watching over deviance – is what causes a community of viewers to become powerful enough. What is at stake is not doing away with fear – as that will render the act of watching over it futile – but to contain certain bodies by constant sight and surveillance, by identifying fear in and through them over and again while realizing one’s own apartness in demonstrating the power to face the fearful, to pre-emptively disturb, penetrate, and illuminate its hidden world before the latter manages to contaminate “ours”. The argument here is diferent from saying that whiteness defnes itself by indulging a fantasy of disembodiment (Linke 1999, 28). It is rather that whiteness acquires a body in its unfolding desire to instantly be both the subject of transparency and the transparent subject: a subject that observes, interrogates, and exposes opaque objects and lays bare their “truth” to the public and a subject that becomes transparent as a staged norm, an immanent truth, a presence that can only refer to itself. Note 1 All translations from German by the author.

References 3nach9. (2017, October 22). Constantin SchreiberüberMisstände in islamischenGemeinden [Video]. YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKufzLEl0Ps&t=9s Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotions (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press. Amir-Moazami, S. (2011). Dialogue as a Governmental Technique: Managing Gendered Islam in Germany. Feminist Review, 98(1), 9–27. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.8 Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. John Hopkins University Press. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press. Asad, T. (2018). Secular Translations: Nation-states, Modern Self and Calculative Reason. Columbia University Press. Beinbauer-Köhler, B., & Leggewie, C. (2009). Moscheen in Deutschland. Religiöse Heimat und gesellschaftliche Herausforderung. C.H. Beck. Gassen, D., Schlenz, K., & Rose, A. (photos). (2017, March 30). ARD-Journalist besuchtedeutsche Moscheen. Vieles, was er hörte, entsetzteihn. Stern. https://www.

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stern.de/gesellschaft/constantin-schreiber-in-deutschen-moscheen-vieles-was-erhoerte-entsetzte-ihn-7391238.html Fernando, M. L. (2014). The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1984). What is an Author? In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 101–120). Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1997). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books (Original work published 1975). Gassen, D., Schlenz, K., & Rose, A. (photos). (2017, March 30). ARD-Journalist besuchte deutsche Moscheen. Vieles, was er hörte, entsetzteihn. Stern. www.stern. de/gesellschaft/constantin-schreiber-in-deutschen-moscheen-vieles-was-er-hoerteentsetzte-ihn-7391238.html Göle, N. (2016). Introduction: Islamic Controversies in the Caking of European Public Spheres. In Islam and Public Controversy in Europe (pp. 3–21). Ashgate. Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2018). Governing Muslims and Islam in Contemporary Germany: Race, Time and the German Islam Conference. Brill. Junginger, B. (2017, March 28). Er warf einen Blick hinter die Mauern deutscher Moscheen. Augusburger Allgemeine. Lanz, M. (Presenter). (2017, June 7). Episode 1001 [TV series episode]. In Markus Lanz. Mhoch2 TV; ZDF. Linke, U. (1999). German Bodies. Race and Representation After Hitler. Routledge. Massad, J. (2015). Islam in Liberalism. University of Chicago Press. Oliver-Heckmann, D., & Spahn, J. (2017, April 4). Die Fragenregeln, wie der Islam in Deutschland ankommt. Deutschlandfunk. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ forderung-nach-islam-gesetz-die-fragen-regeln-wie-der-islam-100.html Pape, J. (2017, March 31). Was man versteht, macht weniger Angst. Interview with Constantin Schreiber. Tagesschau. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/moscheereport-101.html Robinson, D. (1997). Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained. Routledge. Schreiber, C. (2017). Inside Islam. Was in Deutschlands Moscheen gepredigt wird. Econ. Tagesschau (2017, March 28). Der Moscheereport. Teil 1 [Video]. Tagesschau.de. https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/video-273349.html Tagesschau (2019, June 6). Moscheereport. Ein Register für Moscheen? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVeJWd6byQ Zeit Online (2017, March 30). CDU-Politiker Jens Spahn fordert Islamgesetz. Die Zeit. www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2017-03/cdu-jens-spahn-islam-gesetz

15 THE GREAT SUPERSESSION Racialization and Replacement in American Evangelical Islamophobia S. Jonathon O’Donnell

Introduction: “America 2017: Life Under an Islamic Antichrist”

Writing in 2004, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the pastor and missionary Ralph Stice opens his book of anti-Muslim apocalypticism From 9/11 to 666 with a work of speculative fction. The projected year is 2017. “The call to prayer sounds from Bangor, Maine, to Baja, California. The Mahdi government has constructed makeshift mosques in most American towns, but not every outpost has been touched, yet”. Americans now wake up “hours earlier than customary to the haunting ancient Arabic chant”, while on Fridays Islamic clerics across the nation “repeated a phrase that sounded like whimsy a decade earlier: ‘The Koran is stronger than America!’ To the astonishment of the world”, Stice declares, and “no one could argue with that now” (2005, 10). Titled “America 2017: Life Under an Islamic Antichrist”, Stice’s prologue proceeds over the span of thirteen pages to outline a lurid account of the downfall of the United States, one ostensibly “based on the research presented in the following 11 [nonfction] chapters” (Stice 2005, 9). Hobbled by its own imperial hubris, both economically and in the court of public opinion, the U.S., Stice imagines, comes to be brought under the increasing managerial control of an authoritarian Muslim leader: the Mahdi. This Mahdi – a messianic fgure from Islamic eschatology here confated with the Christian Antichrist, a confation that would become commonplace in antiMuslim evangelical texts (Kidd 2009, 159–160; O’Donnell 2021, 81–108) – emerges in the aftermath of a catastrophic Middle Eastern confict, using his rhetorical prowess to “bridge the gap between East and West” (14). Ultimately, the Mahdi becomes head of an “Islamic-European union that DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-19

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overwhelmed one of the world’s great empires and turned the wealthiest nation in history into an economic middleweight” (14). Having lost its hegemony, America is transformed as its political institutions are handed over to the governance of Islamic clerics, for reasons never sufciently clarifed. As a result, industry and commerce “were transformed by Islamic law” (15). Banks cease charging interest, executive salaries are slashed, factory workers are granted regular breaks for prayer, and the “sexual revolution [is] halted” (16) – although critically Stice only mentions “adultery”, omitting both abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. The “American way of life” (15) is destroyed. Almost two decades on, Stice’s narrative serves as a window into not simply the Islamophobic imaginary that abounded in America in the early years of the “War on Terror” but which endures today. While anti-Muslim elements had been part of the conservative evangelical discourse for decades, the post-9/11 era witnessed both an intensifcation of such elements and a shift in their focus. George Otis’ (1991) The Last of the Giants and Reza Safa’s (1996) Inside Islam focused primarily on “Islam” as an apocalyptic religious threat and harbinger of the Antichrist but lacked discussion of the cultural, political, and demographic fears that would emerge in full force during the twenty-frst century. From 9/11 to 666 is among the earlier incarnations of this shift, sitting alongside texts like Robert Livingstone’s (2004) Christianity and Islam: The Final Clash and Joel Richardson’s (2006) Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah – the latter of which would fnd itself on the New York Times bestseller list when World Net Daily republished it in 2009 as The Islamic Antichrist. Blending the eschatological anxieties of works that saw Islam as a chiefy spiritual threat, this wave of texts signalled the emergence of a subgenre in contemporary evangelical demonology in which ideas of a demoniac “Islam” merge with broader Islamophobic discourses on “demographic jihad” and conspiracies about a Muslim Brotherhood infltration of U.S. institutions (O’Donnell 2018). Through examining a cross-section of evangelical anti-Muslim texts, this chapter takes aim at their demonologization of Islam and Muslims in the U.S., not simply to illustrate the politics of intense Othering and dehumanization they involve (although it does this) but as a lens for unpacking wider anxieties about temporality, territoriality, and obsolescence that sit at the heart of such texts. These anxieties manifest particularly in how evangelical Islamophobia is galvanized by an intersection of religious fears over Christianity’s theological “supersession” by Islam with material anxieties over the cultural and demographic replacement of a white Christian America by its racialized Others, notably “Muslims” (racialized as Arab) and Black Americans (framed as susceptible to conversion). Interrogating this intersection of religious and racialized anxieties, the chapter demonstrates how evangelicals’ vision of a demoniac “Islam” acts as an abject refection of both U.S. imperialist praxis

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and their own desires to construct a pious and ultra-patriarchal social order. Ultimately, it argues that the true terror articulated by evangelical anti-Muslim texts is not simply one of replacement but of obsolescence. “Islam Is the Future”

On the third page of his NYT bestseller The Islamic Antichrist, Joel Richardson declares boldly that “Islam is the future” (2009, 3). However, while most of his text engages in a comparative reading of Muslim and Christian eschatologies, the reason given for this declaration is not theological but demographic. “If present trends do not change dramatically”, he explains, “Islam will bypass Christianity for the title of the world’s largest religion very shortly”. Richardson is particularly keen to clarify that he is not speaking about growth outside “the West” – rather, “Islam is the fastest growing religion, not only in the world, but also in the United States, Canada, and Europe” (4). This narrative around demographic shift is a central aspect of contemporary Islamophobia. As Sarah Bracke and Luis Hernández Aguilar write on the European context, “the problematization of Muslims in Europe [as the Muslim Question] is particularly and anxiously concerned with demographics”, especially the dynamics of birth and migration (2020, 681). Analyzing anti-Muslim discourses from across Europe, they trace how conspiratorial ideas of “demographic jihad” or “population replacement” animate reactionary anxieties about a decaying Europe confronted by civilizational decline and a need for defence against “Muslims and Islam”. In these conspiracist narratives, Muslims are positioned as threatening to replace the “native” population and culture of Europe, imagined as intrinsically white and Christian, absent any histories of colonial entanglement or consideration of deep-rooted Islamic presences in parts of Europe. “Islam” here is always imagined as both recent and coming from elsewhere. While Bracke and Hernández Aguilar’s study focuses on Europe, these narratives play key roles in American evangelical Islamophobia. Stice’s fantasy of America’s fall relies on depictions of Islam as fundamentally alien to the West and the United States, especially. The U.S. only fails in its mission of imperialist liberation because “Muslims do not think like Americans” (2005, 12), and his narrative concludes with fantasies of colonization by Muslim migrants. “To complete the colonization of the U.S. for Islam”, he writes, “Mahdi beamed a worldwide call to occupy infdel lands” (19). Eager to “kick the humbled giant and rake in his spoils”, many heed the call: “Jets packed full of men shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ had landed throughout 2015–16, and they emptied an ardent workforce onto the tarmacs of JFK and O’Hare, Logan, and Dulles” (19). These “hordes of lanky Islamic youth” who were the product of the “low productivity and high birth rates” of Muslim-majority countries are “catapulted from a class of unemployed

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no-names” to “ofcial enforcers of the new global regime” (19). Stice wraps up by combining apocalypticism with fear of demographic change, drawing on the common evangelical image of imminent violent end-times persecution as “true disciples of Christ” are executed before an audience framed as representative of an altered America. “At times, only the men were slain”, he intones, “Their wives and children then awarded to one of the many newly immigrated Muslim bachelors. Occasionally the whole family was beheaded in front of crowds comprised primarily of new immigrants” (20). Stice concludes with a fantasy of end-times martyrdom, projecting an air of calm over the imagined victims. After all, “it wasn’t every day that a family got to fulfl biblical prophecy and prepare the way for a 1000-year reign” (21). Stice’s recourse to a fantasy of prophetic fulfilment is central to the evangelical framing of the “Muslim Question”, which I turn to shortly. First, it is important to note that fantasies of the “colonization of the U.S. for Islam” do not simply replicate the features of anti-Muslim discourses discussed by Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, they often rely on them. In such narratives, “Europe” often figures as a negative image of America’s possible future, a place that has already fallen (or is currently falling) to “Islam”. This is apparent in Stice’s claim that a future “Islamic-European Union” is what finally ends U.S. hegemony. In his sequel text, written a decade after From 9/11 to 666 and in response to different geopolitical events – Arab Spring, Christian Winter (2014) – Stice frames the nation’s fall in settler-colonial and gastronomic terms: America “will be the last frontier of victory that Muhammad envisioned” (xxiii) and a “kind of final course on the menu” (xxiv). Similar language is found in the work of missionary Don Richardson, who frames America as “the last bastion” against “the pull of the Islamic siren” that will eventually seduce its allies across the West (2003, 169), while Michael Youssef fixates on the “goal of Islamic conquest”, beginning with the Middle East through Europe, Southeast Asia, and finally America. Youssef writes darkly of how “Arab money and Arab influence are on full display on the streets of London” and of how mosques – “symbols of Islamic power” – are being built “worldwide at a rate unprecedented in history”, potentially surpassing cathedrals in both height and capacity (2013, 169–170). Finally, he turns his attention to the U.S., where Islam is experiencing “rapid growth [due to] immigration, high birth rate, and conversion” (171). Youssef’s reference to conversion is important, marking a point of divergence between evangelical anti-Muslim writings and broader reactionary narratives around “demographic jihad”. This divergence is made clear by Joel Richardson when he elaborates on his claim that “Islam is the future”. While he writes that “much of the reason for the faster growth rate of Islam is simply higher birth rates among Muslims” (2009, 9), this fact is

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presented almost as a comfort. His chief concern, at least in Antichrist, is conversion. “Every year, tens of thousands of Americans convert to Islam”, even going on to note that perhaps as many as “sixty-thousand” Christians may be converting to Islam every year, even among those who are “spirit-flled” (that is, Pentecostal, Charismatic) Christians, including one who “was a pastor’s son raised in a deeply religious and traditional Christian family” (3–6). Richardson states that this might shock his audience, pointing to racial demographics as a reason: “White Christian America has not been as impacted” as much as has Black Christian America – “85 per cent of American converts to Islam are African American” – something he ties to the presence of Islam primarily in urban centres like Chicago and as marking “a sad commentary on the discontinuity of the American church” (6). This racialized component is also present in Youssef’s text, which spends several pages lamenting rates of conversion among African Americans. Indeed, he claims, “Muslim leaders see black America as ripe for conversion” since “the message espoused by militant black Muslims is much the same as the message preached by militant Arab Muslims: America must be subjugated” (2013, 172). Youssef’s and Richardson’s anxieties over Black conversion lay bare the racialized dimensions of their anti-Muslim narratives and galvanize specifcally racialized fears. Rarely, if ever, are white converts to Islam mentioned. Rather, whiteness appears only in the fgure of “White Christian America”, framed as the normative state of American Christianity and as innocently and ignorantly unaware of looming threats to its hegemony. “Something dramatic and revolutionary is happening right before our eyes, and most Western Christians are oblivious to it”, Richardson laments (2009, 10). This threat to Christianity in America is driven by (implicitly foreign) “Muslim leaders” and actualized through coalitions of “radical” Black and Arab Muslims seeking to “subjugate” (white, Christian) America. Although these narratives do not rely quite as overtly as Stice does on demographic fears, in which Muslim migrants descend in “hordes” to violently execute and replace “Americans”, they similarly rely on the fear that the hegemony of “White Christian America” will be replaced by something other, something nonwhite (Black or Arab), Muslim, and (by proxy) un-American. Yet the fxation of Youssef and Richardson on conversion is core to the evangelical problematization of Islam, one also core to Stice’s narrative and its conclusion. Richardson makes this explicit not only when he positions birth rates as the potentially comforting dimension of demographic change but also when he frames births and migration as only laying the foundations for social and spiritual transformation: as Muslim demographics surge, a “tipping point” will occur, “bandwagon conversions and confusion among faithful Christians will rule the day” (2009, 10).

