Ideas may become current without their origins being known to most of those who hold them. Only one of every hundred people who believe that the sole end for which mankind can be warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection, or some such principle, will know that it derives from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.
In like fashion, it is said that a quarter of the French population now believes in the theory of the Great Replacement, most of whom will not have read Renaud Camus or even heard of him. He is persona non grata in the French media; and though his ideas are also widely held in the United States, most of his writings have not been translated into English. As well as being persona non grata, then, he is a deus ex machina. A book of his essays is about to be published in English, however, and this may change his status.
His most pungent idea is simple. It is that the original population of Europe, especially that of France, is being replaced by mass immigration from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, and that this replacement is not accidental or spontaneous but deliberate and planned—on both sides of the equation. On the European side is a mixture of moral grandiosity that makes Europe responsible to all the impoverished and suffering people in the world, ex-colonial guilt, exhibitionist self-hatred, supposed atonement for the sins of the past, and political calculation by those who see immigrants as a kind of vote-bank; on the Maghreb and sub-Saharan side, there is a sense of revenge for colonialism and the desire to Islamise the world, the belief being that Islam is a superior civilisation to all others. Taking advantage of social security systems is a form of restitution.
Continue reading the piece here at The European Conservative
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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