Donald Trump made clear on the Philadelphia debate stage this week, as he has throughout his three presidential campaigns, the basis of his run for office. Trump is running on the platform that non-white immigration is an existential threat to the nation. This time around, Trump has made his primary message, the so-called Great Replacement Theory (GRT), more vivid than ever. It is therefore of existential importance in understanding the stakes of this election to have clearly in mind what has happened in the past when GRT has been the central driving narrative both of individuals and of states.
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According to the Great Replacement Theory, the nation’s greatness, its traditions and its practitioners, are existentially imperiled by an influx of foreign races, ethnicities or religions. The foreign elements are sometimes described in the narrative of GRT, as vermin or diseases.
GRT was central to the official Nazi motivation for the genocide of the Jews of Europe. Hitler blamed the loss of World War I on Jewish betrayal of Germany. But this betrayal, for Hitler, was intimately connected to the Great Replacement Theory, via the introduction of Black soldiers in the French army subsequently occupying the Rhineland, the so-called “Black Horror on the Rhine.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler writes:
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It was and is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
With the benefit of hindsight, the idea that Jews betrayed Germany in World War I in order to use the occupying French army to bring Black Senegalese soldiers in to ruin the white race by rape and race mixing seems utterly unhinged. It is hard to fathom that this crazed conspiracy theory justified for many Germans the mass murder of two out of every three of Europe’s Jews. But our descendants will also find it hard to understand why so many Americans find Trump’s claims that non-white immigrants to the United States are savages who eat pets, criminally insane murderers and drugs dealers who nevertheless somehow manage to get it together to vote fraudulently en masse in election to be plausible. In both cases, the bizarre nature of these claims stands in stark contrast to their obvious political power.
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Mussolini justified Italy’s colonial war against Ethiopia in 1935 with racial paranoias about the decline and replacement of the “white race.” In 1934, Mussolini wrote that defending the white race was a “matter of life or death” and posed this as a key political issue: “It is a question of knowing whether in the face of the progress in number and expansion of the yellow and black races, the civilization of the white man is destined to perish.” This text laid the ground for the racism and segregation imposed by Italians during the war against Ethiopia in 1935 and later the racist and antisemitic laws of 1938.
In the Genocide Convention of 1948, the Soviet Union pressed hard to exclude mass killing of political opponents, demanding instead that the term genocide be restricted to the mass killing of ethnic groups. The Soviet Union’s reason for excluding the mass killing of political opponents, that is, politicide, from the charge of genocide was transparently to absolve the horrific crimes of Stalin’s communist regime, which executed hundreds of thousands of suspected political opponents among their own people. It should worry every American that Trump repeatedly targets as the agents of his version of GRT not an ethnic group, but his political opponents, Democrats. Politicide is no less murderous than genocide.
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The potency of the Great Replacement Theory as a justification for mass murder is particularly apparent when it motivates individual actors. Great Replacement Theory was the justification for Norwegian Anders Breivik’s 2011 murder of 77 people, mostly teenagers in a Norwegian left-wing party’s summer youth camp (in this case, GRT-motivated politicide). GRT was the motivation for Dylan Roof’s mass murder of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, and the motivation for the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue killings of Jews in Pittsburgh, the killing of 23 people, mostly immigrants, at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019, the murder of 51 Muslims by a white supremacist in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, and many other “lone wolf” mass killings.
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Donald Trump’s campaigns have always been based on the Great Replacement Theory. But unlike in his first term, which was characterized by disorganized chaos, his team is now prepared to carry out the actions that GRT has always justified. This time, we can be sure that a Trump victory will mean mass concentration camps that will be filled with millions of non-white immigrants, in conditions of supreme horror justified by the mass vilification of their prisoners. The Nazis filled their concentration camps initially with political opponents before filling them with Jews. It is certainly possible that in a Trump regime, political opponents will join immigrants as the targets of policies of mass imprisonment, as Trump has essentially already vowed.