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Demonology, Temporality, Supersession

For these evangelical writers, conversion enframes other forms of demographic threat. Like other iterations of the “Muslim Question”, they position “Islam” as a problem – one that Christians remain ignorant of and must be awakened to. This problem is assumed to be unsettling but also one with a solution. This solution is implicit in the title of Stice’s speculative prologue with which I began and which other authors make explicit. That is, Islam’s present growth is caused by the fact that it is predestined to play a central (antagonistic) role in the decidedly Christian end times. It is, as Joel Richardson claims, to be “the primary vehicle .  .  . used by Satan to fulfl the prophecies of the Bible about the future political/religious/military system of the Antichrist” (2009, 12). The perceived threat of “Islam” is ameliorated via its assimilation into Christianity and into the teleological framework of Christian eschatology, one in which victory is ultimately assured. Indeed, Richardson later modifes his initial claim: “As I said earlier, Islam is the future (albeit only temporarily so)” (11). Both the attempted assimilation of “Islam” into Christian eschatology and the assimilation of it as specifcally demonic are core to understanding evangelical narratives of replacement. Islam’s demonologization does not only facilitate processes of violent Othering. While concepts of the demonic and demonization are mainly framed through associations with moral and metaphysical evil as well as how they dehumanize individuals and populations by linking them to this evil, within contemporary evangelicalism, these concepts also bring with them a cluster of broader theological frameworks. As I have explored elsewhere, one of these is a construction of temporality (O’Donnell 2021, 33–34). In the demonological frameworks of the authors discussed, Satan and his demons are viewed as having been already defeated through Christ’s death and resurrection. Demonic activity in the world is, therefore, framed as a transient phenomenon, permitted by divine will to tempt and torment humanity. As one evangelical author writes, Satan is “out on bail”. He “was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to ultimate, eternal destruction. That sentence has not yet been executed, but there is no way for Satan to escape it” (Pritchard, quoted in O’Donnell 2021, 148). This sentence is fnally passed at the apocalypse, when Satan is confned to Hell. The apocalyptic and demonological framing of Islam draws upon this framework, in which the demonic threat is not to humanity’s ultimate future but rather to their individual souls. “Islam” and its potential demographic replacement of “White Christian America” is, thus, a threat to the lives and souls of Americans but not to the world order itself. Any demographic – and, thus, cultural and spiritual – change is “only temporarily so”. Through fguring Islam and its demographic shifts as the vehicle for the coming Antichrist, the authors not only aim to situate “Islam” entirely within

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the frameworks of their Christianity but situate it as both invalid and destined to pass away. Yet this attempt to use demonology to render Islam always already part of Christianity points to underlying tensions, linked directly to the “threat” of conversion. A common refrain among more missionary authors is the difculty of converting Muslims to Christianity. Don Richardson encapsulates this, writing that Islam is “unique among non-Christian religions. It stands alone as the only belief system that, due to its very design, frustrates any attempts to convert adherents, since it “drastically redefned fundamental tenets” of Judaism and Christianity (2003, 18; emphasis in original). This “redefnition” relates to Islam’s continuities with these traditions, its inclusion (and difering interpretations) of elements found in them, most notably, its framing of Jesus, who exists as a prophet but not the Son of God. Authors will also highlight how Muslims hold that the Bible was “corrupted by Jews and Christians” (Shoebat & Richardson 2008, 22). That is, “Islam” not only difers from Christianity but accounts for such diferences, resolving them in favour of itself. Reza Safa makes the specifc threat of this resolution explicit in his 2006 The Coming Fall of Islam in Iran, claiming Islam “wants to take the place of Jesus. It is a revelation that claims supersession over Jesus” (2006, 26; emphasis added). The concept of supersession brings with it a history replete with ideas of replacement and temporality. As historian Kathleen Biddick outlines, the doctrine of supersession posited a “theological supersession of the Christian Church over Israel. Christians believed that the New Testament superseded the Hebrew Bible and redefned it as the Old Testament” (2003, 4). This process of redefnition worked within a typological imaginary wherein events and individuals in the “Old Testament” were seen to prefgure a fulflment in the New: Christ as the fulflment of the Mosaic Law, for example, or various diabolical fgures in the Hebrew Bible as prefgurations of the Antichrist. Critically, “this supersessionary move produces Jews as the fgures for the literal truth of Christians” (6). However, she continues, there is a tension in this fgural logic in that every fulflment can itself become a prefguration of another (the Incarnation, for example, prefgures the Last Judgment) and remains vulnerable to temporal reversal. The fgures and visions of the Hebrew Bible read as fgures for Christ’s fulflment may not be such – rather, Christ himself may be a fgure of the (Jewish) messiah to come. The doctrine of supersession maintains the “proper” ordinance of time, ensuring Christianity’s revelatory supremacy. Concepts of Islamic supersession, thus, here repeat (thereby disrupting) Christianity’s supersession of Judaism, a theological replacement that becomes framed as preceding and justifying wider projects of material replacement. Moving away from the specifc focus on conversion found in Antichrist, Joel Richardson ties this theological “replacement” to other Islamophobic narratives in his 2015 Christian Zionist text When a Jew Rules the World.

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Initially outlining what he sees as the fawed history of Christian supersessionism, he writes “Islamic supersessionism . . . was a stronger strain [than Christianity’s], a mutated form .  .  . [which] is far more than theological replacement; it is also profoundly militant, seeking to eradicate all non-Muslims. Not only is Islam as a religion intended to replace Christianity, Judaism, and every other religion, but Muslims are intended to replace Christians, Jews, and every other people” (2015, 145). Richardson’s “Muslims” here are clearly racialized, building on racialized narratives of conversion to position the threat as a replacement of kinds of people (e.g., Christians by Muslims), both through and in addition to conversion. Richardson reiterates this point several pages later: Today, a supersessionist, supremacist mentality permeates every aspect of Islamic theology and Muslim identity. Muslims are taught that theirs is the fnal religion, superior to all others, intended to ultimately replace all others, subsuming and dominating the whole world. What’s more, they are taught that Muslims themselves will replace all other peoples. (2015, 148) This framing implies escalation, moving from theology to identity. Unlike in Antichrist, this replacement is now explicitly tied to a narrative of continual conquest. “Islamic supersessionism continued to play out throughout [Islam’s] history, serving as a catalyst for the literal erasure of previous cultures and religions wherever it spread”, Richardson writes (2015, 146). He then outlines that this pattern is observable from the “once-glorious” Hagia Sophia “in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul)”, the Temple Mount, the destruction of ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan, and “hundreds of churches and monasteries throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and now even across Europe” (2015, 146). Presenting Europe as the latest victim of a history of Islamic expansionism while also removing the Balkans from Europe “proper”, Richardson cleaves closer to broader replacement narratives than his earlier text, demonstrating the integration of evangelical narratives with wider Islamophobic discourse. The “Stronger Strain”

Richardson’s identifcation of “Islamic supersessionism” as a “stronger strain” and “mutated form” of Christianity’s points to underlying instabilities in their anxieties about replacement, destabilizing notions of “Islam” as radically other to (white, Christian) “Europe”. “Islam” appears here not so much as antithetical to “the West” or its Christianity but as an exacerbation of it – a mutation of its own supersessionist projects. This mirroring dynamic is also apparent in the material, political dimensions of their replacement

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narratives, in which narratives about the restrictive and authoritarian nature of Shariah (O’Donnell 2018) often sit alongside evangelical political eforts to bring spheres of U.S. life under the control of “biblical law”. Stice’s claim that America’s fall to a Muslim Antichrist would entail the halting of the “sexual revolution” is one example of this, eliding the reality that evangelicals in the United States continue to push for this exact political project (O’Donnell 2021; Steensland & Wright 2014). The Islamophobic instrumentalization of women’s rights and queer rights as part of U.S. empire-building is by now well-documented (Puar 2007). However, the variant of this deployed by Stice is distinct. Not only does it obscure continued patterns of misogynistic and queerphobic violence “at home”, but it illustrates how evangelical constructions of “Islam” mirror the social order the authors themselves seek to build but in Othered form, mutated, a “stronger strain”. This construction of Islam also infects narratives of Islam’s “colonization” of the West, which becomes an intensifcation of and response to Western imperialist projects. Safa, Stice, and Youssef build extensive discussions of European colonialism and American imperialism in their analyses of Islam. For Youssef, the coming world order of the Islamic Antichrist is a force that arises to dissolve “the territorial divisions imposed by Western mapmakers” (2013, 38), which for Safa relates to how “imperialism .  .  . is a concept greatly hated by Islam” (2006, 107). Both of Stice’s texts contain sympathetic depictions of anti-American sentiments among Muslims due to U.S.-backed strongmen in the Middle East and North Africa. In From 9/11, which began with his fantasy of America’s fall, Stice recounts how acquaintances during his missionary work asked him why my country did not do more to help the poor countries of the world, why it backed a “savage, murderous” government in Israel and cruel dictators in their homelands, why it had a president who prayed for guidance then ordered bombings that killed innocent people. (Stice 2005, 30–31) For Stice, these are reasonable questions that gave him “great insight” into the reasons “for Islamic fundamentalism’s revival and spread” (2005, 30–31). This understanding extends to framings of conversions by Black Americans, discussed before. “Segregation, social injustice, police brutality, poverty and decaying ghetto life were the elements that opened the door for Islam’s infltration”, Safa writes (1996, 55), while both he and Youssef identify Islam as a source of empowerment. Black people are allegedly drawn by its “ofer of power for the powerless” (Youssef 2013, 173), allowing them to “experience freedom from a brutal, unjust system . . . hope of protection and pride, a voice for their anger and frustration at injustice” (Safa 1996, 56). While these authors still frame “Islam” as fundamentally

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demonic, its appeal and power are read as logical consequences of U.S. imperialism abroad and white supremacist brutality at home (O’Donnell 2021, 81–104). Its statistical growth and projected takeover of America become reactions to American foreign and domestic policy, a form of political blowback and mirror of the United States itself and its systems of violence. Yet, although rooted in more material factors, the framings of Stice, Safa, and Youssef are not distinct from Richardson’s claim that Islam’s growth was an indictment of the Church. Like him, they frame “Islam” as a reaction and consequence of American action, the demonic absence that occupies the space of divine (white, Christian) presence when it retreats. However, placed alongside how this “Islam” mirrors many aspects of the social order the authors seek, they reveal tensions in evangelical narratives of replacement. Although the ultra-conservative social order they seek to associate “Islam” with is a projection of their own internal desires for a return to a religious, patriarchal social order, it is not only this. Rather, it is these desires rendered in an Othered, racialized form. The role of imperialism is key here. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha writes extensively about how colonial powers sought to inculcate in the colonized a diminished and racialized form of subjectivity – one that could approximate (and so maintain) colonizer power but never truly challenge it. The colonizer desired “a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of diference that is almost the same but not quite” (1994, 86; emphasis in original), (necessarily) racialized as one that was “almost the same but not white” (90). This Other was a source of ambivalence and anxiety, turning from one of “mimicry – a diference that is almost nothing but not quite – to menace – a diference that is almost total but not quite” (91; emphasis in original). While writers often stress Islam’s inassimilability and claim U.S. imperial projects fail because “Muslims do not think like Americans” (Stice 2005, 12), their persistent anxieties over Islam’s similarities to Christianity and its potential supersession of it belie this narrative. Framed as a product of a doomed U.S. empire, “Islam” fgures the embedded threat of the colonial desire for an Other but one whose resemblance to the self is a cause of anxiety rather than assurance, of menace rather than mimicry. As a monotheistic religion that exists in continuity with Christianity, it is “almost the same” as Christianity “but not quite”. As an alleged harbinger of a pious and patriarchal order, it is “almost the same” as White Christian America “but not white”. Conclusion: Imagining Obsolescence

Evangelical visions of a demoniac “Islam” refect and refract the global operations of the U.S. empire as its product and its mirror as well as the ultra-patriarchal religious order that reactionary evangelicals wish to build. Their “Islam” is, as Richardson illuminates, a “mutated” version of their

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Christianity; indeed, it is the “stronger strain”. Threatened by the continuities of Islam with both Judaism and Christianity, by its novelty and its growth, the authors examined in this chapter produce an image of “Islam” as something that was always already part of their cosmologies: the vehicle of the coming Antichrist, destined to pass away in the proper order of things. By doing so, they reinforce its alleged threat to individual salvation even as they assuage themselves that its demographic expansion has no ultimate bearing on the world order they uphold. At the same time, their “Islam’s” replication of this order in Othered, racialized form necessitates further analysis and points to the specifc fears of supersession held by evangelicals over broader reactionary anxieties of replacement. A common element of reactionary replacement conspiracies is the fear of the loss of some essential (cultural, racial) component of “the West”. This is present in the evangelical narratives discussed, crystallized in fears over the loss of an “American way of life”, of the whiteness and Christianity that way of life implicitly depends on, of how “Muslims” will replace “Americans” with all the religio-racial implications such a replacement entails. However, beneath these fears lies another anxiety. The narrative of supersession entails a relationship not merely of replacement but obsolescence. It is the replacement not merely of a thing but also the reason for that thing’s continued existence. Much as Christian supersession theology was used to justify Judaism’s alleged obsolescence as part of an unfurling divine plan, the notion of “Islamic supersessionism” injects uncertainty into their narratives of eventual divine triumph and continued revelatory supremacy. This is the terror at the heart of the Islamophobic narratives discussed here: the terror not merely of being “replaced” but that such replacement may be justifed, even divinely intentioned, both theologically and politically. Their repeated attempts to situate Islam inside the existing biblical record through demonology and eschatology underline their terror that it might not be situatable as such. As their visions of the alleged Islamic “colonization” of the West are a repetition of earlier and ongoing Western imperial interventions, their vision of “Islam” repeats their aspirations of theocratic, patriarchal Christianity, simply in new forms; Other, but recognizably so, menacingly so. At the heart of evangelical fears over Islamic supersession is, thus, not merely a fear that Islam will “replace” Christianity or that Muslims might “replace” Christians but that Islam may have always already rendered that Christianity obsolete. Not a fear that some intrinsic, irreplaceable essence will be lost but that nothing essential will be lost at all. References Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge. Biddick, K. (2003). The Typological Imaginary. University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12742 Kidd, T. (2009). American Christians and Islam. Princeton University Press. Livingstone, R. (2004). Islam and Christianity: The Final Clash. Pleasant Word. O’Donnell, S. J. (2018). Islamophobic Conspiracism and Neoliberal Subjectivity: The Inassimilable Society. Patterns of Prejudice, 52(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0031322X.2017.1414473 O’Donnell, S. J. (2021). Passing Orders. Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare. Fordham University Press. Otis, G. (1991). The Last of the Giants. Chosen Books. Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press. Richardson, D. (2003). Secrets of the Koran. Bethany House. Richardson, J. (2006). Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah. Pleasant Word. Richardson, J. (2009). The Islamic Antichrist. WND Press. Richardson, J. (2015). When a Jew Rules the World. Winepress Media. Safa, R. (1996). Inside Islam. Charisma House. Safa, R. (2006). The Coming Fall of Islam in Iran. Charisma House. Shoebat, W., & Richardson, J. (2008). God’s War on Terror. Top Executive Media. Steensland, B., & Wright, E. (2014). American Evangelicals and Conservative Politics: Past, Present, and Future. Sociology Compass, 8(6), 705–717. https://doi. org/10.1111/soc4.12175 Stice, R. (2005). From 9/11 to 666. ACW Press. Stice, R. (2014). Arab Spring, Christian Winter. ANEKO Press. Youssef, M. (2013). Jesus, Jihad, and Peace. Worthy Books.

PART IV

The Gendered Violence of Replacement

16 FASCISM AND THE VIOLENT REPLACEMENT OF THE PEOPLE Mattias Gardell

Introduction

During a livestreamed massacre on March 15, 2019, cheering online spectators across the world followed Brenton Tarrant into a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, from the perspective of a frst-person-shooter video game, seeing the enlarged barrels of the AR-15 and the people encountered and shot in the rooms and hallways of the building.1 Tarrant continued his killing spree at a second mosque three miles away and drove towards a third mosque in Ashburton but was fnally intercepted by the police (High Court 2020). Tarrant took 51 lives and wounded another 56 that day – men, women, and children – and was beatifed Saint Tarrant by his fascist fanbase. He did not kill his victims because of anything they had done; he did not even know their names. He killed them because of who they were: Muslims in Christchurch. Tarrant didn’t hate Muslims, or so he claims. He had travelled in Muslim-majority countries and always been treated “wonderfully”. However, according to his ethnopluralist ideology, Muslims should be in “their homelands”, not in “European lands”. Being in Christchurch by choice or birth made Muslims “invaders” and marked for death. To Tarrant, Muslims born in New Zealand were not home in their land of birth but born aliens – as blood, not territory or citizenship, defnes who you are, and where your home is (Tarrant 2019). Inspired by his Norwegian predecessor Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed to act as “jury, judge, and executioner” on behalf of the “indigenous [white] peoples of Europe” (Breivik 2011), Tarrant felt entitled to “kill the invaders” (Tarrant 2019). On July 22, 2011, Breivik detonated a homemade bomb made of fertilizers, fuel, and chemicals placed in a rental van outside the ofce of social DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-21

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democratic prime minister Jens Stoltenberg in Oslo and massacred young adults at a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya, killing 77 people and injuring 121. “I have committed the most sophisticated, spectacular, and brutal political assault perpetuated by a militant nationalist in Europe since the end of the Second World War”, Breivik (2012) proudly proclaimed in court. Breivik saw the atrocities of 7/22 as a “marketing operation” to draw attention to his political tract, 2083: A Declaration of European Independence (Breivik 2011), which he mailed to selected recipients in the white radical nationalist landscape hours before the attack, asking his fellow “patriots” to translate and circulate his work. Similarly, Tarrant (2019) posted his Great Replacement manifesto on 8chan and Twitter, along with photos of his assault weapons and an invitation to follow his massacre on a Facebook livestream. Claiming that the “native” white population in Euroland territory (Australia, Canada, Europe, South Africa, the United States, and New Zealand) was being “replaced” by racialized Others in a white genocide program, Tarrant saw white people as an endangered species that, at best, would be reduced to a minority in “their own lands”. “Minorities are never treated well”, Tarrant (2019) warns, “do not become one”. While years apart, these atrocities were not isolated instances of weaponized whiteness but part of a series of assaults similar in style and motivation. Perpetrated across the Global North, these attacks began long before Oslo and have continued after Christchurch, although not all are equally well-known. This kind of political violence has been sufciently commonplace to award the individual racist attackers their own epithet within the milieu of white radical nationalism: lone wolf, a metaphor loaded with romantic notions of the potency and lethality of the free-roaming outcast, suiting the hero politics idealized in the milieu. How did we get here? Why do white radical nationalists across the Global North believe that (white) “native” people are being “replaced” with (nonwhite) “alien” people? Why should “resistance” against a perceived invasion of “white” territory be launched by individual “lone wolves” indiscriminately killing noncombatants they do not even know the names of? In this chapter, I explore these questions by (1) tracing the genealogy of the white genocide/great replacement theory; (2) following the tracks of the lone wolf through the political landscape of white nationalism; (3) discussing the role of the hero, violence, and death in fascist ideology; and (4) investigating the paradoxes of anti-elitist elitism and the efort to save the people by killing them as key to post-1945 fascism. The Words Used

