Historian H. W. Brands addresses concerns about demographic replacement:
Renaud Camus did get the joke but took it seriously. The idea of replacing the people of a country was just what he was imputing to French elites in a 2010 book called L’Abécédaire de l’in-nocence. The title, which translates unhelpfully to Abecedarium of no-harm, didn’t grab readers. Camus tried again in 2011 with Le Grand Remplacement, which borrowed from the Brecht poem for an epigraph. Camus was referring to French immigration policies that permitted Muslim Arabs to enter the country in what Camus and others considered excessive numbers. Between the immigration itself and the fecundity of the immigrants, the Muslim and Arab portions of the French population increased compared with that of the traditional portions. Extrapolating, Camus and those who agreed with him concluded that the latter were being replaced by the former.
The idea caught on elsewhere and became a staple of right-wing politics in Europe and America. Part of the replacement idea was undeniable. Immigration and differing birth rates were indeed causing an increase in the proportion of nonwhite people in various countries, and the proportion of non-Christians in some places was rising too.
He then draws on the British as an example of how even they’re a product of migration, that at one point, their ancestors were not natives of the Isles:
Recently a study was published in the journal Nature describing a concrete case of demographic replacement. For centuries, people living in Britain claimed as ancestors the mysterious folks who built Stonehenge. The British acknowledged an admixture of Angles and Saxons and Vikings, but most supposed a lineage that ran deeper. The new study suggests they were wrong.
The focus of the study was the spread of a pottery culture associated with a group called the Beaker People, after their distinctive style of pottery. An old question among anthropologists is whether culture spreads by diffusion primarily or by migration. Do ideas and habits move? Or do people with the ideas and habits move?
The Nature study came down on the side of migration—with a vengeance. The Beaker folks, who carried genes from the steppes of central Europe, first reached Britain around 2450 BC. In comparatively short order they and their culture displaced nearly all before them. The judicious tone of the article couldn’t hide its astonishing import: “The spread of the Beaker complex introduced high levels of steppe-related ancestry and was associated with the replacement of approximately 90% of Britain’s gene pool within a few hundred years.”
Brands’ bottom line:
This is exactly what the replacement alarmists are worried about. By their lights, they have some reason to be alarmed. It’s ironic, though, that the Britons among them are the beneficiaries of the very kind of replacement they decry. (Others have noted a similar irony regarding American replacement alarmists, who consist largely of descendants of the Europeans who replaced American Indians.)
Alarmism aside, the Nature study is a reminder that humans moved in the past much as they move today. Everyone gets replaced eventually.
The message seems to be: We all get replaced eventually, so don’t worry about it. Really, though? That’s not the end of the discussion, is it? No, it’s not, Mr. Brands, an otherwise reputable historian.
Time Matters Or It Doesn’t. Pick One.
Brands is, of course, not wrong. Over the long term, people move, and everyone gets replaced. The thing is, that’s not what we’re talking about with respect to the contemporary immigration debate. For one, as our friend Kaiser Bauch likes to say, we’re not talking about what’s going to happen in year 2143 or whatever it was. We’re talking about what’s going to happen anywhere between the next five to 20 years. We’re talking about what’s going to happen in our lifetimes, our children’s and our grandchildren’s lifetimes. Beyond that, the human brain is incapable of caring too much about, nor should we.
The Beaker people of whom most of today’s modern native Briton can trace their ancestry back to those who came to what today is considered Britain back in 2450 BC, according to research. That’s 4,476 years ago. Certainly, we should study even the distant past, but the idea that has any bearing on the contemporary migration or demographics debate is sketchy, to say the least. Remember - even the Native Americans, the so-called “Indigenous,” another holy class among liberals, they themselves at one point migrated to the continent. Eventually, they formed tribes, which warred with each other for - you guessed it - land and resources. Sometimes, they replaced other tribes. Why don’t we tell them to get over getting replaced by Europeans? Surely, all replacement is fair game?
At some point down the line, whether someone came from somewhere else becomes irrelevant. If native Britons today can trace their ancestry back almost four-and-a-half millennia, there ought to be no dispute whatsoever that they’re the true natives to the land, and some African or South Asian immigrant who’s only been in the country a year shouldn’t be able to say otherwise or claim the same level of ties to the land as native Britons.
Likewise, even a native-born American whose family has been in America only for a generation cannot claim to be as American as someone whose family’s presence in the Americas precedes the Revolution. An American of Scotch-Irish ancestry whose family arrived in-country in the 18th century will probably get the side-eye if they ever went to the north of England or Northern Ireland and said, “I’m one of you!” For H.W. Brands’ argument to matter, time mustn’t. Yet even scientists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking will argue that few things matter more than time.
