Excerpt (from “Introduction: The Great Replacement Theory, from France to the United States and Back”, pages 44 to 47)
Overview of chapters
In chapter 1, I focus on the contemporary politicization of Christian and Muslim historical clashes in what came to be known as Europe, and their reactivation in current immigration debates. These include the Battle of Poitiers in France, the so-called Reconquest of Spain, the Crusades, and, more briefly, Ottoman incursions in Eastern and Central Europe. I study this politicization of history in three locations: the classroom, the media, and the electoral stage. I pay particular attention to how French commentators and historians depict the Battle of Poitiers, during which Frankish leader Charles Martel repelled the Andalusian Arab invaders out of what would become France. Some consider this battle to be a turning point at which Christian Europe decisively came into being; it is considered by others to merely constitute a failed raid without further territorial ambitions. Reactionary historians argue that some educators choose to include or exclude the battle from school manuals not merely out of concern for historical accuracy but also because of how they imagine the battle resonates with a student body and French populace counting more and more Muslims among it. Countless Franco-Muslim actors, writers, rappers, and filmmakers have recounted traumatic memories of childhood teachersdeclaring that “our ancestor,” Charles Martel, saved Europe from Muslim invaders and Christian enslavement.
The French history classroom becomes particularly important at a time when the far right believes these history lessons are getting canceled, and worse still, that those strongmen at their center—Charles the Hammer, Matamoros (the “Killer of Moors,” aka Saint James), the Knights Templar, Crusaders, Vikings—are being erased. The memorialization of ancestral European “heroes” (often extremely violent and immoral) becomes necessary as a grounding legend for the many survivalist and men’s rights movements who take after them. These groups contrast the fearless leaders of old with the lamentable, fragile state of today’s European man.
Chapter 2 examines the current trend of alarmist and nativist literature that projects today’s demographic tendencies into the future, using popular social science to paint a picture of European Christian extinction. Houellebecq, author of Submission, about Europe’s capitulation to Muslims, was called prophetic after the attacks at the Charlie Hebdo offices. His literary prediction of a spineless France unable to confront Muslims out of political correctness seems to have found validation with a large readership. Jean Raspail wrote the blueprint for “submission” decades earlier, with Camp of the Saints, considered the favorite novel of Western white nationalists. It trades Muslims for Indian invaders, describing France’s submersion under a fleet of a million famished refugees fleeing the subcontinent. Raspail later admitted in interviews that he was really talking about North Africans but switched them out to avoid scandal. Similar to naturalist and realist writers of old, with their attention to detail and vivisections of society, these alarmist writers nevertheless distort what they believe to be reality. They overdose on “real” ingredients like bad news, gritty and pessimistic outlooks, and worst-case scenario predictions and thus concoct a “realist” vision that lacks proportion and verisimilitude. The border blurs between authors who write dystopian fiction inspired by current events and nonfiction writers who exaggerate current events and warn of a bleak future. I refer to both as great replacement writers. So-called security experts like Laurent Obertone use police statistics to detail scenarios in which crime would vanish if only Muslims would do the same (La France Orange mécanique, 2013). Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe (2017), seeks in his work to specify, with journalism and figures, all the ways in which Raspail and Houellebecq’s fictions are becoming reality. These authors share a common pity for (white) European man, who is on the precipice of major and destabilizing change. Houellebecq, for example, describes the middle-aged, white, balding, romantically clueless protagonist François (a prototype that makes repeat appearances in his novels) as powerless to stop Islamization. I pay particular attention to the way that these portraits of miserable and failing European men are designed to spur European man into action, not further pessimism and lamentation, as most critics have suggested. The difference is important: it means that Europe is not a lost cause. European man can regain his ascendancy if sufficiently incited, a convalescent strategy I’m calling provocative self-pity. The authors cultivate the affect of disgust (over the indigestible otherness of the migrant) and self-disgust (when European man faces his miserable portrait), so as to motivate him out of his torpor.