Before proceeding, we need to clarify how the key concepts of fascism, nation, and radical nationalism are used in this context. Following Roger Grifn (1992, 2018), “fascism” here connotes a family of revolutionary

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nationalisms centred on the palingenetic myth of national rebirth. Much like socialism, liberalism, and conservatism, fascism changes according to time and space. Italian fascism in 2022 is not the same as Italian fascism of the 1920s, and fascism in Italy is not identical to fascism in other places, be it Hungary, Russia, India, or the United States. Key to fascism is the notion of “nation”, understood in line with Benedict Anderson’s take on the nation as an imagined community (Anderson 1991), produced by nationalist discourse and practice. A nation may be founded on constructs of race, ethnicity, territory, language, history, religion, and culture and is always exclusionary, albeit open to naturalize outsiders under certain conditions. In nationalist imagination, a nation is a transhistorical entity of organic solidarity with a specifc essence that nationalists hold uniquely theirs. More than the sum of its inherent qualities, the nation is something that nationalists believe in and bestow with certain rights, such as the rights of autonomy, prosperity, and self-determination in a territory of its own, typically called the nation’s homeland. The nation that nationalists fght for may or may not be the same as the nation of existing nation-states. A nationalist in Sweden may pay allegiance to a nation defned as Swedish, Nordic, European, Western, White, Christian, or all the above, irrespective of how contradictory that may seem to an outside observer. To a radical nationalist, the nation is of overarching importance, the very root of human existence. In radical nationalist discourse, the cherished nation is typically held to sufer from a severe crisis produced by corrupting internal elements and external enemies. Perceived as deepening, the crisis must be overcome to secure the nation’s existence, an objective a radical nationalist is obliged to fght, kill, and die for. The concept of radical nationalism names a political landscape that encompasses a variety of overlapping and often competing political traditions, including national socialism, populist nativism, the radical right, alt-right, deep right, fascism, ecofascism, occult fascism, identitarianism, radical traditionalism, tribal socialism, and national bolshevism, all of which are open to diferent and unstable interpretations that may spur further schismatic divisions. In relation to fascism, radical nationalism is the broader term. Every fascist is, by defnition, a radical nationalist, but every radical nationalist is not a fascist. Both radical nationalism and fascism seek to return the nation to its former glory, to Make the Nation Great Again. A non-fascist radical nationalist may believe that it is possible to achieve this aim by reformist strategies only: put the nation frst, build a wall, restrict immigration, and the like. To a fascist radical nationalist, nothing but systemic change will do. Fascism, by defnition, is revolutionary although fascists difer in how a fascist revolution may be accomplished. Whereas some fascists hope to somehow mobilize the people to rise in a popular revolt, others are less optimistic about the prospect of gaining mass support ahead of assuming power. The

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latter category may instead opt for a coup d’etat, or they may plan to take power in the wake of some military intervention or in the aftermath of systemic collapse. Great Replacement and White Genocide

In journalistic accounts, the great replacement theory is widely attributed to the French identitarian Renaud Camus. In Le grand remplacement, Camus (2011) claims that Muslim and African “invaders” seek to “replace” the native (white) French population in accordance with the master plan of a shadowy “replacist power” and in collusion with corrupt traitors in the French establishment. Of course, Camus’ theory rejects the republican defnition of the French nation – a French person is a citizen of France – in favour of a racial defnition of blood and essence. He stipulates that a Muslim born in France has an inborn quality of alienating Muslimness that makes him or her Muslim and not French and, therefore, an invader in his or her country of birth. Camus’ work became infuential among identitarians in Europe and Canada, but there is no indication that Tarrant ever read it or even knew it existed. Tarrant shares Camus’ assumption that European is something that you either are or are not – it is not something that you may become or aspire to be, not if you are of the wrong blood, which is key to the great replacement theory. This idea, however, is hardly original; it is picked up from elder currents of white nationalist thought. Important for Tarrant was the imprisoned white radical nationalist David Lane of the Silent Brotherhood (nicknamed The Order). Lane was an Aryan guerrilla active in the early 1980s and the founder of Wotansvolk, an Odinist think-tank (Gardell 2003). In his White Genocide Manifesto (1988), Lane coined the Holy 14 Words – “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” – which has become the rallying cry among white radical nationalists globally, and which Tarrant scribbled on his AR-15 and quoted three times in The Great Replacement. To Lane, it was the U.S.A. – not France or Europe – that was at the centre of the great replacement/white genocide drama. According to Lane, the U.S. was, from its very inception, part of the plan to exterminate the white race and grind together the diverse cultures of the world into one mongrel race of soulless and interchangeable production units. It was to use its military to destroy every white territorial initiative on the globe, as evidenced when it intervened to end Germany’s efort to “defend the race” in the Second World War and forced Europe to open the gates to invading “Moors and Mongols” to terminate the white race, as “racial integration is genocide for the White race through miscegenation”. Time is running out. “Death of a race is eternal”, Lane warns, urging white men to do whatever is necessary to “preserve the beauty of their women and a future for White children” (Lane 1988, 1994a, 1994b).

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Lane was inspired by lawyer Madison Grant, head of the American Eugenics Society, and historian Lothrop Stoddard, a Ku Klux Klan consultant. To Lane, what was of prime importance was their eforts to preserve the endangered species of North America, including the American Bison and the Native American – a term they reserved for white Americans of Nordic heritage. In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant (1906) claimed that the Nordic race extinguished in the melting pot, outbred by the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian, and the Jew – all classifed as alien races due to the particular race-religion constellations at work here. In The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard (1921, 264) warned that the “fnest of all human breeds”, the Nordic race, was being “displaced, not reinforced”, by the “truly alien hordes of the European east and south”. This was, however, but a prelude to the deluge that was yet to come. “The whole white race is exposed, immediately or ultimately”, Stoddard exclaimed, to the “fnal replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races”. Alarmed, Congress passed the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 to favour immigration from Northern and Western Europe at the expense of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, in addition to existing laws excluding nonwhite people from citizenship. Adolf Hitler kept a well-read copy of Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race in his private library (Ryback 2010), and both the eugenics program of the Third Reich and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were modelled on American eugenic practice and racial law (Kühl 2012; Whitman 2017). To Hitler, the Aryan race was on the brink of extermination. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (1939) that, should the Aryan race disappear, “a profound darkness will descend on earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert”. To secure racial “survival”, Hitler sought to use the powers of the state to crush Jewish Bolshevism, reassert Aryan culture, implement eugenics and genocidal programs, and create sufcient Lebensraum for the Volk by replacing the population of the conquered Eastern territories with German settlers, farmers, and industries (Smith 1980). The German conquest of the East was modelled on the American conquest of the West, as Hitler aimed at establishing a colonial empire on the continent of which it was the dominant power (Kakel 2011). “Here in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America”, Hitler said (Fritz 2018, 126). To Hitler, the conquest of the East was a colonial war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg) between incompatible life forms (fascism vs communism; civilization vs barbary; Aryans vs Jews; good vs evil), in which the prize was the privilege of life itself. Speaking to the top ofcers under his command, Hitler said they could not leave this urgent task to future generations (Fritz 2018). Reiterating Hitler, Tarrant (2019) asks, “Would you rather do the killing, or leave it to your children?” White nationalist fears of racial replacement may be seen as a case of chickens coming home to roost; the history of settler colonialism and ethnic

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cleansing have returned from the past to haunt white Euroland nationalists in the present. Another historical replacement model white nationalists frequently refer to in the present is the Crusades and the Spanish Reconquista. In their study of how crusading rhetoric frames and justifes political violence in the present, Mike Horswell and Akil N. Awan (2020, 1) observe that, “the Crusades refuse to remain in the past”. Crusading knights have a long presence in the white nationalist landscape, as evidenced by the Ku Klux Klan, and saw a revival when Islam returned to the fore as the archenemy of the West after the collapse of communism. When Tarrant (2019) quotes Pope Urban II (1095) calling for a holy war against the “impious race of the Saracen” (the Muslims), his reference was common to the rhetoric of the community he addressed. Breivik’s efort to summon recruits to the supposedly revived Knights Templar to repel the Muslim “invaders” and the “Eurabian” conspiracy theory follow the same logic (Breivik 2011; Ye’or 2005; Gardell 2014). In nineteenth-century Spanish nationalism, the concept of the Reconquista was used to project the construction of a Christian Spanish nation back to the Romans and Visigoths, “interrupted” by almost 800 years of Muslim rule. The Reconquista encompasses all the events that led to the end of al-Andalus (“Muslim Spain”) and the establishment of “Christian Spain” as “true Spain”. This involved wars and battles; edicts banning Jews (1492) and Muslims (1502, 1522–26); the forced conversions to Christianity; the prohibitions of Moorish (Muslim) clothing, literature, language, and festivals; torture interrogations of suspected crypto Jews and stealth Muslims; and the Great Expulsion of all Moriscos (people of “Muslim background”) from the Kingdom in 1609–11. The patron saint of Spain is Santiago Matamoros (“Saint James, the Muslim Slayer”), the martyred apostle of Jesus who, according to legend, miraculously reappeared in the mythic battle of Clavijo to purge Spain of the Muslim presence. In popular culture, legendary clashes between Christians and Muslims are still celebrated in the festival Moros y Cristianos (Harris 2000).2 In contemporary white nationalist usage, the concept of the Reconquista is used as a call for purging “white territories” from Muslim and cultural Marxist infuence (Ebner 2020). “There will only be two options” for white Europeans, identitarian fascist Guillaume Faye says in The Colonization of Europe (2016): “our historic disappearance, or a Reconquista”. Breivik (2011) asserts that “Muslims will be expelled from Europe yet again, after major bloodshed and millions of dead across the continent”. Tarrant (2019) echoes: “Remove the invaders, retake Europe”. Lone Wolf Race Warriors and Leaderless Resistance

The tracks of the white racist lone wolf hark back to the white power milieu that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a fusion of the once mighty

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ideologies of European fascism and American white supremacy. European fascism was in disarray after its loss in the Second World War. In the U.S., white racist organizations had failed to hold back the black Civil Rights Movement’s fght for desegregation. In Africa and Asia, European colonial power was pushed back by national liberation movements. This, in turn, was followed by the “colonial boomerang”, as people from the former colonies in greater numbers than before moved into the heartlands of the old colonial centres. Western European and North American administrations responded by establishing colonial systems of governance within their national territories that were challenged by antiracist and social justice movements. Alarmed, European fascists and American white supremacists found common ground and merged into a transatlantic scene of white “resistance”. “The White Man has lost!”, Joseph Tommasi of the Los Angeles–based National Socialist Liberation Front declared in Strategy for Revolution (c 1974). “We are an occupied people in our own land who must now develop a totally diferent outlook on revolution”. In the years to come, white American racist leaders such as Louis Beam, Tom Metzger, David Lane, and James Mason came to share his conclusion (Gardell 2003). White racist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan(s), white citizens’ militias, and national socialist parties had not only proved too small, weak, and dysfunctional to “defend the white race” but also far too visible and easy to monitor, infltrate, and neutralize. While white “resistance” still needed organizations and ideologues to reach and educate new cadres, armed resistance should be decentralized and leaderless. White nationalist leaders should issue generalized calls to arms but give no direct orders and have no advanced knowledge of who was planning to do what. The more random and unpredictable the violence, the better. Perpetrators would themselves be responsible for planning, fnancing, and implementing their violent assaults. To go under the radar, a would-be perpetrator should follow the “laws of the lone wolf”: stay away from white nationalist organizations and public events; melt into the population by looking and acting as anyone else; do not talk politics, do not reveal plans, take no credits for accomplishments. The perpetrator would risk their life or freedom but be included as a heroic lone wolf in the white nationalist hall of fame. To leaders, such tactics were cost-efective. A disconnected perpetrator would have no harmful information to reveal if caught (Beam 1983, 1992; Metzger n.d.-a, n.d.-b; Lane 1994a, 1997; Mason 1980a, 1980b, 1981a, 1992; Kaplan 1997; Gardell 2021a). While the lone wolf metaphor was used interchangeably with lone eagle, lone warrior, and one-man army, it ultimately became the term that stuck. In modern American culture, the lone eagle symbolizes the spirit of freedom and sovereign majesty, but as the bald eagle is also the national emblem of the United States, the eagle metaphor became increasingly tainted for radical white nationalists who came to see the government as their enemy. The

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lone wolf had no such connotations in popular white American culture. Seen as free, feared, and lethal, the lone wolf symbolized the outlaw and was associated with wilderness, frontier culture, outlaw bikers, and legendary gunslingers. The lone wolf is an outcast yet a hero, lyricized in numerous Hollywood productions as the lone avenger, the vigilante, Zorro, the lone ranger – almost always white, male, and often rich; a born aristocrat yet against the establishment; a true American hero. The fact that the lone wolf was adopted by fascists as an embodiment of heroic white masculinity alongside the Viking, the Berserker, the Spartan, and the Crusader Knight is hardly surprising. Fascism travels in myth and legend, and the lone wolf does its work by appealing to white radical nationalist warrior dreams and alphamale fantasies (Gardell 2021a). Through a series of white racist violent crimes, including serial murders, massacres, and bombings during the coming decades, the lone wolf’s leaderless resistance tactics spread throughout the American white power world, greatly assisted by media and the frst internet revolution. At the dawn of the new millennium, the FBI (1999) assessed that the “overwhelming majority” of armed white racists had adopted the tactics which made them difcult to apprehend beforehand. By then, the tactics had begun to spread among white nationalists globally and developed into two models that I name after their respective role models: Joseph Paul Franklin and Timothy McVeigh. Franklin was a white racist serial killer who, in the late 1970s, crisscrossed the U.S., shooting individual Blacks, Jews, mixed-race couples, and white women who dated nonwhite men. He operated strictly under the radar; did not partake in racist organizations or events; never talked politics; dressed ordinarily; changed modus operandi, guns, and appearance; and never killed anyone he knew or had prior relations with, picking his targets by their looks or names. McVeigh placed a homemade bomb of fertilizers, fuel, and chemicals at a federal ofce building complex in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The devastating blast killed 168 people, including 19 children, as the buildings housed a daycare centre for the children of federal employees. The Franklin and McVeigh models represent two diferent tactics. The Franklin model is a low-intensity campaign of terror. It uses serial assassinations to send a message to the targeted communities of racialized Others (e.g., Blacks, Muslims, Roma, Jews) or internal enemies (e.g., race traitors, feminists, cultural Marxists) that the victims are forced to represent by being killed: you are out of place, worthless, marked for death. The McVeigh model favours a high-intensity strike of terror – an unexpected attack so shocking that the nation halts, all eyes on the crime. Both models count on the media to do their job: the Franklin model predicts that the media initially will blame the victims and/or the targeted community and then slowly build the terror with stories of a serial killer on the loose; the McVeigh model trusts the

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media to amplify the deed by broadcasting everything about it, including its carnage, motif, and perpetrator. From the perpetrator’s perspective, the Franklin model is less risky. By operating under the radar, changing modus operandi, and killing people whom the perpetrator does not know in places where he or she is not known, the perpetrator seeks to avoid getting caught. Lone wolves following the Franklin model may never be identifed, and some wait years after their frst killings before starting a new cycle, perhaps in another area or state. The McVeigh model is a high risk–high gain venture; the perpetrator is more likely to get caught or killed during or shortly after wreaking havoc but potentially makes a greater impact and is more likely to get the political message disseminated nationwide. The advantages and disadvantages of the two lone wolf models are frequently debated among white fascists, a fact which can be illustrated by the discussion between two of the more well-known Scandinavian lone wolves: Peter Mangs and Anders Behring Breivik. Mangs adopted the Franklin model to the streets of Malmö, Sweden, between 2003 and 2010, killing three and attempting to kill at least twelve more people he took for Muslim, Black, or Roma by their appearance or their name. Conversely, Breivik followed the McVeigh model. In my interviews with Mangs and Breivik following their sentencings, they talked a lot about each other. Breivik hailed Mangs as a brave race warrior, second only to himself, but reprimanded him for not having explained his cause in a manifesto and for choosing the wrong targets. Breivik claimed that Blacks, Muslims, and Roma people cannot be held responsible for defling the country as “it is their nature”, expressing why Mangs should have targeted the traitors who opened the borders to inferior people instead. “He thinks he is the best”, Mangs stated. “But, really, what did he accomplish? He did that one thing, one day, and then got caught. Hitand-die, or go direct to jail for the rest of your life. Quite hard to market, isn’t it?” Mangs found Breivik’s method expensive and complicated, whereas he only had to buy a gun and use it. “Once you’re done killing, throw away the gun and there’s no evidence”. As for the manifesto: “1,500 pages of Breivik’s writings. Who is going to read all of that?” To Mangs, propaganda by deed was superior to any manifesto, and it was obvious that people would follow him, rather than Breivik (Gardell 2015a, 2015b, 2018). Heroes of Life and Death

