Discussion: The Great Replacement Marc Weitzmann, Adam Shatz, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, and Marwan Mohammed
Ian Buruma: In 1996, I believe it was, the French writer Renaud Camus had an epiphany, and the epiphany was we—I suppose I could say we in this case—white Europeans were going to be replaced very soon by Muslims who would then destroy our civilization in the process. So this will be the sort of call of the discussion of the next panel, what all this means, etc. I’ll introduce the speakers very briefly starting with the first speaker, Marc Weitzmann, who’s a very prolific writer, journalist, novelist. His book Hate, I believe, is being published in the United States as we speak. Then there’s Adam Shatz, who’s written a great deal about France, about culture, about jazz, and so on, has taught at Bard, and writes for the London Review of Books. Thomas Chatterton Williams, best known for his book Losing My Cool. He’s the last person to lose his cool in my acquaintance. And then there’s Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, sociologist, who’s written on Muslim affairs and teaches sociology and anthropology at the University of Paris 8. And finally there is Marwan Mohammed, a sociologist, visiting scholar at the John J. College of Criminal Justice, and I believe he’s written a great deal about the prison system and related affairs. Marc, why don’t you start? Marc Weitzmann: Talking with some students last night I realized that the Great Replacement theory, even though it made front page in most of American media after the Charlottesville demonstration of white supremacists in 2017, and even more after the Christchurch killings in New Zealand that made forty-nine Muslim victims, is a notion pretty much unknown in the US. No one really knows what it’s about. And it’s a shame, really, because once you begin to grasp what it’s about, you realize that the Great Replacement theory actually makes the connection between racism and antisemitism, and also explains what’s different between the two notions. Indeed, there’s a reason why we use two different words, racism and antisemitism. And the Great Replacement theory, with its neofascist historical background, makes clear what the difference is. In the US, a somewhat distorted illustration of what the Great Replacement theory is about may be found in, for instance, the Ku Klux Klan’s rhetoric that argues that the civil rights movement in the ’60s in this country was in fact the result of a Jewish plot to help the “brown races” to conquer the West; a most extremist and demented version of that narrative links the civil rights
Discussion: The Great Replacement
Weitzmann, Shatz, Williams, Guénif-Souilamas, and Mohammed
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