Two years ago, I chanced upon a colleague who had just returned from a visit to France. She lamented that Paris was no longer the Paris she had remembered from twenty years past.

“There are more social issues,” she remarked, more or less.

“Indeed, in 2013, I saw more homeless people in certain districts,” I replied.

“There are more immigrants.”

“Those asking me for money weren’t immigrants.”

“It’s not that I’m against immigration,” she clarified. “The problem lies in the replacement of European culture with another that is not our own…”

“Much like the European culture that replaced the natives here and in other colonies. Besides, if not for the theft and genocide (as was the case with all imperial conquests), I see no issue with different peoples occupying our place…”

I could never quite grasp that collective narcissism that insists on the right of our race, our culture, and even our last name to be preserved through eternity. What does it matter if, in a generation or two, my ethnicity, my culture is replaced by the Chinese, Congolese, Russians, Swedes, or Bolivians? Or is our fear that the new majorities will treat us as we have treated minorities? Or is it merely narcissism, as if my beliefs, my blood, my sperm, my sweat, and even my excrement are favored by some equally narcissistic deity?

Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-right party’s leader, responded repetitively to this inquiry. Wilders has insisted that “Our values of freedom, democracy, and Human Rights are incompatible with Islam.” Other arguments based on racial and cultural hatred were expounded by the famed Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci following 9/11: “Even if they were completely innocent, even if among them there is not one who wishes to destroy the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Tower of Giotto, not one who wants to force me to wear the chador, not one who desires to burn me on the stake of a new Inquisition, their presence alarms me.” We responded to this in “The Slow Suicide of the West“ (2002), forewarning of the greatest peril on this side of the world: our monstrosities, the architects of the worst catastrophes in modern history.

In early 2024, Wilders interviewed Elon Musk. Musk repeated his obsessions, which are not even his own. Like in his tweets, which gather millions of micro-reads (the right dimension for slogans and propaganda), he never tires of demonizing immigrants. Poor immigrants with dark skin, not white immigrants like himself or the half a million Anglo-Saxon immigrants living in the United States without documentation, who evoke no fear in anyone.

Another fixation of Musk’s concerns is the reproduction of the white race. When the dark-skinned poor have many children, even if they may be future wage slaves, it is deemed an invasion or irresponsible mentalities born of poverty. “The fault always lies with the poor.” His father, a millionaire businessman thanks to apartheid in South Africa, shared the same obsession: sex with numerous women and prolific fatherhood with a couple of them.

Nothing new here. It traces back to the era of Anglo-Saxon private companies’ conquests across the globe beginning in the seventeenth century and, more articulately, to the racist ideology that justified colonialism, robbery, and the mass extermination of blacks and yellows, asserting that (1) the Anglo-Saxon race was superior and had the right to enslave the inferior, while (2) those inferior races were evolutionarily more successful and their numbers frightened the invaders. This mindset justified countless massacres in Asia and Africa perpetrated by England, France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, as well as the spoliation of native nations in America, first, and from the newly independent American republics thereafter.

Later, it was the new immigrants or the children of immigrants (always rejected and persecuted by the old immigrants) who became nativist xenophobes. Like today, many immigrants must be 500 percent American to feel an 80 percent acceptance. From there arises the “horse’s tail complex” of many who wrap themselves in the stars and stripes and latch on to any jingoistic symbol, rant, or ritual.

In 1843, Lewis Levin founded the Nativist American Party (then the American Party), more commonly known as the “Know Nothing Party.” Despite belonging to a people historically persecuted in Europe, the Jewish people, Levin organized anti-immigrant protests, some of which culminated in the murder of dozens of Irishmen and the burning of homes and Catholic churches. Back then, the Irish were not only Catholic, poor, and mostly anti-imperialists, but they were also not considered true whites. None of these crimes were brought to trial, and Levin was elected as a representative for Pennsylvania. From his seat, he continued his fight against unwanted immigrants, blaming them for the decadence of America.

The slavers of the South and the wealthy racists of the North, like Theodore Roosevelt (“blacks are a perfectly stupid race,” he wrote in 1895), continued to expand even into Australia and back to Europe until they inspired Hitler himself, who plagiarized American Madison Grant’s book in Mein Kampf.

Now, these ideas serve as the vanguard for political leaders repeating the same sentiments: “We are facing a white genocide,” immigrants are causing “the Great Replacement,” and “We must defend ourselves by expelling the invaders.” These medieval slogans are effective indeed, for they are easily replicated on social media and attract readers steeped in the depressive culture of hyper-fragmented dopamine. Especially when there is a palpable decline of Western empires that can no longer sustain their living standards through the vampirization of their colonies and respond with violence. For the fascist mindset, which seeks refuge in the past for solidity and self-esteem, these notions offer the ideal opium.

The notion that we will lament the replacement of Western (Anglo-Saxon) culture by Chinese or Islamic culture rests solely on old propaganda, not on facts. The West did not invent freedom, democracy, or Human Rights. Many native nations in America were acquainted with all three values long before Europe. The famed Greek democracy, like its American counterpart, possessed slaves and was an empire. No one can even define themselves as a democrat if they are not simultaneously anti-imperialist.

It is hard to surpass the violent tradition of Europe. If we were to begin with the Crusades (the ISIS of the era that vandalized the heart of the developed, Islamic world), we must carry on to the Inquisition, the religious wars, the forced conversions, the torture chambers, the massacres in the colonies; the destruction of free markets and thriving societies like Bangladesh, India, and China which interrupted an incipient industrial revolution, bombing and addicting populations to drugs, as in China; inventing hereditary slavery based on skin color; exterminating several hundred million human beings in Asia, Africa, and America; producing the two most bloodstained world wars in history; exterminating unarmed or defeated peoples in gas chambers, under atomic bombs or weapons of mass destruction like Orang Agent; obliterating freedoms, democracies, and Human Rights in every (all) colony and protectorate; imposing brutal national dictatorships to exert the brutal imperial dictatorship of Western democracies…

Shall I continue?

Jorge Majfud, August 2024