Lone wolf tactics are disseminated through manifestos, handbooks, propaganda by deed, and fascist fction. A trendsetting novel written from the perspective of a lone wolf character is Hunter by William Pierce (1989), which was dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, whom he described as “the Lone Hunter, who saw his duty as a White man and did what a responsible son of

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his race must do” (Pierce 1989). Hunter was a freestanding sequel to Pierce’s bestselling race war novel Turner Diaries (1978), which inspired scores of underground militants, including The Order, McVeigh, and Breivik. Since then, the genre has grown substantially, with hundreds of titles written by fascist authors across the “once-white world”. On the rise of this fascist fction, Pierce himself states that This is the way to teach people. Write novels, write plays, write flm scripts, because a person not only experiences the actions of the protagonist, but if you have the protagonist in decision-making situations, when he has some sort of a confict that he has to resolve, the reader, or the viewer, undergoes the same thought processes, and then you can carry the audience along, to educate them, to get them to change their minds, to get them to see things the way the protagonist learns to see things.3 Fascism ofers its adherents the possibility to be part of something greater than themselves, invoking their desire for heroism, glory, and honour and inducing their capacities for self-sacrifce, discipline, and violence. Centered on its core myth of national rebirth, fascism appeals to the Faustian task of metamorphosis, of individual, national, and racial grandeurization, heroifcation, and deifcation. Unsurprisingly, fction, rather than the dry prose of party programs, has become a privileged avenue to feed the hero dreams inherent to the fascist mission. This aspect may be illustrated with an analysis of contemporary Swedishlanguage fascist crime novels written in the style of Nordic noir (Gardell 2021b). The narrative is typically set in the decaying world of multiculturalism, political correctness, and meaningless consumerism, with the once-great Swedish nation drifting towards destruction. White majoritarian Swedes are positioned as repressed and depressed, bereft of their aboriginal homeland, mocked by the intellectual elite, silenced by the politically correct media, abused by racial strangers, and betrayed by the political class. The protagonist is typically a young white man or woman who wakes up to the realities of the ongoing white genocide through being exposed to some violent crime – not least rape – committed by racialized aliens protected by the System. Seeking revenge, the protagonist learns how to be a man or meets her hero and is gradually introduced to fascist ideology and the art of killing. In fascist literary fction, violence, life, and passionate love (for the white race, nation, and woman) are intimately related (Gardell 2021b). In fascist desire, Thanatos, the god of death and destruction, and Eros, the god of life and love, are drawn to each other, as the lust of blood in its intensity only is comparable to the passion of love. Fascist literature stresses the productivity of destructivity. Death is the cradle of life. Only apocalyptic violence will create the condition for the rebirth of the nation. Marked as masculine, war and

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aggression become the principles of reproduction. Reproduction and rebirth, fascism claims, do not really require women, not in any active role. Her role is being raped and rescued. Nationalism conventionally construes the nation as a woman and, therefore, something that belongs to men. Her body is being penetrated by racialized Others, which illustrates the failure of the current government to be her legitimate guardian. This sets the stage for the heroic white warrior to come to her rescue by unleashing the excessive violence that allows him to rise above the mundane world of the commoner in a consumerist society. It sets him apart in the more profound sense of being holy and makes him a Crusader ready to sacrifce his life in pursuit of a divine mission. Across the political landscape of radical nationalism, there are recurrent references to Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Jung’s archetype of the hero – he who springs from the depths of the collective unconscious of the Aryan race’s soul and embarks on an adventurous journey; confronts the dragon, the monster of darkness; and returns a new man. This heroic quest lies at the heart of the lone wolf attraction among white radical nationalists. In their eyes, the lone wolf is not a perpetrator of heinous massacres of unarmed civilians; rather, he is the Hero who confronts the Beast, recognizable from the sagas, the Hollywood epics, and the Marvel productions. The laws of the lone wolf dictate that the Hero should melt into the general population as an ordinary man, keep his identity secret, take no credit, tell no one, disappear into an anonymous everyday identity until the time has come for his public performance of heroic masculinity to save the world. This script is readily familiar to most men growing up with white Western popular culture. This is the storyline of Superman, who walks the earth incognito as Clark Kent from Smallville, Kansas, a timid, near-sighted insignifcant reporter who is secretly in love with Lois Lane, a beautiful star reporter who (initially) only has eyes for Superman. When the supervillain enters and threatens the good and innocent people of the city, country, and world, Clark Kent dashes into the closet, elevator, hallway, or alley and changes into Superman. He fies over the heads of the awestruck folks to confront evil as it comes, defeats the supervillain, and wins the admiration of Lois Lane, his love. Dreaming of shapeshifting into a lone wolf to defeat the enemies of the race and save the beauty of the white woman is not all that diferent. Big-screen productions featuring superheroes are immensely popular among the general public. The 2013 Superman flm Man of Steel grossed US$ 291 million in the U.S.A. and Canada and US$ 668 million worldwide. The Dark Knight (2008) grossed US$ 534 million in the U.S. and around US$ 1 billion internationally, whereas the whole Dark Knight trilogy collectively grossed US$ 2.5 billion. Notably, these movies were a huge success among white radical nationalists. A look at white fascist movie reviews collected in the Counter-Current anthology Dark Knight: Batman Viewed From the Right (Johnson & Hood 2018) and The White Nationalist Guide to the

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Movies (Lynch 2013) reveal interesting diferences in their receptions. Many fascist reviewers fnd Superman to be too much of a big blue boy scout created by Jews (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) to fght the anti-white system that he is constantly called in to save. Other fascist reviewers stress his dual white heritage. Superman comes from a superior Aryan planet (there are no nonwhite Kryptonians) organized hierarchically along caste lines and is raised by churchgoing small-town white farmers in Kansas. In addition, fascist reviewers typically make much of the scene in Man of Steel where a young Clark Kent reads Plato’s Republic, pointing out that the villain of the plot, General Zod (interpreted as an allusion to ZOG) may be seen as an agent of the “Great Replacement” who aims at pushing native white people of of their land to make the planet safe for alien invasion, a plan that can only be thwarted by the extra-legal violence exerted by Superman. If fascists are ambivalent about the Superman character, Batman is universally greeted as truly fascist. While Superman is almost invulnerable and, therefore, hardly a hero, Batman is a Faustian character who made himself more than a man – a Nietzschean Superman – by hard training and lethal confrontations, thereby personifying the fascist vision of white Aryan men reaching into divinity. Batman is not an Apollonian emissary of truth, justice, and the American way but comes from a world of shadow and darkness as the native son of Gotham, the archetypal New York, the modern Rome or Babylon – the most corrupt, materialist, rotten city-state on earth. Batman is an undemocratic vigilante who understands that order only can be brought about through illegal violence. If the system is so inherently corrupt that it can only be saved by violating it, fascist reviewers understand Batman’s underlying message to be that the System cannot really be saved but needs to be destroyed and reborn. That is the task of the lone wolf. Fascism and the Great Replacement of The People

Key to both the great replacement theory and to fascist ideology is the idea of The People and its organic connection to a territory that is exclusively theirs; that is, the mythic bond between blood and soil, Blut und Boden, race and space. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the surge of violent lone wolf assaults and the increasing impact of the great replacement theory are concomitant with each other, which points to the troubled relation between fascism and The People. This vexedness provides a rationale for the seemingly irrational idea of halting the replacement of the people by killing them. Throughout its history, The People has been an important referent to fascism, in whose name its activists engage. Fascism claims an organic link between itself and The People, asserting itself as its true voice. Yet, the relation between fascism and The People was never straightforward and simple, as fascism, Grifn (1992) observes, also is elitist. Fascism appeals to The

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People but inserts itself as the only legitimate body that can realize the will of The People by imposing fascism. Fascism seeks a revolution in the name of The People but cannot leave the revolution to The People. It refers to the masses yet seeks to control them and mould them in its image. Fascism, then, is simultaneously populist and elitist. In pre-1945 fascism, the relation between The People and its fascist leadership was mutually enthusiastic with public declarations of each other’s greatness and infallibility, not least in Italy and Germany where fascism’s critics were swiftly excluded as traitors and often literally delated. Fascism’s defeat in 1945 broke the immutable bond. The mutual trust and admiration between The People and the fascist leaders turned into mutual disbelief and rejection. Fascism was discredited in the eyes of The People, which sought to reinvent itself as a democratic subject by condemning fascism, posing at its victims, and denying culpability, and even knowledge, of the exclusionary violence which fascism had used in its name. Simultaneously, The People fell in the eyes of the fascist leadership. Both Hitler and Mussolini sought to save fascism by condemning The People. To Hitler, the doctrine of racial superiority could not be falsifed. In fact, during a meeting with top party ofcials in August of 1944, he stated that Germany’s defeat would only prove that the German Volk was inferior and unworthy of his ideas (Trevor-Roper 1987).4 “It isn’t Fascism that has ruined Italians”, Mussolini exclaimed at the end of the rope, “it’s the Italians who have ruined Fascism. It’s this great mass of contaminated and sick slaves who go from lethargy to desperation who have failed” (Eatwell 2017, 381). Post-1945, fascism tried to get back on its feet by regrouping, reorganizing, and revising. An important segment dropped the term fascism and returned to the fore as the populist right, claiming to represent the will of The People by combining nativism and monoculturalism with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-globalism, and anti-establishment rhetoric. Among the true believers who held on to fascism in name or core ideology, a visible tendency remained enamoured with the fascist spectacle, which they were typically too young to have experienced unmediated. Here we fnd the plethora of neo-fascist groups that take to the streets in uniforms and fying banners of their own design, rarely attracting more stormtroopers than counter-protesters and policemen. Another fascist current fnds such eforts embarrassing. Fascists seeking to rally the white masses “will not work, never has worked, and almost always results in merely revealing our weaknesses and making us look like idiots”, said James Mason (1981b), one of the early architects of the leaderless resistance tactics previously mentioned. It is from this current that the lone wolf emerged to target unarmed civilians. How are lone wolf assaults thought to further the fascist aim of realizing the rebirth of the nation? To this question, fascist factions have diferent answers, depending on alternative conceptualizations of The People and fascist revolutionary theory.

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Claiming to represent the true will of The People, the fact that post-1945 fascism only gets minuscule support from that people requires an explanation. According to one fascist version, The People is “sleeping” and, therefore, unaware of how bad the situation has become. If they do not wake up to exacting realities, the once glorious race/nation will die in its sleep. Sudden explosions of shocking lone wolf violence are used as an alarm clock to awaken The People to impending danger. The People, its innate warrior instincts now rekindled, will then fock under the banner of the fascist revolution; its numbers increasing as the System reveals its inherent wickedness by repressing the will of The People to fght for its existence. Thus, the spiral of violent confrontation is set in motion, eventually releasing the full revolutionary potential of The People who, directed by its fascist leadership, will secure the rebirth of the nation. Another fascist tendency invests less hope in The People. The white masses are considered too corrupt to count on or save. As both The People and the System are beyond redemption, the aim of lone wolf violence is to hasten the approaching race war by increasing the contradictions inherent to the System, a fascist version of a revolutionary theory known as accelerationism. Only apocalyptic violence will create the conditions for the rise of the New World and the New Man. To be reborn, the nation must frst die. The overwhelming majority of The People will die in the cleansing fre to come, saving a small elite of extraordinary individuals. Selected by Nature, the surviving elite will be the progenitors of the Aryan super race when the reborn nation has arisen out of the ashes of total war. The fascist paradox of being the elite of anti-elitism and claiming to save The People while killing them is thus not paradoxical but related to the fact that both terms come as a double set. In fascist thought, there are two elites: the corrupt and the authentic, the establishment elite and the fascist elite. Similarly, and correspondingly, The People fgures in a dual form: the corrupt and the authentic, the soiled people produced by the establishment elites and the pure people moulded into perfection by the fascist elite. When fascist ideologues hail The People, this is reserved for times past and future, in narratives of its former greatness and becoming glory. However, fascists have nothing but contempt for The People in the present tense. The really existing people do everything wrong: support the wrong parties, mix with alien people, have materialistic desires, dance to the wrong music, eat the wrong food, march in Pride parades, and believe that all men are created equal, feminism is fne, egalitarianism is nice, and fascism is evil. Fascism seeks to replace the establishment elite with themselves, that is, the authentic elite, who are destined to rule the perfected society to come. Equally dissatisfed with the really existing people, fascism calls for its purifcation to achieve systemic change, after which they will install themselves as the organic leaders of a reborn people. The fascist concern with the theory

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of a secret cabal planning to replace The People with another people may, thus, be seen as a refection of what they themselves plan to do: replacing the (impure, heterogenous, worthless) people with another (pure, monogenous, valuable) people of their likening. Notes 1 This chapter is based on the author’s keynote at The Politics of Replacement Conference (Amsterdam, June 28–29, 2021) and was expanded in Gardell, M. (2021). Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide. Cambridge. The analysis of the concept of The People in fascist political theory was presented at a workshop series organized by the NORFAS network for the study of Nordic fascism and has been discussed from a diferent angle in Gardell (2022). Gardell remains immensely grateful to the organizers and participants of the Politics of Replacement conference and the NORFAS workshop series. 2 In legendary accounts, Santiago Matamoros also participated in the conquest of present-day Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. In falangist legend, he also fought democracy, socialism, and egalitarianism on the side of Franco in the Spanish civil war. 3 Pierce, interview with author, Hillsboro, West Virginia, tape recorded, March 19, 1997. 4 “If the German people was to be conquered in the struggle”, Hitler said, “then it had been too weak to face the test of history and was ft only for destruction”.

References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. Verso. Beam, L. (1983). Leaderless Resistance. Inter-Klan Newsletter & Survival Alert. Beam, L. (1992). Leaderless Resistance. The Seditionist, no. 12. Breivik, A. B. (2011). 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Self-published. Breivik, A. B. (2012). Testimony in Court, Oslo Tingrett, TOSLO-2011-118627-24. Camus, R. (2011). Le grand remplacement. David Reinharc. Eatwell, R. (2017). Populism and Fascism. In C. R. Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. O. Espejo & P. Ostiguy (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism (pp. 363–383). Oxford University Press. Ebner, J. (2020). Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. Bloomsbury. Faye, G. (2016). The Colonization of Europe. Arktos. FBI. (1999). Project Megiddo. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. https://irp.fas.org/eprint/megiddo.pdf Fritz, S. (2018). The First Soldier: Hitler as Military Leader. Yale University Press. Gardell, M. (2003). Gods of the Blood: White Separatism and the Pagan Revival. Duke University Press. Gardell, M. (2014). Crusader Dreams: Oslo 22/7, Islamophobia, and the Quest for a Monocultural Europe. Terrorism and Political Violence, 26(1), 129–155. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2014.849930 Gardell, M. (2015a). Raskrigaren [The Race Warrior]. Leopard. Gardell, M. (2015b). What’s Love Got to Do With It? Ultranationalism, Islamophobia, and Hate Crime in Sweden. Journal of Religion and Violence, 3(1), 91–116. https://doi.org/10.5840/jrv20155196

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Gardell, M. (2018). Urban Terror: The Case of Lone Wolf Peter Mangs. Terrorism and Political Violence, 30(5), 793–811. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2018. 1444796 Gardell, M. (2021a). Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide. Cambridge University Press. Gardell, M. (2021b). The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire: Violence and Passion in Contemporary Swedish Fascist Fiction. Fascism, 10(1), 166–185. https://doi.org/ 10.1163/22116257-10010004 Gardell, M. (2022). Esoteric Nordic Fascism. The Second Coming of Hitler and the Idea of the People. In N. Karcher & M. Lundström (Eds.), Nordic Fascism: Fragments of an Entangled History (pp. 138–166). Routledge. Grant, M. (1906). The Passing of the Great Race. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Grifn, R. (1992). The Nature of Fascism. Pinter. Grifn, R. (2018). Fascism. Polity. Harris, M. (2000). Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain. University of Texas. High Court of New Zealand. (2020). The Queen vs Brenton Harrison Tarrant, CRI-2019-009-2468. Hitler, A. (1939). Mein Kampf (J. Murphy, Trans.). Coda Books. Horswell, M., & Awan, A. N. (2020). The Crusades in the Modern World. Routledge. Johnson, G., & Hood, G. (2018). Dark Knight: Batman Viewed from the Right. Counter-Current Publications. Kakel, C. (2011). The American West and the Nazi East. Macmillan. Kaplan, J. (1997). Leaderless Resistance. Terrorism and Political Violence, 9(3), 80–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546559708427417 Kühl, S. (2012). The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press. Lane, D. (1988). White Genocide Manifesto. Stencilled handout. Lane, D. (1994a). White Genocide Manifesto. 14 Word Press. Lane, D. (1994b). Revolution by Number 14. 14 Word Press. Lane, D. (1997). Deceived, Damned and Defant: The Revolutionary Writings of David Lane. 14 Word Press. Lynch, T. (2013). White Nationalist Guide to the Movies. Counter-Currents. Mason, J. (1980a). Removing All Options. Siege, IX(4). Mason, J. (1980b). The N.S.L.F. and the Move Towards Revolution Through Armed Struggle. Siege, IX(4). Mason, J. (1981a). The N.S.L.F. One-Man Army. Siege, X(1). Mason, J. (1981b). Strike Hard, Strike Deep. Siege, X(2). Mason, J. (1992). The Collected Writings of James Mason (M. Jenkins [M. Moynihan], Ed.). Storm Books. Metzger, T. (n.d.-a). Laws of the Lone Wolf, WAR. Metzger, T. (n.d.-b). Mini Manual for Survival. The Insurgent. Pierce, W. (1980). Turner Diaries (2nd ed.). National Vanguard Books (written under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald) (Original work published 1978). Pierce, W. (1989). Hunter (2nd ed.). National Vanguard Books (written under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald). Ryback, T. W. (2010). Hitler’s Private Library. Vintage. Smith, W. D. (1980). Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum. German Studies Review, 3(1), 51–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/1429483