Time is, of course, relative. But this doesn’t mean time differences are irrelevant. To argue that concerns over migration-induced demographic change are irrational because thousands of years ago your ancestors were immigrants is utter nonsense. If a person born in New Jersey, moves to California, and spends the rest of their life there, are they not Californians, even if they don’t completely reject the Jersey-ness in them? Sure, you could be both, but my point is that one doesn’t cancel out the other.
There’s a lot of subjectivity in all of this, surely. A lot of it really comes down to what we decide as a society makes sense to us. That’s the crux of the problem: we can’t decide whether to adopt the George Washington model or the “Bad Bunny” model of America. More than race, that’s the question dividing Americans, that’s the question this country will fracture catastrophically over the next time. For America to remain viable in the future, we have to agree upon a model of “Americanness” that makes sense to us, even if it doesn’t make perfect logical sense (impossible when it comes to humans). The only other option is that one side wins the debate outright, usually through force of arms.
Currently, the Bad Bunny model is prevailing. But even granting a certain level of illogic, the Bad Bunny model falls apart because even a nonsensical framework has to at least be applied consistently. It’s many things, but a core tenant of Bad Bunny-ism, as it were, is that showing up in America makes you American, with similar illogic applied through the West more broadly.
You Cannot Replace. You Can Only Be Replaced.
Geoffrey Heath-Taylor argues in the UK magazine The Critic about the absurd stupidity of Bad Bunny-ism, about how its failure to even be consistently applied undermines it along with all its adherents:
Minnesota’s “Feeding Our Future” scandal involves a gargantuan fraud involving some $250 million of US-taxpayer money. Intended to feed hungry children during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was instead siphoned off to purchase luxury cars, jewellery and property in Turkey and Kenya.
The cast of characters is largely drawn from Minnesota’s substantial Somali-American community, and as the details first emerged, the American right — with its customary subtlety — pounced on the demographic details to demand tighter borders.
In response, the American left pointed out, with lawyerly precision, that many of the perpetrators were not “immigrants” but United States citizens. Some were naturalised; others were born on American soil. Therefore, so their argument went, this was not an immigrant scandal. It was an American scandal.
It is an interpretation that relies on a core dogma of the progressive creed: the magical, transformative power of Western soil. The moment a migrant steps onto the tarmac at Heathrow or JFK — and certainly the moment their child draws its first breath in a Western maternity ward — they are deemed to be as indigenous as the oaks of the Forest of Dean and the Redwoods of northern California. To suggest that cultural roots or ancestral ties might linger is “othering”.
This logic was deployed in the aftermath of the Southport stabbings. When it emerged that the suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was the son of Rwandan immigrants, the immediate response of the clerisy was to flatten his identity.
He was, we were told, a “Welsh Christian”. Forget that his parents moved to Wales from Rwanda in 2002. Rudakubana was born in Cardiff: to mention Rwanda was irrelevant. The mystical soil of Wales had worked its magic, making Rudakubana as Welsh as Dylan Thomas. Only a bigot could imagine otherwise.
If this principle — that geography dictates identity, and recent arrival is no bar to belonging — were applied universally, its consistency could be respected. But it is not. It is applied with a rigorous, almost comical selectivity: the rules of belonging depend more on who you are, where you’ve come from and what colour you are.
That last paragraph is Heath-Taylor’s point: the illogic could work so long as it’s applied across the board. But as we’re all aware, it’s not. Identity comes first, meaning it’s identity which dictates geography.
He uses the Afrikaners as an example [bold mine]:
Consider the Afrikaners. The Dutch first dropped anchor at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. That is the better part of four centuries ago — pre-dating the formation of the United Kingdom by more than 50 years.
An Afrikaner born in Pretoria today is the product of 12 or 13 generations of African living. They have no other home; their language was forged in the Sub-Saharan dust.
Yet, to the liberal progressive, they remain undeniably, irrevocably European. In the lexicon of the decolonisation movement, a white farmer in Zimbabwe or a third-generation British descendant in Kenya can never be an African. They are “colonial settlers”, transients with no moral claim to the land of their birth.
It matters not that they might never have seen Europe, nor that their great-grandfathers are buried under local Mpundu trees. Their whiteness renders them eternal guests, morally obliged to “go back” to a continent that is foreign to them.