In chapter 3, I study men’s rights movements and their relationship to the GRT. European guardians’ demographic alarm about losing the birthrate battle to immigrant populations stems, as I mentioned, from a domestic crisis of masculinity visible in all manner of cultural production. This is evident, for example, in the doomsday fiction discussed in the preceding chapter, where authors warn of the national and cultural dangers of emasculation. This chapter focuses on the main domestic scapegoats for this emasculation, namely the gay and feminist rights movements, perceived ascomprising enablers paving the way for the great replacement. The social “disruptions” that alarm nativists the most are the prospect of gay parenthood, the teaching of gender theory in schools, and the opening of IVF to single mothers, all of which threaten to cut straight men out of the picture entirely. I underline the surprising role of homophobic homoeroticismin the resurrection of European man in the process of curating his restored image. White nationalists in both Europe and the United States aim to reforge homosocial links of tribal brotherhood, seen clearly in the muscular campaigns in France against gay marriage, mocked by journalists for being the gayest protests against gay marriage ever. Ultimately, this homophobic homoeroticism aims to displace “useless,” hedonistic, public homosexuality with a homoeroticism that drives patriarchy and is a tonic for reproductive marriage. White nativists aim to sacralize bodily contact between white men through sport and combat, driving it away from its homosexual connotations. Ironically, the homosocial infrastructure and brotherhood that white nativists aim to put in place closely resembles the communitarian homosociality that characterizes relations between Muslim men in the Western gaze (affectionate friendships, love born of mutual struggle or combat). These Islamic links between men were considered suspect and possibly homosexual only decades before.
The theme of tribalism provides a bridge to chapter 4, which looks at the role environmentalism plays in demographic anxiety and anti-immigrant rhetoric. While left-leaning groups have traditionally been associated with back-to- the- land movements, the right has its own version, which sometimes borrows from leftist ecological philosophies in order togreenwash its conservatism and xenophobia. Nativist groups are converging with men’s rights movements across the Western world and creating survivalist camps in forests and the countryside, spaces viewed as beyond the corrupting reach of cosmopolitan cities and immigration. In order to resolve the crisis of Western masculinity, these groups urge white men to go back to basics and recover ancient reflexes (that modern and technological comforts have atrophied) through survival training in the elements.
This austerity program would promote masculine sustainability through strategic resource deprivation, a kind of fasting that strengthens the body and mind. These groups form neopagan wolf packs that teach self-defense through jousting within the group and creating hierarchies that order the chain of command. Collaborative hunting teaches them to discard the self-sabotaging lone wolf mentality and embrace tribal chains in the wolf pack; strength in numbers trumps the self-sufficiency of individualist survivalism. Tactics learned in the wild can be redeployed against racial and migrant others on Day X, the horizon of inevitable civil war in Europe.
In their search for “pure” codes that predate postcolonial migration, these groups embrace paganism. As a system of beliefs that existed before Christianity, paganism has greater “native” credentials and moreover lacks Christianity’s crucial flaw: a code of hospitality that welcomes strangers. This version of paganism emerges from the land and foregoes all missionary elements, focusing instead on an essential connection between “blood and soil,” giving new dimension to an old fascist phrase. Researchers and journalists have coined the term ecofascism to refer to the nexus between the environmental and European nativist movements. In the past, Nazism advocated for an exclusive relationship between the Aryan race and the European environment; natural selection would favor Aryans’ claim to “their” land. Today’s fascists, however, use the apparent political neutrality of environmentalism to make inroads toward new, untapped constituencies. They deploy a whole host of plant and animal metaphors to frame immigrants (and their descendants) as invasive species and parasites feasting on largesse provided by their “overly generous” hosts, which are unprepared for disruptions to their ecosystem. With this racialization of different species, ecofascists aim for population reduction and the fostering of “native” human species that are supposedly better stewards of European land, in preexisting synergy with its plants and animals. This framework uses the incontestable “logic” of nature to call for a return to essentialist gender roles that naturalize sexual difference. This ecofascist patriarchy privileges sexual complementarity and the dependency of women on men, selectively ignoring natural models that showcase male parenting, synergy between male and female organisms, female leadership, or homosexuality.
Mehammed Amadeus Mack, The Eurabia Myth: Countercolonization and Masculine Fragility in France (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
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