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Stoddard, L. (1921). The Rising Tide of Color. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Tarrant, B. (2019). The Great Replacement. Self-published. Tommasi, J. (c 1974). Strategy for Revolution. National Socialist Liberation Front. Trevor-Roper, H. (1987). The Last Days of Hitler (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Whitman, J. Q. (2017). Hitler’s American Model. Princeton University Press. Ye’or, B. (2005). Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

17 “A VICTORY FOR WHITE LIFE” Reproduction, Replacement, and a Handmaid’s Tale Sarah Bracke

Introduction1

On May 14, 2022, a white supremacist embarked upon a mass shooting in a supermarket in Bufalo, NY, which killed ten and injured three people, eleven of whom were African Americans. The 18-year-old killer was impelled by population replacement conspiracy theories, which insist that deliberate forces are turning white people into a minority in the U.S. and call upon different kinds of interventions to bring this purported plot to a halt. Little more than a month later, on June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade, resulting in abortion bans that will most likely afect roughly half of the states in the U.S.2 Both events caused intense grief and rage as well as public uproar and debate. The (social) media commentaries on these events mostly existed independently of each other. The Bufalo killings elicited comments on racism and white supremacy and often situated replacement conspiracy theories as a violent pathology in which Black and Brown people, migrants, Muslims, Jews (and such categories are both overlapping as well as confated within diferent recursions of replacement discourses) are seen as a demographic threat to white, Christian people. This threat is invoked through monikers like “white genocide” (see the Introduction of this volume) but also “demographic winter” (see Trimble 2013) or “demographic jihad” (see Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020b) that understand these demographic changes as the results of concerted eforts, purportedly organized or at least enabled by “elites” imagined as Jews, “multiculturalists”, or feminists. On their side, the media commentaries critical of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the rise of abortion bans were focused on the patriarchal disciplining of women’s bodies and DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-22

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the bodies of those who can be pregnant. Such commentators attended to the violence of forced pregnancies and forced births but also to the criminalization of miscarriages and stillbirths as well as the potentially life-threatening situations of clandestine abortions and ectopic pregnancies. From a biopolitical perspective, the resonances or connections between both events are tangible, as they both invoke notions of “population management” and “demographic anxieties”. Yet the contours of the public debate have not been conducive to exploring such connections: most often the events were captured by diferent frames, and as a result, questions of white supremacy and reproductive rights are set up as two distinct matters of concern. Every now and then, however, crucial entanglements of these questions emerge to the surface and are caught in the spotlight. This was the case on June 25, 2022, the day after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, at the Save America rally in Mendon, Illinois. Here, former president Donald Trump endorsed Republican congresswoman Mary Miller for the upcoming 2022 House of Representative primaries. In his introduction, Trump claimed the Supreme Court’s decision, “a victory for life”, as his achievement – a promise he had delivered through the nomination of judges and justices “who would stand up for the original meaning of the Constitution and who would honestly and faithfully interpret the law as written”.3 After being introduced and invited on stage by Trump, Miller began by thanking him and welcoming him to Illinois and continued with the following words: “President [sic] Trump, on behalf of all MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday”.4 A victory for white life – an articulation that frmly ties the question of the regulation of reproductive rights to that of racial politics and white supremacy. The statement did not go unnoticed. As it elicited immediate responses on social media, Miller’s campaign was quick to correct her words: she had meant to say, “the right to life” but misread her remarks – a misreading which was qualifed as a “mishap” or a “stumble”.5 This explanation raises a few questions. What does it mean that the right to life is misread so easily as white life or that white life is so interchangeable with the right to life? Right, as a noun, encompasses two dimensions: that which is morally good and just and a (moral or legal) entitlement. On a semantic level, the substitution of right by white would then suggest that these qualities – moral goodness as well as entitlement – are also the qualities that pertain to whiteness or that right and white are interchangeable. On a (bio)political level, the confation of the two terms points to an understanding of abortion bans as a means to secure the birth of more white babies. What if, instead of a mere “stumble”, Miller’s words were more of a Freudian slip, an error in speech that occurs due to a wish that usually remains hidden in the unconscious, or in secrecy, yet reveals itself in this error? No matter how one approaches these questions, Miller’s “stumble” is a public and political moment which invokes a

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horizon of “demographic anxieties” where abortion bans and replacement conspiracy theories can and should be considered in relation to each other. Abortion bans, Miller’s words suggest, are not merely a victory for those forces that have organized themselves under the banner of “pro-life”, forces that are often an afrmation of a Christian logic which considers the injunction against taking another human being’s life to start from the moment of conception, well before that life would be viable outside of the womb. These bans, moreover, would also bring victory to “white life”, which aligns this Christian logic with a white supremacist one. Miller’s “stumble”, in other words, implies that restricting the legal possibility of and access to abortion would be benefcial for a regime of white supremacy. This chapter explores the articulation between race and reproduction, in terms of what critical theorist Alys Weinbaum (2004) calls the race/reproduction bind, that is, a persistent modern ideological constellation which she posits as a central feature of the modern episteme. As reproduction in its contemporary understanding “became central to the organization of knowledge about nations, modern subjects, and the fow of capital, bodies, and ideas within and across national borders” (Weinbaum 2004, 2), it emerged as a biological, sexual, and racialized process. Excavating the entanglement of race and reproduction, as Weinbaum puts it, implies that the study of population replacement conspiracy theories should further unpack the question of reproduction (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020a), which aligns with the call for paying more attention to gender and sexuality in the study of population replacement conspiracy theories (Thiem 2020). It also implies that the study of reproduction should further pursue questions of race and racial politics (Darling 2004; Rapp 2019; Roberts 1996, 2009; Schuller 2016). This chapter explores the centrality of the race/reproduction bind within a contemporary conjuncture marked by a pushback against reproductive rights, in general, and abortion rights, in particular, as well as by the rise of replacement conspiracy theories. To do so, I turn to a case study within popular culture: a best-selling work of fction that has been further popularized through a prominent television series and whose iconography has become a crucial part of the feminist movement – The Handmaid’s Tale. A Cautionary Tale

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Canadian author Margaret Atwood tweeted a picture of herself in an armchair, holding a mug with the words I told you so. A much-acclaimed author, Atwood is wellknown for many of her novels, yet she is probably most associated with her best-selling book The Handmaid’s Tale, frst published in 1985. The novel has been translated into over forty languages and was turned into a flm (1990), an opera (1990), a ballet (2013), a graphic novel (2019), and a

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television series (running since 2017). Both the story and its visualization in the television series have become frmly embedded in popular culture. The iconic red handmaid habit has entered what Aline Cohen (2019) calls “our visual lexicon of dissent”, and a few years ago, in 2019, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History acquired one of the dresses worn by the protagonist in the television series for its collection. Many have relied on the story as a political lens through which to consider contemporary gender and sexual politics, notably, the disciplining of women’s bodies and the state regulation of reproduction. The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Ofred, a “handmaid” assigned to a high-ranking Commander (called Fred, from whom her name is a derivative, “of Fred”, at least for the time she serves in his house) and his Wife, in the authoritarian Republic of Gilead. The handmaid is a captive in her master’s house; like all women in Gilead, she is forbidden to read and write, and the handmaids’ contact with the outside world is mostly restricted to surveilled trips for grocery shopping. Her sole task in this dystopian society is to bear children for the household she is assigned to, a task which includes a monthly rape by the master of the house, referred to as “the ceremony”. This ritualized rape invokes the Biblical story of Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah and requires the handmaid to lie between the Wife’s legs, with her head on the Wife’s abdomen and her arms raised above her, so the Wife can hold her wrists. Handmaids are trained to perform their tasks by the Aunts in Gilead’s Rachel and Leah Center and are subsequently assigned to a household. An assignment lasts around a year or two or until the handmaid is pregnant and gives birth. Handmaids can be assigned to three diferent households, and if, after these consecutive assignments, they have still not conceived, they are sent to “the colonies”, where they are obliged to work in toxic environmental circumstances and are sure to face death soon. Throughout the story, women are subjected to diferent kinds of indentured servitude and those who do not comply are tortured. Most of the novel is narrated in Ofred’s voice, who has found a way to record her story on cassette tapes. This renders the story into “literature of witness”, as Atwood (2017) writes in an essay on the novel’s contemporary relevance: “Ofred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be found later by someone who is free to understand it and share it”. If “nothing comes without its world”, as Donna Haraway (1997, 137) has argued, and as María Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) has taken up in her refections on thinking and knowing with care, a careful reading of stories does well to trace the contours of the world in which a story came into being. Atwood began writing The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984 – the year in which George Orwell’s signature dystopian novel was set – and resided in Berlin during part of the writing. This was a world shaped by the Cold War, with totalitarian regimes on one side of the Iron Curtain, including Ceausescu’s

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Romania with a reproductive regime that forced “pure” Romanian women to give birth to as many children as possible while forcibly sterilizing Roma women. The other side was shaped by the rise of Reaganite politics, which wedded economic neoliberalism to moral conservatism that found its expression in, among others, publicly afrmed pro-life stances and a chilling, necropolitical, response to the AIDS/HIV epidemic. This was the era of the rise of the religious right in the United States, with groups such as Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, and Christian Coalition accumulating power and infuence. The novel, moreover, also referenced other developments that caught Atwood’s attention at the time, such as what was happening to women’s rights in the then recently installed Islamic Republic of Iran or the child-stealing of the Argentinian generals during the military dictatorship that came to an end in 1983 (Hammill 2008). There’s a sense in which Atwood’s book was its own “literature of witness” to the world in which it was conceived. Indeed, the dystopian novel, as Atwood has stated repeatedly, is a work of speculative fction, not science fction, because all the regulations of women’s bodies and reproductive rights that fgure in the novel are based on historical or contemporary examples (Atwood 2017). Historical examples included the 19th-century Puritan roots that shaped U.S. society (including a reference to the Salem witch trials) as well as the institution of human chattel slavery in the U.S. and the Shoah in Europe. “There is nothing in the book that hasn’t already happened”, as Atwood (in Neuman 2006, 859) put it, “All things described in the book, people have already done to one another”. The Handmaid’s Tale was a commentary on the social, political, and religious trends in the U.S. at the time of its writing and was concerned with what could happen with women in this emerging political economy constellation. Forty years after publication, the novel remains a signifcant grid of interpretation for current events – as history unfolds, this speculative fction increasingly gains traction. In recent years, the novel has gained enormous momentum with the popular and visually stunning Hulu television series, which premiered in 2017 and is in its ffth season at the time of writing. This momentum is partially accounted for by the contours of the world in which the television series is produced: the doom of advanced neoliberalism and intense environmental crises; systematic attacks on reproductive rights (well captured in the iconic 2017 picture of Trump, surrounded by a bunch of men, signing a ban on spending federal money to international groups that perform or provide information on abortion on his frst day in the Oval Ofce); antigender mobilizations in diferent parts of the world (with Hungary’s fnancial incentives for women to have more babies or Poland’s establishment of “LGBT free zones”, see Kuhar & Paternotte 2016); global #metoo mobilizations; and the rise of authoritarianism, including attempts to erode or overthrow the U.S. Constitution by Trump, his administration, and his followers. The momentum also prompted Atwood to write a sequel novel entitled

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The Testaments (2019). The haunting force of these tales from the Republic of Gilead lies in their familiarity and the way in which the stories weave together recognizable elements from the past and the present with a dystopian future. The television series relies on fashbacks as a powerful technique to anchor the dystopian practices of Gilead in continuity with the present, and many of the fashbacks bring the viewers uncannily close to current predicaments. These fashbacks include activities – by the conspirational political movement Sons of Jacob before the political take-over through which the Republic of Gilead was established – such as campus activism in the name of freedom of speech (by a political movement who was never intent on protecting civil freedoms), as a way to build up political power, or the orchestrated pressures on LGBT academics, who eventually get labelled as “gender traitors” and are persecuted. The fashbacks also include the political take-over itself, President’s Day Massacre, when the Sons of Jacob seized control over the U.S. government after an orchestrated attack on the White House and the U.S. Capitol.6 (Strikingly, in the book they manage to blame this attack on Islamic terrorists, something which is not taken up in the television series.) As these fashbacks convey an uncanny feeling of familiarity, they render the authoritarian regime of Gilead as possible or even plausible by connecting alienating dystopian scenes with familiar contemporary ones, and thus ofering a sense of a pathway from the world we currently inhabit to Gilead’s dystopian future. If “no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter” (Atwood 2010, 319) is a comment on the political overthrow from which Gilead emerged, it also accounts for the way in which, especially the television series, the dystopian future is rendered eerily close-by – around the corner, so to speak. Unsurprisingly, feminists have relied heavily on images and symbols from The Handmaid’s Tale, both to make sense of and push back against contemporary gender and sexual politics that restrict reproductive freedoms. This reliance has elicited critique – some commentators have come to fnd the handmaid imaginary tiresome, while others emphasize that this defensive style of visual dissent positions us as having something to lose and fails to imagine the world that we might be able to gain from feminist politics (Cohen 2019). Most critical voices have focused on the question of race: the kinds of biopolitics and indeed necropolitics depicted by The Handmaid’s Tale have a long history of targeting the bodies of women of colour, yet as the novel and television series are centred on white women, the popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale seems to suggest that the violence of such biopolitical regimes is only recognized and considered as a matter of concern when inficted upon white women.7 The dispossession of bodily autonomy – notably, reproductive autonomy – and the reduction of women to childbearing objects for the state to manipulate have been an integral part of (settler) colonial and white supremacist political projects,

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targeting Black and Brown women in particular. Dorothy Roberts (2009) has conceptualized this as a “reproductive caste system”, in which white women and women of colour have structurally diferent roles, while Rayna Rapp (2019) has captured such structural inequalities in terms of “stratifed reproduction”. The Handmaid’s Tale, however, shows and tells a story of reproductive indented servitude with solely or mostly white handmaids – solely is the assumption in the book and mostly in the television series – and the diference between the two renditions matters. One way of approaching this focus on white women is to seek for more inclusion of characters of colour in the story. This is the direction the television series took, with a somewhat colour-blind casting, resulting in more characters of colour compared to the book. Yet this more inclusive casting raises diferent kinds of questions. In fact, it highlights the lack of the thematization of racism and racial politics. For instance, the presence of some handmaids of colour in the white Commander households of Gilead begs the question of what accounts for the transition from a structurally racist society of the U.S. as we currently know it (with a long history of problematizing and disciplining “miscegenation”), to a totalitarian Christian society where race is purportedly not much of an issue (and the presence of a handful of handmaids of colour is hardly commented upon) while this society also “happens” to be mostly white. Without a storyline that accounts for these racial politics, the “colour-blind” casting leaves many questions in the air, unless we are to assume that the structural racism of U.S. liberal democracy simply withered away when the Capitol and the White House were attacked, and the Republic of Gilead was established as a “post-racial” patriarchal dystopia. This does, to say the least, not seem to be a plausible assumption – at all. The Republic of Gilead: It Was the Birth Rates

While race is at the heart of The Handmaid’s Tale, the question is how to capture its signifcance well. The novel leaves us with no doubt about the white supremacist character of the Republic of Gilead, a place where “handmaids were forced to serve as breeders for elite men and their infertile wives in order to perpetuate the white race”, as Dorothy Roberts (2009, 783) comments on the book, well before the production of the television series. While the world invoked in Ofred’s witness account generally radiates a white supremacist Christian theocracy, its white supremacist dimension is not made very explicit in her narration. But this changes in the epilogue of the book, titled “Historical Notes”, which is key in understanding the white supremacist politics and, indeed, the raison d’être of Gilead. The epilogue takes the reader to a Gileadian Studies academic conference, a few hundred years after the Republic of Gilead came to an end. This is an exciting moment for the scholars: the cassette tapes with Ofred’s witness account had been