Whilst the Somali arrival in the US instantly becomes a permanent thread woven into the fabric of the nation, the Dutch arrival in Africa is a temporary incursion that centuries cannot normalise.
The anti-settler, pro-immigration lobby cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim that the “Welsh Christian” son of Rwandan immigrants is irrefutably British whilst simultaneously turning a blind eye to the seizure of land from third-generation white farmers in Africa on the grounds that land being in Africa cannot be settled by non-Africans.
Never mind that the Afrikaners helped establish more than one modern state in southern Africa. Never mind that once they were dispossessed of power, even if you believe it was worth doing, led to the decline of these states, a decline which seems to have no bottom. At the end of the day, no matter how long Whites have been there, no matter what they’ve managed to accomplish, Africa can never be home to them because they’re not black. Sounds a lot like blood-and-soil nationalism, doesn’t it? I thought liberals were against that.
The attitudes towards Whites in the U.S. and Canada are exactly the same. Most European-descent Whites in both countries know no other home. Yet it can never be their home, because they didn’t sprout out of the ground, because they haven’t been here as long as the Indigenous have, who also didn’t sprout out of the ground, who are also a diverse amalgamation of tribes, who cannot lay claim to the entire continent, because even as a collective, they didn’t control it all.
But you can’t defeat the anti-colonialist mindset with facts or logic, because the ideology itself, like most ideologies, isn’t driven by facts or logic. Ironically, it’s driven by something much deeper, more primal. When you get right down to it, it’s an argument over who gets to be human in all our most flawed ways and who must be held to a “higher standard.”
A liberal who wants to sound more reasonable would probably argue that all that’s being asked is that we learn to “share and care;” since all these great countries were founded through blood and great tragedy, White people specifically, should humble themselves and learn to live in peace and harmony with their neighbors who don’t look like them. To that, I say, “What the hell do you think we’ve been doing this whole time?” I can’t take anyone who thinks we haven’t tried multiculturalism hard enough, let alone at all, seriously.
What’s happening now isn’t the result of Whites nor Westerners lacking magnanimity. This is instead the result of being far too magnanimous:
Remember: the Western mentality of fairness and kindness as virtues, building an entire society around them, isn’t even a modern invention. It’s an invention of the last century. Most of human society throughout history, even to this day, has been and will continue to be built around collective survival. This is why some people say you can understand the human condition far better in the Third World or the Second World. It takes a certain level of development and luxury to be able to wake up in the morning and have your first concern be, “How will I be fair and kind to everyone I meet today?”
Embracing Replacement Is Suicide
This is a perfect place to return to H.W. Brands’ thesis and why it’s so dangerous to embrace. If we ought to just accept the inevitability of demographic replacement because, over the long term, it’s going to happen anyway, what’s the point of continuing with this charade? If it’s going to happen, you might as well have it happen sooner rather than later, no?
The thing about being a scholar is that it becomes so easy to outpace your own humanity. What I mean by this is that embracing replacement because it’s going to happen eventually anyway is the same as saying a human should just commit suicide because we’re all going to die anyway. I don’t think that’s the message Brands wants to send, but that’s the message he inadvertently sends.
I think back to this season towards the end of the the HBO adaptation of the play Angels in America. The protagonist, Prior Walter, who’s gay and afflicted by AIDS, appeals to the angels in Heaven to give him more life, regardless of the suffering he must endure, whether he can be saved from his disease or not:
If you prefer to read over watch, here’s his monologue:
Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do. I’ve lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.
Moving stuff. But how does it apply to the immigration debate? It means nobody should hold it against anyone for refusing to be demographically replaced. It’s not about hatred. Can it lead to hatred? Sure, but all things, even love and kindness, can. All things taken to extreme demand a visceral opposition to all things standing opposed. The opposition to demographic replacement is about wanting your people, your society, your way of life to endure, that the fate of all these things isn’t up to people you’ve never met to decide. It’s not about opposition to change, either. It’s about change coming on their terms, nobody else’s.
Are these demands irrational? They could be. But are they human? Absolutely. Again, liberals don’t oppose any of this when it comes to their most-favored groups. They oppose it for everyone else. There would be far less discord if the rules were applied consistently, which they’re not, because the whole point is to apply them disparately. Disparate outcomes, as they were.
The implication also appears to be that it’s always incumbent upon the one being replaced to give way to the replacement, that there exists some moral responsibility to make room for the next person. This would assume, of course, that all of humanity operates in accordance with the same exact mindset, morality, and worldview.