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discovered recently, and the conference represents the frst public scholarly gathering in which the fndings of those working on Ofred’s testimony are shared and discussed. In “Historical Notes”, the reader learns in more detail how and why this dystopian society came into being: because of severe environmental crises and a sharp drop in birth rates. The authoritarian Republic of Gilead, in other words, emerged to preserve life that felt under threat. This life, however, was not life in general but was unambiguously qualifed in racial terms from the outset: Men highly placed in the regime were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive ftness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birth rates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time. (Atwood 2010, 318) Gilead, in other words, emerged as a response to white demographic anxieties, as it was the “Caucasian birth rates” that plummeted and “white life” that was feared to be under threat. Gilead was not only a patriarchal regime that stripped women from their reproductive autonomy but also a white supremacist regime focused on the preservation and continuation of the white population in a situation where that population understood itself as under threat. This implies that the violent gendered and sexual politics within the Republic of Gilead should not only be approached in their entanglement with white supremacist racial politics but that these racial politics – of protecting “white life” – are, in fact, the foundational force of this dystopian society. In their exploration of the dropping birth rates, the Gileadian Studies academics turn to several contributing factors. The conference keynote speaker, the fctional Professor James Darcy Pieixoto (Cambridge University), enumerates the following: women’s increased control of reproductive autonomy (“the widespread availability of birth control of various kinds, including abortion, in the immediate pre-Gilead period”, Atwood 2010, 318), the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (“Need I remind you that this was the age of the R-strain syphilis and also the infamous AIDS epidemic, which, once they spread to the population at large, eliminated many young sexually active people from the reproductive pool?”, 318), as well as ecological disaster turning livelihoods toxic (“Stillbirths, miscarriages, and genetic deformities were widespread and on the increase, and this trend has been linked to the various nuclear-plant accidents . . . and to the uncontrolled use of chemical insecticides, herbicides, and other sprays”, 319). The declining birth rates, moreover, were considered a

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major societal problem well before the political overthrow that established the Republic of Gilead, Pieixoto continues: The need for what I call birth services was already recognized in the preGilead period, where it was being inadequately met by “artifcial insemination”, “fertility clinics”, and the use of “surrogate mothers”, who were hired for the purpose. Gilead outlawed the frst two as irreligious, but legitimized and enforced the third, which was considered to have biblical precedents; they thus replaced the serial polygamy common in the preGilead period with the older form of simultaneous polygamy practiced both in early Old Testament times and in the former State of Utah in the nineteenth century. As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter, as witness the pagan elements in mediaeval Christianity and the evolution of the Russian “K.G.B”. from the Czarist secret service that preceded it; and Gilead was no exception to this rule. Its racist policies, for instance, were frmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did. (Atwood 2010, 319) While an account of whether and why the birth rates dropped specifcally among the white population is missing from the academic analysis at the conference, the Gileadian Studies scholars are clear about racism. Not only was Gilead shaped by racist politics – in continuity with U.S. society before the political take-over, the keynote speaker duly notes, and in contrast to a “postracial” understanding of Gilead that the television series seems to hint at – but this racism played a foundational role in the political takeover that lead to the Gilead regime. In Pieixoto’s words, racist fears were “the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did” (319). In sum, the establishment of the Republic of Gilead was fuelled by a racist fear over declining white birth rates. Gilead is then not only the patriarchal dystopia for which it is so well-known in popular culture but also a white supremacist dystopia, obsessed with the number of white babies born. This dimension of white supremacy has, however, receded from view in the television series, through the lack of thematization of the racial politics that are laid out in the epilogue of the book and through the efort to create somewhat of a “post-racial” aesthetics. Admittedly, fully developing Gilead’s racial politics and “demographic anxieties” of not enough white babies being born would have made for (an even more) uncomfortable viewing of the series. Besides the violent assault on women’s reproductive autonomy, we would also be watching a violent race war waged in the terms of white supremacy. Yet, in times when replacement discourse is increasingly becoming salonfähig

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and when violence perpetuated in its name is on the rise, omitting the racial politics of the assault on reproductive freedoms is, to say the least, a missed opportunity to create more cultural and political literacy on the operations of the race/reproduction bind. Conclusion

There’s a particular anxiety about birth rates in replacement discourse (Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020b; Bracke 2020). This chapter makes a case for considering contemporary replacement conspiracy theories and violence in the same analytical and political space as contemporary assaults on reproductive freedoms. This allows us to further explore the ways in which questions of race and reproduction are entangled – an entanglement that Weinbaum (2004) has conceptualized as the race/reproduction bind. As the ideological operation of this bind often remains rather concealed and needs to be “excavated”, as Weinbaum puts it, this chapter discusses two instances where the bind suddenly becomes visible. Tellingly, qualifying the loss of the legal right to abortion as “a victory for white life” in a political speech is immediately framed as a “mishap” or “stumble”, and the replacement discourse frame of an iconic dystopian novel, laid out unambiguously in its epilogue, disappears in the production of a popular series based on the novel. This suggests that the race/ reproduction bind that, according to Weinbaum, is central to modern intellectual and political formations is in need not only of excavation but also of sustained attention if we want to prevent it from slipping from view. This critical attention, I argue, is necessary, as the importance of understanding the race/ reproduction bind and, indeed, cultivating literacy for its ideological operation cannot be overstated in times when replacement thinking is on the rise. Notes 1 This work is part of the research programme EnGendering Europe’s “Muslim Question” with project number 016.Vici.185.077, which is fnanced by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). 2 Roe v. Wade was a landmark ruling that legally protected the right to abortion in the U.S. on a federal level since 1972. The overturning of this ruling by the Supreme Court efectively put an end to ffty years of legal protection of the right to abortion, by making it possible for individual states to restrict or abolish the right to abortion, which about half of the U.S. states have already done or are expected to do. Moreover, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is on record as saying that, in the light of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, several other landmark rulings should be reconsidered, including established rights to contraception access, samesex relationships, and same-sex marriage. 3 The speech can be found at C-SPAN: www.c-span.org/video/?521332-1/presidenttrump-speaks-illinois-rally; quotes between 00:04:00 and 00:05:02. 4 The speech can be found at C-SPAN: www.c-span.org/video/?521332-1/presidenttrump-speaks-illinois-rally, quote between 00:17:33 and 00:17:40.

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5 www.npr.org/2022/06/26/1107710215/roe-overturned-mary-miller-historic-victory-for-white-life 6 The attacks on the U.S. Capitol of January 6, 2021, prompted several commentators to compare the scenes taking place in the streets of Washington, DC, with those in The Handmaid’s Tale. Anticipating the argument that is developed further in the chapter: among the many symbols of racial hatred and white supremacy that were part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol (from Confederate fags to gallows and nooses that invoked the lynchings of Black people), there were also messages that pertain specifcally to the current replacement discourse, notably T-shirts with “2044”, that is, the moment when white people are projected to become a numerical minority in the U.S. 7 In October 2021, for instance, the Women’s March in the U.S. organized demonstrations across the country in response to the Texas law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and called upon protesters not to wear the iconic red handmaid’s habits, see https://twitter.com/womensmarch/status/1444302585440112648.

References Atwood, M. (2010). The Handmaid’s Tale. Vintage Books (Original work Published 1985). Atwood, M. (2017). Margret Atwood on What the Handmaid Means in the Age of Trump. New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaretatwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html Bracke, S. (2020). “It’s the Birth Rates”: Sex, Gender, and Race in Europe’s “Muslim Question”. Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 23(4), 383–407. Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020a). Racial States – Gendered Nations: On Biopower, Race, and Sex. In J. Solomos (Ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms. (pp. 356–365). Routledge. Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020b). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. Cohen, A. (2019). The Rise of the Handmaid Habit as a Visual Icon. Artsy. www. artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rise-handmaid-habit-visual-icon Darling, M. J. T. (2004, May 6). Eugenics unbound: Race, Gender, and Genetics. Paper delivered at gender and justice in the gene age. Centre for Feminist Research, York University, New York. Hammill, F. (2008). Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In W. Seed (Ed.), A Companion to Science Fiction. (pp. 522–533). John Wiley and Sons. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan@_Meets_ OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge. Kuhar, R., & Paternotte, D. (Eds.). (2016). Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe. Mobilizing Against Equality. Rowman and Littlefeld Publishers. Neuman, S. (2006). “Just a Backlash”: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale. University of Toronto Quarterly, 75(3), 857–868. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2012). “Nothing Comes Without its World”: Thinking with Care. Sociological Review, 60(2), 197–216. Rapp, R. (2019). Race and Reproduction: An Enduring Conversation. Medical Anthropology, 38(8), 725–732. Roberts, D. (1996). Race and the New Reproduction. Hastings Law Journal, 47, 935–949.

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Roberts, D. (2009). Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia? Signs, 34(4), 783–804. Schuller, K. (2016). The Biopolitics of Feeling. Race, Sex, and Science in the 19th Century. Duke University Press. Thiem, A. (2020). Conspiracy Theories and Gender and Sexuality. In M. Butter & P. Knight (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (pp.  292–303). Routledge. Trimble, R. (2013). The Threat of Demographic Winter: A Transnational Politics of Motherhood and Endangered Populations in Pro-Family Documentaries. Feminist Formations, 25(2), 30–54. Weinbaum, A. E. (2004). Wayward Reproduction: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Modern Transatlantic Thought. Duke University Press.

18 THE KING OF TARS A Medieval Rendition of Replacement Theories Anya Topolski

While I was raised on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, which I truly loved as a child, I cannot share this with my own children – I am too aware of how these fairy tales implicitly and explicitly reinforce very problematic forms of exclusion. The process of unlearning the illusion that I, as a woman, would be saved and protected by Prince Charming is one I wish to spare the next generation. Fairy tales are, like other stories or myths, ways of establishing norms and values – including very dehumanizing ones that are racist or sexist. In this chapter, I wish to explore whether the medieval myth – The King of Tars – served a similar purpose, that is, to teach followers of Christianity about the “truth” of their religion and, in so doing, establish the threat posed by nonwhite Christians as well as the inferiority of women, in a vein analogous to what replacement theories have been doing over the past century. Albeit a bit provocatively, I implicitly am also asking the question of how recent replacement theories are. Their genealogy, like that of scientifc racism, is most often traced to the 19th century, but as with racism, which I argue also has its origins in the medieval period (Topolski 2018, 2021), these roots might be much older. In my reading of The King of Tars myth, dated to approx. 1330, the entanglement of race, religion, and gender are manifest in a striking manner. Likewise, it depicts the need for a white male hero to save civilization and to eliminate the supposed threat and danger posed by nonwhite Christians. The question this raises, also present in the disturbing “logic” of replacement conspiracy theories, is whether “the hero” creates “an Other” in order to identify himself as, and feel like, a hero. The same question arises in fairy tales: is the damsel really in distress, or does the prince need to think so in order to feel “superior”? Do the manifestos citing the “Great Replacement” need to see women, and especially women DOI: 10.4324/9781003305927-23

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producing nonwhite children, as dangerous to justify both sexism and racism and defne a white male supremacy? A Medieval Replacement Theory?

The King of Tars primarily served the purpose of religious education in the aftermath of the losses of the Christian West in the Crusades, which spanned the 13th century (the 4th to 8th Crusades). One hypothesis holds that The King of Tars myth served to help “explain” this loss as a temporary one – to give Christian society false hope of future justice and to help justify the immense loss of life.1 According to scholars of early medieval history, the period of the Crusades (11th–13th centuries) was one in which all peoples who were seen as threats to the Church were identifed as dissidents, forced to convert, and/or eliminated (Iogna-Prat 2002; Moore 2007; Anidjar 2014; Bethencourt 2014; Heng 2018). The primary purpose of the Crusades was to unify Western Christianity: those calling for the Crusades saw them as a means to construct and fortify the respublica Christiana, a fortifcation that was considered to be much needed after the schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church. An external political enemy was constructed: the Saracen, the derogatory medieval term used to refer to Muslims, was “the personifcation of the very religion of the Antichrist” (Mastnak 2001, 117). An internal theological enemy was also constructed: the Jew. In order to prevail against these enemies or “threats”, Christian rulers, via the Church, demanded peace between Christians – making it a secular and religious crime to shed Christian blood (Mastnak 2001; Anidjar 2014). Dehumanization, which manifests itself in the colonization of and genocide against non-Christians, served to unify Christianity (Bethencourt 2014). This was also the century in which the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) declared that “there is one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation” (Espin & Nickolof 2007, 439). In other words, only Christians who practised vera religio (true religion) would be saved, all others are damned. This medieval binary between saved/damned, I argue, expressed a racial logic, which I refer to as one of dehumanization.2 This binary of saved/damned is a blueprint for the binary between human/ nonhuman, which I claim is foundational to the dehumanization that grounds all forms of racism. Racial logic, even before the terms race or racism, operates when one group denies the full humanity of another group based on a particular assemblage of markers of diference. Since the long 19th century, these markers of diference have been based on biology or phenotype (e.g., antisemitism and anti-Black racism) and sought “scientifc” legitimacy. Prior to the 16th century, markers of diference were based on Christian theology that viewed non-Christians as lacking a soul, reason/rationality, and civilization, among other things. While many of these markers of diference were

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invisible, theological laws made them visible by, for example, requiring Jews and Saracens (a problematic 13th-century synonym for Muslims)3 to wear prescribed items of clothing as in Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). The specifc political context for The King of Tars, which circulated both orally and in several diferent written manuscripts, was the fact that at the end of the 13th century, many of the Mongol tribes converted to Mohammedaism (most were previously Buddhist or Shamanist). The myth refers to the King of Tars, who is assumed to be from the Tatar region and, thus, exemplary of this conversion trend. During the 13th century, the Christian powers identifed many of these tribes as new military threats in the East (often marked by the fall of Acre in 1291 and the loss of Jerusalem). Hornstein, a The King of Tars scholar, claims that the myth is inspired by the sudden report in 1299 of the defeat of the Egyptian Sultan by the Tartars at Damascus. This victory, the frst in twenty years, aroused wild enthusiasm. Boniface VIII called for a crusade; the noble women of Genoa sold their jewels to equip a feet of vessels. What would more greatly inspire the zeal of Western rulers than the account of this astonishing Eastern potentate, Ghazan, so puny and ugly, and yet withal so great a military leader and legislator, who was willing to furnish a great army and his resources of fabulous wealth to restore the Holy Land to the Christians? (Hornstein 1941, 412) This tale thus served to reinspire faith in Christianity and the real threat posed to the salvation of the world – aka, the Christian world – by a “Muslim threat” and not just on the battlefeld of the Crusades but also in the daily lives of Christians and specifcally in relation to procreation (a connection which is also explicitly manifest in contemporary replacement theories, see Bracke & Hernández Aguilar 2020). The King of Tars

Scholars most often refer to this myth as a poem written in Middle English by an unknown author. It is made up of approximately 1,250 lines of end-rhyme verse. There are currently three complete versions of this poem in existence and countless references to it. In my analysis of this myth, my goal is twofold. First, to highlight the entanglements of race, religion, and gender and show how each of these contributes to the dehumanization of both non-Christians and women and to the creation of the white male as superior. Second, I wish to make explicit connections to several central motifs in replacement theories. Before analyzing the poem in detail, let me ofer this brief synopsis, which highlights the intersections of race, religion, and gender.4

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The dark-skinned Saracen Sultan of Damas (which refers to Damascus) is victorious in battle against a Christian army from Tars. To save the Christian army from death, the Sultan demands to marry the “fair” (which meant white-skinned) and beautiful daughter of the King of Tars. Her name is Marie, a clear allusion to the Virgin Mary. The King refuses the Sultan because he is Muslim and thus not worthy of his Christian daughter. The princess volunteers to marry to save her father and his kingdom and accepts the Sultan’s demand that she convert to Islam before they consummate the marriage. Because of a dream in which Christ speaks to her, the princess agrees to a false conversion. While outwardly she will appear Muslim, inwardly she will continue to be a committed Christian. Soon after they consummate the wedding, she gives birth to a “monstrous” child described as a formless lump of flesh. The Sultan blames her false conversion for the monstrous “child”. She blames him for not having true religion and proposes a “test of true faith” (or vera religio). The Sultan fails the test as his gods are unable to bring the lump to life. The princess, with the help of a priest imprisoned by the Sultan, asks that the child be baptized. This “rebirth”, with G-d as the father of the child, allows the child to come to life. The child is white, male, and beautiful. It is thus born again because of the true power of Christianity: the vera religio. The Sultan concedes and commits himself to a sincere conversion. Upon his baptism, he is also transformed from a beastly black animal-like creature to a white “reasonable” man. He then demands his people convert or be beheaded and joins forces with the Christian King of Tars against five Saracen kings. The Christians are, of course, victorious in this battle and they, aka the Christians, lived happily ever after. At the beginning of the poem, Saracens are dehumanized, suggesting the subhuman status of non-Christians, by being deemed wild, irrational, and violent and, thus, uncivilized, as deceivers (line 627); associated with the devil (line 451); pagan idol worshippers (line 714); treacherous, deceitful, false; guileful, crafty; villainous, base; wicked, evil (line 1170); and, in the fnal lines of the tale, dishonourable. The poet also describes the Sultan as a “hethen hounde”, which was at the time a popular insult for non-Christians, characterizing them as closer to animals than humans, and as “a wilde bore” (98), an animal associated with the devil in medieval folklore. The Sultan’s response to the King’s refusal is described as screaming and ranting, and the Sultan is depicted as tearing at his clothing,5 thus suggesting he is emotional, violent, and hysterical – traits problematically associated with being efeminate and projected onto non-Christian men. According to Chandler, one of the poem’s translators/editors, there are two further connections the poet likely wishes to invoke. First, the boar’s spiritual signifcance, “the boar means the devil because of its ferceness and strength”, could easily refect upon the pagan

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Sultan by virtue of his religion. Second, the boar “is said to be a creature of the woods because its thoughts are wild and unruly” (Barber as cited in Chandler 2015, note 98). The poem uses the term Sarazin to refer to Saracens, a term in Middle English that included heathens, pagans, and infidels. In this text, it refers to opponents of Christianity, who are most often Muslim and Arab. While many of these descriptions are specific to the Sultan, the vast majority create a binary between Christians and Sarazins, who symbolize non-Christians, by means of the middle-English term kende. This term, similar to the Latin gens, is translated as people – but can also mean kind, species, or nature and is a precursor of the term “race”.6 According to Chandler, “its use here, ‘Cristen kende,’ suggests a group that is not genetic but spiritual . . . However, it may be that the scribe or the original poet was interested in both senses” (2015, note 261), which could reinforce the distinction, or exclusionary binary, between Christians and Muslims. This depiction of Muslims, in this case, personifed in the Sultan,7 as animals is a common motif and manner to dehumanize, past and present (Bethencourt 2014). In this poem, the author’s description explicitly refers to the Sultan’s Islamic faith and his “blac and lothely hide” (skin colour). His colour is also contrasted with the beauty of the “fair” (white and lightskinned) princess who calmly sacrifces herself for the greater good. Had the King permitted his daughter to marry the Sultan, he would have lost his honour as a Christian who ought not to make any sacrifce to those deemed inferior. This is apparently not an expectation for women who are, albeit in another way than non-Christians, inferior creatures.8 While pregnancy is often seen as a reward for women in myths, in this tale the birth signifes G-d’s punishment. The “child” is described as monstrous in that “it” lacks any defning features and, as such, is ofensive to the eyes. This is an implicit contrast with Christian children who are formed in the image of G-d and thus beautiful. It is often thought that baptism, as the ritual central to conversion, saved non-Christians from damnation. Current research on medieval Christianity challenges this position. Conversion and baptism were depicted as the path to salvation but were rarely so in practice. While baptism was a means of full inclusion into the Christian community for pagans, this was much less the case for those who were born either Jewish or Muslim and who, for a diversity of reasons, chose or were forced to convert. While there were exceptional non-Christians who were accepted and often used as models of “good” converts, the vast majority remained under surveillance and suspicion (Tartakof 2012; Yisraeli & Fox 2017). At even the slightest misstep, real or fabricated, these converts were exposed and excluded, and neither theological nor political/legal logic saved them, their friends, or their families. Even after several

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generations, the shadow of the fgure of the Jew or Muslim remained and led to distrust and suspicion as is evidenced in the history of Limpieze de Sangre, which has its roots in as early as the 14th century (Martinez 2008; Martinez et al. 2012). Thus, while it is the case that for a few exceptions, which are often the only stories that were shared, conversion and baptism could seemingly save and “humanize”, most converts remained non-Christians in the eyes of Christian society and were never fully included in humanity. These few exceptions were often fnancially motivated and conditional, and inclusion was evident with regard to marriage, business, and other social questions. The myth of conversion and baptism served and continues to serve Christian innocence today – that is, the illusion that the Other has the choice of being fully included, thereby also making them responsible for their failure to integrate.9 The constellation of race-religion and gender is most explicit in relation to the two baptisms in this poem. The frst is that of the monstrous nonliving lump “child”, which is a sign of evil. By means of baptism, he is transformed into a fair (white) beautiful boy upon being reborn. Christianity has the power to save and rehumanize the demonic. This same power is reafrmed with the Sultan’s baptism – he is cleansed of sins and changes from “blac and loathy” to white and shame-free. According to Anna Czarnowus, the monstrous child indicates “its father’s sinfulness” and leads, through the body, to reconciliation between Islam and Christianity . . . The formless body symbolizes the uselessness of Muslim beliefs, or perhaps even their harmfulness for the health of one’s body and spirit. (2008, 473) What is important in both cases is that colour is not a fxed characteristic but an external, visible marker of diference for the invisible “fallen or nonhuman” soul. In the medieval period, although by no means consistently, skin colour symbolizes that which is invisible – a soul or non-soul (Anidjar 2014). Commentators of the poem refer to this as a rather common medieval association in which baptism brings grace – grace purifes the spirit, which then purifes the physical body, and the fesh imitates the soul. When it comes to gender, the poem reafrms the dominant Aristotelian position of the time. In line with Aristotle’s theory of conception, the passive mother contributes only the material or fesh of the progeny, and the father – who is the active contributor through his seed – provides the soul or spirit. While white Christian women are seen as human, they are not fully formed or developed and are thus lesser and incapable of the full potential or power of men. Likewise, the Sultan, as a male non-Christian, cannot provide a living seed for he himself lacks a soul – he is not fully human. Only when

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reborn with G-d as his spiritual father can the Sultan’s son have a human life (809–10). The child is white, Christian, and male. A female child would have been a sign that Christianity is not all-powerful (769–77) as a female child would not have been able to actively contribute further to the Christian repopulation of Europe, either by means of war or progeny, which is a central concern in this myth, as it is with replacement theories. Diferent medieval myths, written in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, take diferent positions in relation to the imbrication of race, religion, and gender with regard to dehumanization, each of which needs to be teased apart. In this poem, white Christian women are part of the zone of being, albeit as lesser beings (Fanon 2008; Gordon 2015). For example, the princess, who symbolizes womanhood, requires a male priest to baptize the baby. She, on her own, does not have the power to save Christianity. While one could attempt to interpret Marie’s role in a more agential manner, by afrming that she has a role and voice and can act in opposition to her father’s decision – this is contrary to how her actions are viewed in the context of Middle English medieval myths in which “women can only ‘do good’ by submitting to their husbands, serving their parents, and trusting God” (Winstead 1995, 146). This, however, still must be seen as distinct from the position defned for non-Christians. Unlike white Christian women who could play a passive or secondary role in the salvation of humanity (which was defned as the Christian political community), Muslims are demarcated as threats or obstacles to this messianic aspiration. The Sultan is excluded from the zone of being; he lacks a soul and is therefore damned – this makes him nonhuman. This continuous dehumanization of non-Christians manifests throughout the myth. This is, of course, a central trope in great replacement theories.10 Replacement Conspiracy Theories in Medieval Europe?

I want to explore several of the shared motifs between contemporary replacement theories and this medieval myth. Albeit a bit provocatively, I also want to begin to unsettle the commonly held assumption that replacement conspiracy theories are a modern project. While there is no space to fully tease out this intuition in this chapter, I do hope others will take up this endeavour and further unsettle assumed and entangled binaries such as those between modern and medieval, race and religion, and the secular and the religious (Topolski 2018; Westerduin 2020). If we might consider one of the many possible “causes” of replacement theories to be perceived boundary crossings, it makes sense for this period in medieval history to be saturated with replacement theories as it was a time of immense border crossing. This boundary drawing is the basis of why R.I. Moore has described this period of European history as the formation of a persecuting society:

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The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw what has turned out to be a permanent change in Western society. Persecution became habitual . . . deliberate, and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed, through established governmental, judicial and social institutions, against groups of people defned by general characteristics such as race, religion or way of life. (Moore 2007, 4) Latin Christianity struggled to defne itself in this time and actively sought, via language and laws, to establish borders – politically, religiously, culturally. One example of this is the term populus Christianus coined in 1215, which sought to create a unity, with legal efects, for all Western Christianity. While replacement theories are most often associated with the modern nation-state, the foundational pillars of the nation-state itself are clearly rooted in Christianity and are also racialized. Take the period of the 16th century in Western Europe. In addition to the production of “pure-blooded” states in the Iberian Peninsula, northern Europe – by means of the religious wars – also formed religiously homogenous states. A “solution” to the political and physical violence in Europe, which led to the death of over ten million people between the 16th and early 18th century, was frst conceived of in Augsburg in 1555 (e.g., cuius regio, eius religio, or “whose realm, his religion”). This new paradigm of political communities was formally institutionalized at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which led to the structuring of new states in the form of nation-states. Nation was, thus, frst defned by one’s religion, which was fundamentally linked to one’s soul and humanity. This political peace created sovereign states with distinct theological-political constellations and enabled many of the non-Catholic denominations of Christianity to be accepted, at least in theory, as forms of Christianity – judged as the only true religion. There was no “Peace” for those groups in Europe that did not have either acceptable form of true religion – that is, for non-Christian “peoples” such as Jews or “Mohammedans”. In essence, Europe organized the world using these “religious” categories until at least the 17th century – thereby installing a binary between saved humans and damned nonhumans. The view that nonChristians were human beings to be considered as “equal” subjects to Christians was itself highly contested. Non-Christians were most often viewed as heretics, heathens, barbarians, uncivilized, and lesser beings. The view propagated in Europe among theologians, whose political infuence was still strong, was that non-Christian peoples had false “religion” making them, at best, inferior to Christians and, at worst, nonhuman. The secularized historical myth of the formation of states tries to deny the reality that the Westphalian nation-state, in its inception, was a religion-based racialized state.

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Just as many contemporary replacement theories are essential to homogenization projects of the nation-state, the poem The King of Tars sought to promote racial-religious homogenization. Although it predates colonialism, both in relation to the Crusades and the 16th-century “refugee crisis”, where the term refugee is frst coined,11 there are clear echoes of this same project of producing propaganda to incite violence and fear of those perceived to be a threat to this purity, (i.e., those that cross boundaries). Commentators on this poem refer to the phrase “In you was never no gile” (627) as an example of anti-Muslim propaganda. It refers to Mohammed as the embodiment of disguised deception who, along with all his followers, is not to be trusted. What is intriguing is that this is explicitly connected to reproduction by means of a reference to Astirot (629). Astirot is, in fact, Astarte, also known as Venus or Ishtar, the goddess of sexuality, birth, and fertility. This explicit link between danger, deception, and fertility – dating from 1300 – should make one question how modern replacement conspiracy theories are. Another such example is to be found near the end of the poem when the notion of replacement, with all its medieval connotations of supersessionism,12 is implicitly referred to. “Thou no hast no part theron ywis,/Noither of the child ne of me” (809–10). Here the princess makes explicit that all that the Sultan embodies, such as sin and soulless, is erased by means of baptism and explicitly superseded – purifed. She even denies his role in procreation, saying that baptism leads to him being replaced by G-d the Father. The message of the poem is, thus, that hope for the future and salvation can only be found by eliminating this diference and reunifying humanity under Christianity. Earlier in the poem (738), the princess has secretly told to the imprisoned priest her plan, which is that after the Sultan’s conversion, she will see to convert the entirety of Damas. This is precisely how the poem ends, with all of Damas joining the Christian forces against all remaining Saracen kings to be victorious in the ultimate “clash of civilizations” – a clash in which “Islam” shows its true disgrace as its soldiers fed the battle in dishonour rather than being willing to die for their faith, as Christians are (1183–8). Conclusion

By way of conclusion, albeit briefy, I wish to return to some of the questions I raised in the introduction when framing The King of Tars as a medieval fairy tale that served to propagate a violent and exclusionary logic analogous to many contemporary replacement conspiracy theories. One of these questions was whether “the hero” creates an “Other” to defne himself as superior. In the case of this poem, this was the explicit purpose, as it was written after a devastating battle aiming to provide future hope of Christian victory. The poem also served as a form of propaganda to keep Christians fearful and

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distrustful of the new, boundary-crossing presence of Muslims in Europe. While politically Christianity was struggling, theologically this myth served to reafrm its true eternal superiority. This political theology, I suggest, albeit in a secularized form, is still present in Europe today. Perhaps this is what connects this medieval myth to contemporary replacement conspiracy theories. While I have not explored whether fairy tales use this same exclusionary logic, I think the question we must ask ourselves, following Sylvia Wynter, is whether it is possible to write new narratives, new stories, myths, and fairy tales to replace those that rely on dehumanization and exclusion such as replacement conspiracy theories. If we could replace these exclusionary myths, we might be able to answer the brilliant question our children ask when we read them fairy tales. “Who” is “they” when we say, and they lived happily ever after? Notes 1 This is also what fairy tales do for women by promising them that they will be happy when their prince arrives, which is, of course, a very dangerous and false illusion. 2 Dehumanization, which is a matter of degrees (e.g., Othering, lesser human, subhuman, nonhuman), has a much longer history, one which is often masked. When combined with institutionalised power, this logic has the potential to exclude and eliminate diference (Topolski 2018, 2021). 3 Naming the enemy Saracens, however, highlights and repeats the story of an ingenious lie. The story that fabricates the name’s medieval and post-medieval connotations appears with St. Jerome (347–420 CE), who suggests that Arabs took for themselves the name of Saracens in order to falsely claim a genealogy from Sara, the legitimate wife of Abraham, “‘to conceal the opprobrium of their origin’ because their true mother, Hagar, was a slave” (Heng 2018, 111 citing Mastnak 2001, 105). 4 Full text: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/chandler-the-king-of-tars 5 This is a ritual Jews perform when mourning which was often viewed as uncivilised, as expressing too much emotion, and, as such, may have served to link Jews to Muslims. 6 Note the etymological link with gender: from “gens” to “genus” to gender. 7 This form of personifcation is a form of homogenization that denies diferences between members of “race” and is, thus, a form of a dehumanization (Topolski 2017). 8 Perhaps it is because women are, by nature, seen as potentially duplicitous that it is acceptable for her to lie and to pretend to convert to Islam while inwardly retaining her Christianity. 9 The framing of immigrant assimilation as an inclusive approach to dealing with cultural diference connects to this same “innocence rhetoric” that is central to contemporary replacement theory as well (i.e., myth of equal opportunity, myth of free choice for adopting local culture, myth of choice to relocate). 10 It is worth noting that Othering is not quite the same as dehumanization although there is often overlap. Othering does not necessarily deny the humanity of the other – which is precisely what is at stake with dehumanization. In this sense, there is also a conceptual distinction between Othering and racialization, the latter a term that we can only speak of as of the 16th century.

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11 The frst wave of refugees in Europe were religious, namely the Huguenots, who unfortunately had been born in a territory that did not tolerate their religious practices and who were thus forced to seek refuge in another territory. 12 Supersessionism, also known as fulflment theology or replacement theology, defends the position that the new covenant replaces the old. Christianity, according to this theological stance, reforms and replaces Judaism, which is defected (Feldman 1998, 18).

References Anidjar, G. (2014). Blood: A Critique of Christianity. Columbia University Press. Bethencourt, F. (2014). Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press. Bracke, S., & Hernández Aguilar, L. M. (2020). “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement. British Journal of Sociology, 71(4), 680–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12742 Chandler, J. H.  (2015). The King of Tars. Medieval Institute Publications. https:// muse.jhu.edu/book/98491 Czarnowus, A. (2008). “Stille as Ston”: Oriental Deformity in the King of Tars. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 44, 463–474. Espín, O. O., & Nickolof, J. B. (2007). An Introductory Dictionary of Theology and Religious Studies. Liturgical Press. Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press (Original work published 1968). Feldman, S. M. (1998). Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas: A Critical History of the Separation of Church and State. New York University Press. Gordon, L. (2015). What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. Fordham University Press. Heng, G. (2018). The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press. Hornstein, L. H. (1941). The Historical Background of the King of Tars. Speculum, 16(4), 404–414. https://doi.org/10.2307/2852840 Iogna-Prat, D. (2002). Order & Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150). Cornell University Press. Martinez, M. E. (2008). Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford University Press. Martinez, M. E., Hering Torres, M. S., & Nirenberg, D. (2012). Race and Blood in the Iberian World. LIT Verlag Münster. Mastnak, T. (2001). Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order. University of California Press. Moore, R. I. (2007). The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250 (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. Tartakof, P. (2012). Between Christian and Jew Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391. University of Pennsylvania Press. Topolski, A. (2017). Good Jew, Bad Jew: “Managing” Europe’s Others. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(12), 2179–2196. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1391402 Topolski, A. (2018). The Race-Religion Constellation: A European Contribution to the Critical Philosophy of Race. Critical Philosophy of Race, 6(1), 58–81. https:// doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.6.1.0058 Topolski, A. (2021). The Race Religion Constellation. In N. Meer (Ed.), The Routledge Online Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. Section: Histories/Origins. Routledge Encyclopedia. Routledge.