As I explained earlier, most of the world sees kindness for what it is: a trait, not a virtue. For generosity to work, the receiving party must recognize that you’re being generous. If they instead feel as though they’re paying a debt - the essence of anti-colonialism and Third World-ism - then your generosity not only becomes an entitlement, but a lifetime debt they can cash in anytime. This is why its always easier to be generous with whom you know versus whom you don’t know. We all do understand this and see this in our own lives, right? Even liberals are still human.
Those liberals who try to sound more reasonable will cite things like the history of England while also being pro-immigration:
Once more, the logic is laid bare: we were replaced once, so we’ll need to be replaced again. The problem, of course, is that nobody ever in history, except perhaps the modern liberal, “wanted” to be replaced. They all resisted it. Maybe liberals see themselves as better, more righteous humans for it. But you see, you have to live in a place of such great privilege and safety to think that you’ll never be affected by the negative consequences of replacement.
Leading to my last point: demographic replacement, even over the long term, doesn’t happen peacefully. In fact, it happens violently. This is something H.W. Brands seems to understand:
The article’s authors didn’t speculate how the replacement occurred. Various means are possible. One is a massive die-off of the old Britons, perhaps by disease, war, loss of land or some combination of these. Such a combination explains the similar replacement of indigenes by European invaders in North America after 1492.
The authors didn’t speculate, I presume because of the implications doing so would raise. We all recognize that the replacement of the Indigenous in the Americas didn’t happen peacefully, however. So, why would it happen peacefully for the modern West? Maybe it doesn’t happen quite as brutally as it did in the past. But that doesn’t make it any more peaceful. Even if our replacement is happening via what I refer to as The Long Surrender, think about it: what compels a person or persons to surrender in the first place?
Capitulation comes as a result of recognizing the futility of resistance, that there’s nothing to gain from fighting. It’s not always an irrational thought, but it’s irrational to believe the other party’s ability to inflict damage, figuratively or literally, has nothing to do with it. The fact is, the West’s replacements are willing to risk more, more willing to employ violence, than the replaced. Through a combination of indoctrination, anarcho-tyranny, and violence, the people of the West, Americans included, are being terrorized into submission. The fact that millions aren’t going to die is immaterial, because violence still very much implied.
One more point:
Another possibility is a higher birth and survival rate among the Beaker people. If one or two more children survived each generation among the Beakers than among the locals, in a dozen generations a small starting group of Beakers, perhaps augmented by continuing immigration, could become the dominant group.
Hence, the debate over birthrates. Personally, I see it as something of a moral panic, but it’s not that there isn’t anything to it, either. If anyone thinks Whites are on the verge of demographic replacement through sheer force of numbers, there’s actually some good news, courtesy of Kaiser Bauch:
The combination of these factors produces one significant piece of reassurance for those worried about the decline of their ethnic group or nation: if your population numbers in the millions, or even tens of millions, the probability of genuine biological extinction in our low-mortality environment is very low, and the timescale involved would be centuries of subreplacement fertility.
He’s speaking less about replacement and more about a demographic completely going away in effective terms, but I think the same rules apply. The likelihood of Whites, even in the U.S., becoming a minority aren’t as dramatic as made out to be. If you go one further and buy into the argument scholar Eric Kaufmann made in his book Whiteshift, then the likelihood of Whites becoming a minority are next to nil.
What about mass die-offs triggered through war or some other catastrophe? To that, I ask, “What do you think would happen to the minority groups? You think they’d be spared?” When you think about it, a lot of these replacement-by-birthrates fears sound more irrational. This is where South Africa can no longer be projected as a model onto the West, because Whites were always a minority there.
At the same time, you think liberals in the West are happy to hear Whites will never be replaced, never become a minority? Absolutely not. In addition to race-obsession, liberals, Whites included, are banking their political hopes on constantly changing demographics. They believe the more diverse a society becomes, the balance of power tilts in their favor. There are problems with this thinking, but the point is, this is the hill they’ve chosen to die on.
The takeway here is that H.W. Brands is wrong: replacement is nothing to embrace. Only an academic in the safe, secure West could ever believe that. The developing and even under-developed world is full of wonderful people, yet if you asked them if they’d be willing to be demographically replaced, they’d all say, “No, thanks” in their own language. That’s because the reality of replacement and what it all means is more blunt, the consequences more stark. The fact that they’re far less so in the West doesn’t make it less real or non-existent.