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Westerduin, M. (2020). Questioning Religio-Secular Temporalities: Mediaeval Formations of Nation, Europe and Race. Patterns of Prejudice, 54(1–2), 136–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1696050 Winstead, K. A. (1995). Saints,  Wives, and Other  “Hooly Thynges”:  Pious Laywomen in Middle English Romance. In Chaucer Yearbook: Vol. 2 (pp. 137–154). Whitaker, C. J. (2021). Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking. University of Pennsylvania Press. Yisraeli, Y., & Fox, Y. (2017). Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World. Routledge

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. 4chan 12–13, 82–85, 139–140, 244; countering mainstreaming 157; cross-platform dissemination 152–155; data collection 148; filtering process 149–151; method 147–148; political culture 142–147, 145–146 abortion 28, 62n17, 78, 232, 260–264 affordances 139–140; countering mainstreaming 157; crossplatform dissemination of conspiracy theories 152–157, 152–154; filtering processing 148–151, 150–151; of 4chan and the YouTube comment section 142–147, 145–146; mainstreaming replacement narratives 140–142 alimentary replacements 210–211 alternative histories 85–88 American evangelical Islamophobia 229–233; demonology, temporality, supersession 234–238; imagining obsolescence 238–239 anti-immigration discourse 179–180; cold war against Islam 183–185; origins of the clash of civilizations 181–183;

replacement of populations 185–187; replacement theory 187–188 antisemitism 3–4, 7, 52, 100–102, 152–155, 188, 275 asylum compromise 42–47 Balkans 51–53; and birth rates 56–60; and replacement 54–56; and silence about race 53–54 biopower/biopolitics 27, 32, 42, 78, 169, 202, 261, 265 birth control 8, 25–28, 31–33, 269–270 birth rates 4–5, 9, 27–28, 51–60, 82, 202, 231–233; and The Handmaid’s Tale 266–269; and silence about race 53–54 body, the 193–195, 202–203; bodily terror 198–201; fear of sameness 201–202; racism without race 195–198 bordering, racialization of 45–47 borderlands, Australia as 88–89 Bosnian Genocide 51–60 Buffalo killer 1, 15, 260 capitalism see liberal capitalism census 109–110, 119–122; and communal conflict 117–119; and community identity 113–115;

Index  287

data, decibels, and demography 110–112, 111–112 centrist discourses 162–163, 172–175; catering to the Far Right 171; cultural hegemony 164–165; mainstreaming Great Replacement 167–170; omvolking 166–167; “silent majority” 165–166 chans/chan culture 12–13, 82–90, 139–140, 139–151, 244; affordances and political culture 142–147; filtering process 148–151; mainstreaming replacement narratives 140–142 Christchurch 1, 82–84, 90, 96, 195–196, 243–244; alternative histories and Manichean enemies 85–88; Australia as borderlands 88–89; interpretive hazards 84–85 Christianity 12–15; gendered violence 248, 260–268, 272–280; genealogies of replacement 41–44, 51–59, 67–77, 86–87; Islamophobia 229–239; technologies of replacement 110–111, 115–116, 181–187; see also American evangelical Islamophobia clash of civilizations 14, 179–180; cold war against Islam 183–185; origins of 181–183; replacement of populations 185–187; replacement theory 187–188 climate migrant 28–33 cold war against Islam 183–185 colonialism 7, 27–31, 98, 103, 237–238, 247–249, 282; see also colonial census colonization 66–67, 72–74, 78–79;critique of JudeoChristianity 69–71; and the far right 74–75; and the New Right 71–72; return of 75–78; reverse colonization 67–68 communities, imagined 117–119 community identity 113–115 conflict, communal 117–119 conspiracy theory 1–7, 10, 13–15, 52–54, 60, 66, 82, 102–103, 140–141, 144–145, 152–155, 162–165, 202, 212, 250, 262–264; and gendered

violence 260–262, 278–281; and genealogies of replacement 52–54, 60, 66–67, 82, 102; and technologies of replacement 144–145, 152–155, 162–171, 179–180, 188; see also specific conspiracy theories cross-platform dissemination 152–157, 152–154 cultural hegemony 48, 67, 132–133, 164–165, 171, 232–235 culture see political culture decline/degeneration 4–9, 66–67, 78–79, 110–111, 116–117, 195–202; critique of Judeo-Christianity 69–71; and the far right 74–75; and the New Right 71–72; return of colonization 75–78; reverse colonization 67–68 demography 2, 5, 8–15, 109–112, 111–112, 121–122; demographic war 119–121; and gendered violence 260–262, 267–268; and genealogies of replacement 23–27, 31–33, 52, 58–59, 75–78; and Islamophobia 194–197, 230–234; and technologies of replacement 147–149; demonology 234–236 differential bordering 45–47 digital spaces 10, 84, 139–157 discourse: anti-immigration 179–188; discursive strategies 169–170; Nordic Resistance Movement 95–104; see also centrist discourses Dutch anti-immigration discourse 163–170, 179–180; cold war against Islam 183–185; origins of the clash of civilizations 181–183; replacement of populations 185–187; replacement theory 187–188 ecofascism 95–98; and liberal capitalism 103–104; and “white replacement” 100–103 ecological-nativist paradigm 37–38, 48; and the asylum compromise 42–45; and neo-Malthusianism 38–39; and the New Right 40–41; and racialization 45–47; and the refugee crisis 41–42

288  Index

ethnomorphosis 28–30 ethnopluralism 40–41 eugenics 4–8, 23–27, 38–39, 69–71, 78–79, 95–96, 247 Eurabia 10, 166, 180, 187–188, 200, 248 Europe/the West 2–10, 82–84, 90; alternative histories and Manichean enemies 85–88; Australia as borderlands 88–89; and gendered violence 243–249, 278–278; and genealogies of replacement 32–33, 37–48, 51–60, 66–79, 86–87, 96–103; interpretive hazards 84–85; and Islamophobia 194–197, 201–202, 206–207, 211–213, 229–232, 236–239; and technologies of replacement 113–114, 117–119, 128–130, 139–141, 155–157, 162–170, 180–188 evangelical Islamophobia 229–233; demonology, temporality, supersession 234–238; imagining obsolescence 238–239 far right 13–14, 66–67, 95–98, 102, 155–156, 162–163, 172–175; catering to 171; cultural hegemony 164–165; mainstreaming Great Replacement 167–170; omvolking 166–167; and reverse colonization 74–75; “silent majority” 165–166 fascism 243–246; great replacement and white genocide 246–248, 254–257; heroes of life and death 251–254; lone wolf race warriors and leaderless resistance 248–251; see also ecofascism fertility 1, 5, 25–30, 87, 111–112, 202, 270, 280 French New Right 66–67, 78–79; “Against All Racisms” article 72–74; critique of JudeoChristianity 69–71; and the far right 74–75; public debate over 71–72; return of colonization 75–78; reverse colonization 67–68 gastro-politics of replacement 206–213 gender: and fascism 243–259; and Handmaid’s Tale 260–271; and The King of Tars

genealogies of replacement 6–11; and the Christchurch killer 82–90; and ecofascism 95–104; and ecological-nativist paradigm 37–48; and Malthusianization 23–33; and the “Muslim Question” 51–60; and reverse colonization 66–79 génération identitaire/identitarians 76, 96, 102, 156, 245–248 genocide 121, 273; see also Bosnian Genocide; Shoah; white genocide; Holocaust governmentality 113, 122, 224–225 Great Replacement 1–2, 6, 12–15, 86–87, 139–140, 162–163, 172–175, 246–248, 272, 278; catering to the Far Right 171; countering mainstreaming 157; cross-platform dissemination of 152–157, 152–154; cultural hegemony 164–165; and fascism 254–257; filtering processing 148–151, 150–151; of 4chan and the YouTube comment section 142–147, 145–146; mainstreaming replacement narratives 140–142, 167–170; method 147–148, 147; omvolking 166–167; silent majority 165–166 Great Supersession 229–233; demonology, temporality, supersession 234–238; imagining obsolescence 238–239 GRECE 66–79 halal 198–199, 209–213 Handmaid’s Tale 260–269 hegemony, cultural 48, 67, 132–133, 164–165 , 171, 232–235 hero 251–254 histories 82–84, 90; alternative histories and Manichean enemies 85–88; Australia as borderlands 88–89; interpretive hazards 84–85 Holocaust 9; Shoah 266 identity see community identity imagination/imagining 206–213; imagined communities 117–119 immigration 7–8, 27–29, 37–41, 74–77, 86–88, 100–101, 131–134, 155–156, 165–167, 179–180,

Index  289

198–199; cold war against Islam 183–185; origins of the clash of civilizations 181–183; replacement of populations 185–187; replacement theory 187–188 integration 43–44, 133–136, 222–225, 236, 246 Islam: and gendered violence 275–277; and genealogies of replacement 52, 55–58, 74–77, 83, 86–87; and technologies of replacement 166, 180–188 Islamization 179–180, 184–185, 206–211 Islamophobia 3–7, 88–89, 100, 164, 167–168, 186–187; American evangelical Islamophobia 229–239; and the body 193–203; demonology, temporality, supersession 234–238; and gastro-politics of replacement 206–213; imagining obsolescence 238–239; and public interrogation 217–227 Jews 1–10; and genealogies of replacement 38–39, 42–44, 70–72, 75, 86–87, 100–102; and Islamophobia 195–196, 235–236; and online milieus 155 Judeo-Christianity, critique of 69–71; see also Christianity Kalergi plan 2, 152, 155, 188 King of Tars, The 272–281 leaderless resistance 248–251 liberal capitalism 103–104 liberal nativism 42–45 lone wolves 15, 244, 248–256 mainstreaming 162–163, 172–175; catering to the Far Right 171; countering 157; cultural hegemony 164–165; Great Replacement 167–170; omvolking 166–167; replacement narratives 140–142; silent majority 165–166 majority 13, 112–114, 122, 186–187, 250–252; majority rights 125– 136; and minority rights 129– 131; mistaken claims 131–133; “silent majority” 165–166

Malthus/Malthusianism 4–6, 23–25, 109, 112; ethnomorphosis and the climate migrant 28–30; genealogy of 24–28; need for a comprehensive concept 30–33; neo-Malthusianism 38–40, 48 Manichean enemies 85–88 masculinity 6, 15, 119–121, 250, 253 medieval replacement theory 272–281 memes 2–4, 84–85, 145, 152–155, 200 migrants 3–5, 13–14, 24–33, 73–75, 97–100, 109–110, 113, 164–170, 180, 184, 196; climate migrant 28–30; and genealogies of replacement 31–33, 40–48, 82–84, 89; and Islamophobia 231–233; and the legitimacy of majority rights 125, 134–135 migration 1–5, 8–9, 23–25; and American evangelical Islamophobia 231–233; and ecological-nativist paradigm 39–41, 44–48; ethnomorphosis and the climate migrant 28–30; genealogy of Malthusian fears 24–28; need for a comprehensive concept 30–33; and online milieus 142–144, 148–149, 155–156 minority 96–97, 114, 125–129, 186–187, 244; and majority rights 133–136; minority rights 129–131; mistaken claims 131–133 moderated online milieus 139–140; countering mainstreaming 157; cross-platform dissemination of conspiracy theories 152–157, 152–154; data collection 148; filtering processing 148–151, 150–151; of 4chan and the YouTube comment section 142–147, 145–146; mainstreaming replacement narratives 140–142; method 147–148, 147 mosques 207–208; as sites of public interrogation 217–227 “Muslim Question” 51–53, 77–79, 194–195, 231–234; and birth rates 56–60; and replacement 54–56; and silence about race 53–54 Muslims 2–7; and gendered violence 243, 246–251, 273–280; and genealogies of replacement 51–60,

290  Index

omvolking see Umvolkung/omvolking online milieus 139–140; countering mainstreaming 157; crossplatform dissemination of conspiracy theories 152–157, 152–154; 4chan and the YouTube comment section 142–147, 145–146; mainstreaming replacement narratives 140–142; method 147–148, 147

People, The 243–246; great replacement and white genocide 246–248, 254–257; heroes of life and death 251–254; lone wolf race warriors and leaderless resistance 248–251 policy 37–38, 48; and the asylum compromise 42–45; and neoMalthusianism 38–39; and the New Right 40–41; and racialization 45–47; and the refugee crisis 41–42 political culture 142–147, 145–146 politics of fear 5–15, 23–24, 88–89, 201–203, 221–222, 267–268 politics of replacement 1–10; and ecofascism 95–104; gastropolitics of replacement 206–213 population 1–10, 23–26, 31–33, 38–40, 56–58, 109–112, 116, 188–189; and gendered violence 244–249, 253, 260–262, 267–268, 278; and genealogies of replacement 23–33, 38–40, 48, 55–60, 67–69, 73, 76–78, 88, 98–102; and Islamophobia 197, 200, 206, 209–211, 231; and technologies of replacement 109–121, 126, 135, 149, 155, 162–163, 166– 167, 171, 179–188 Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich) 11, 29, 39 population replacement conspiracy theories 1–11, 13–15, 179–180; cold war against Islam 183–185; Dutch 166–167; and gendered volence 248, 260–262, 269, 278–281; and genealogies of replacement 28, 42–43, 60, 66–67, 82, 102; and Islamophobia 206, 210; origins of the clash of civilizations 181–183; replacement of populations 185–187; replacement theory 187–188; and technologies of replacement 136, 140, 144–145, 149, 152–157, 162–171; see also specific conspiracy theories pork 207–208 power, whiteness as 225–227

palimpsest 3–6, 11, 15–16, 71, 78 PEGIDA 2, 207–210

race 2–5, 8–10; and gendered violence 246–256, 262, 266–269; and

74–79, 86–89, 100–102; and Islamophobia 194–203, 206–213, 217–225, 229–239; and technologies of replacement 109–122, 162–170, 180–188; Muslim takeover 206–213 narratives see narratives of decline; replacement narratives narratives of decline 66–67, 78–79; “Against All Racisms” article 72–74; critique of JudeoChristianity 69–71; and the far right 74–75; and the New Right 71–72; return of colonization 75–78; reverse colonization 67–68 nation 2–3, 7–9; birth of a Muslim nation 56–60; and gendered violence 245–253, 256; and genealogies of replacement 42–43, 85–90, 95–96; and Islamophobia 193–194, 197–199, 229–230 nativism 136, 140, 195, 245, 255; see also ecological-nativist paradigm necropolitics 202, 265 neo-Malthusianism 24–33, 38–39, 40, 48 New Right 40–41, 66–67, 78–79; “Against All Racisms” article 72–74; critique of JudeoChristianity 69–71; and the far right 74–75; public debate over 71–72; return of colonization 75–78; reverse colonization 67–68 Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) 95–98; and liberal capitalism 103–104; methodology 99–100; and “white replacement” 100–103

Index  291

genealogies of replacement 77–79, 101–103; and Islamophobia 195–198, 199–200; silence about 53–54; and technologies of replacement 113–118, 141–142, 155–156 race suicide 8 race war 5, 10, 99, 200, 248–252, 256, 268; warfare 4–5, 9 racialization 45–47, 229–233; demonology, temporality, supersession 234–238; imagining obsolescence 238–239 racism 2–3, 6–14; and gendered violence 244, 248–250, 2260, 266–268, 272–273; and genealogies of replacement 26, 30–33, 38–40, 44–45, 48, 66–67, 72–75, 78–79, 86, 95–100, 103–104; and Islamophobia 195–198, 206, 213; reproduction of 164–165; and technologies of replacement 130, 136, 140–144, 147, 152, 157, 163–169, 172–174 refugee crisis 37, 46, 140–141, 224, 279; of 1990s 41–42 replacement: in American evangelical Islamophobia 229–239; and the birth of Balkan’s “Muslim Question” 54–56; and the body 193–203; and fascism 243–259; gastro-politics of 206–213; and Handmaid’s Tale 260–269; and The King of Tars 272–281; politics of 1–10, 164–165; “white replacement” 95–98, 100–103; see also Great Replacement; population replacement conspiracy theories; replacement narratives; technologies of replacement resistance, leaderless 248–251 reverse colonization 66–68, 78–79; critique of Judeo-Christianity 69–71; and the far right 74–75; and the New Right 71–72; return of colonization 75–78 Saffron Demography 2, 109–110, 119–122; and communal conflict 117–119; and community identity 113–115 sameness, fear of 201–202

settler colonialism 7, 98, 247 sexuality 3–6, 30, 121, 132, 260–269, 272–281 Shoah 9, 264 silence: about race 53–54; “silent majority” 165–166 social bordering 45–47 social/biological reproduction 260–269 speech affordances: 4chan and YouTube comment section 142–147 supersession see Great Supersession systemic racism, reproduction of 164–165; see also racism technologies of replacement: affordances of replacement narratives 139–157; anti-immigration discourse 179–188; centrist discourses 162–175; colonial census and Saffron Demography 109–122; legitimacy of majority rights 125–136 temporality 234–236 terror, bodily 198–201 terrorism 1, 51, 83–85, 96, 185–186, 199–200 translation 222–224 transparency 217–218; integration 225; politics of fear 221–222; translation 222–224; as an urge for visibility 219–221; whiteness as power 225–227 Umvolkung/omvolking 2, 8–9, 24, 166–167, 179 Utøya massacre 15, 96, 244; Utøya killer 1 violence, gendered: and fascism 243–259; and Handmaid’s Tale 260–269; and The King of Tars 279–280 visibility 219–221 War on Terror 10, 185, 202, 230 white genocide 1–2, 9, 96–98, 139–140, 195–202, 244–248; countering mainstreaming 157; cross-platform dissemination of 152–157, 152–154; 4chan and the YouTube comment section 142–147, 145–146;

292  Index

mainstreaming replacement narratives 140–142; method 147–148, 147 whiteness 53–57, 87–88, 141, 201; as power 225–227 “white replacement” 95–98, 100–103 white supremacy 1, 6–10, 15; and gendered violence 249,

260–262, 268; and genealogies of replacement 26–28, 51–52, 60, 82, 85, 95, 98–103; and Islamophobia 196–197, 200, 238; and online moderation 140 YouTube 13, 85; comment section 139–157, 145–146