On some level, all ethnic groups, all races, all societies must come to terms with their own mortality, as humans do. That much is true. We aren’t the full masters of our own fate, no. Change is inevitable. But just as we don’t “buy the farm” because the end is inevitable, societies have a responsibility to just keep on living, as humans do. The fact that we were once replaced, once the product of replacement, doesn’t mean that we have some moral obligation today to capitulate unconditionally and contribute to our own replacement.
Most people of the world still get that. Most people throughout history got that. It’s the people of the modern West, the smartest of us, who’ve forgotten.
La Résistance Against Replacement
In closing, France proves that it remains low-key the most BASED country in the West:
Not only that, a higher percentage, including among Socialist Party voters, found it to be a bad thing, while less than 10 percent thought it to be a good thing. I don’t envy France, not in one bit, but at least France recognizes the danger it’s in. France is hardly some conservative bastion. There were some Americans foolish enough to move to Russia, of all places, because they wanted to live in a non-Woke country. They should’ve moved to France instead. At least they wouldn’t have been drafted into the Ukraine war (this really did happen to an American immigrant to Russia!).
The problem, of course, is how long it took to get them to this point, plus the fact that there’s still no end in sight. I’ve always said France isn’t just much further along the timeline than the U.S., but of all the West. They’ve always been a revolutionary state and it appears when it comes to demographic and immigration backlash, they remain much the same: revolutionary.
There’s this also:
Again, imagine how bad, how much further along France is, that this sort of thing is happening. In America, real estate companies are refusing to disclose crime and demographic data so as to avoid discrimination, against blacks specifically. This suggests to me the real backlash we need is much further down the road than we’d like it to be. I’m surprised this web browser extension is allowed to be implemented, and I’m sure someone will file a grievance against it in court. But the fact that it was even deployed speaks volumes about the situation in France. It also proves that, eventually, people do resist, and France does it better than most. As an American, I can never forget how fiercely they fought our own national ancestors prior to the founding of this country.
Let me also remind everyone: France is the one Western country where a political gender divide, at least on the topics of crime and immigration, doesn’t exist. Everywhere else, these topics can be dismissed as the concerns of “insecure” “loser” men, while the women vote, which is highly coveted, is more magnanimous towards both issues. Once more, imagine how bad things have to get before places like the U.S. see a convergence in political attitudes between the genders.
Finally, there’s Denmark:
Sigh. It must be nice having consensus on the topic of immigration, to the point it’s not even a big issue. No wonder Denmark is one of the happiest countries on the planet!
Same with Switzerland:
Obviously, in the U.S., it’s not that easy. This essay is running too long, so I’ll have to save the reasons why for another time. For now, it’s enough to say that there exist Western countries who, by virtue of coherence and a political system whose sole purpose in life isn’t to ensure equality or to prevent anyone from having too much power, manage to not only solve glaring problems, but prevent them from occurring in the first place. Imagine that?
So, what do you think? Does H.W. Brands’ argument have merit? What is his point, do you think, exactly? Does the fact we were all once replaced, products of replacement, mean that we should accept our replacement today? What are your thoughts on anything else covered?
Let’s talk about it in the comments section.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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No society endures permanently, and it’s a fortunate few whose people adapt as tides of ‘others’ break the levy and consign old norms to the forgotten past.
The Itals, invigorated by hunger and perhaps destiny, would subsume their Grecian cousins who’d grown soft and tired. Rome inherited a millennium of knowledge and skill, which it established an empire upon.
Time passes, and that grand edifice succumbed to the Vandals whose ascendant brutality overwhelmed the she-wolf’s descendants.
The torch is not passed but stolen, often by people who possessed nothing more (or less) than the willingness to destroy what they had not constructed.
And so it is that 8,000 years after the birth of the British Isles - when successive waves of people (more genetically and temperamentally similar than not) culminated in an historically great civilization - those who’ve weaselled their path to power are aggressively bequeathing our inheritance… not to conquerors possessed of superior cunning or intellect, but to troglodytes. These are neither dreamers nor builders, but rather constituents of a virus.
Metastasizing quickly, the culture is now riddled with lesions which cannot be hidden. As with all such disease, the cure will come at great cost, the dearest of which may be our knowledge of who we were.
In hindsight, if you were a Stonehenge chieftain seeing the sudden appearance of Beaker culture and people, resistance would have been prudent. Almost certainly they did, but they lost.
Brands passivity reminds me of my favorite Q'ism from Star Trek Next Gen: "Everyone dies, Picard; it's only a question of when." Small comfort when you're the person (or culture) doing the dying.
Or perhaps The Princess Bride is a better response to Brands: "I do not think this lesson means what you think it means."