This blog post is a translation of an interview by famous French writer philosopher and political thinker Renaud Camus, made by the Hungarian conservative portal Mandiner. Mr. Camus has also posted the interview on his Facebook page in French.
It’s long but it’s well worth reading. I’m going to publish it in several parts. I’ve run the human translated Hungarian and the original French texts though Google Translate and this is an edited version, making use of my limited French reading skills and my native Hungarian.
You have invented the notion for “the Great Replacement”. You insist that this is not a theory but it’s today’s most striking actuality. How will you explain this phenomenon to our Hungarian readers?
The Hungarian readers don’t even know how lucky they are that they need an explanation for this! They should avoid it like the plague! This is horror! For the French, the English, the Swedes, even for the Italians now, the Great Replacement is a daily experience, it’s the bare reality: mass immigration, demographic decline, a change of people and civilization, an ethnic change, Islamization, Africanization, a genocide by replacement. There have lived people in a particular territory for centuries and, all of a sudden, there are others there in one or two generations. This time indigenous people are not being eliminated, even though they are suffering from a lot of attacks and from crime, but they are gradually submerged. They are being drowned, they are being erased from photos, they are being replaced.
You emphasize that the Great Replacement is not a conspiracy theory. You said that “I’m usually blamed that I don’t clarify the the causes of the Great Replacement. In fact I’m cautious about this indeed because I want to unite people, not to divide them”. However you also spoke of “a cohesive beam of certain interests and taboos.” What are these interests and taboos?
This is what I call global replacementism (replacement ideology), or as “davocracy” more recently, or even “direct davocracy”: the management of the human park by Davos. You know that little Swiss town where the world’s financial elite hold their annual Nuremberg Congress.
The Karl Marx for global replacementism is called Frederick Winslow Taylor and his major work, his “The Capital”, is titled “The Principles of Scientific Management”. The interests are the same in economic terms as the two meanings of that word: in a purely economic sense, that is to say, in a financial world view, there is economics, the minimal cost, the drive to save up, having no-frills through equalization and standardization. Cinematographically speaking, we could say that global replacementism is “Modern times” plus “Metropolis” plus “Soylent Green”. The hyper-rich, the financial elite disconnected from the world, want to impose a general proletarianization [on the world] through forced mixing of peoples, the grinding of human matter into an undifferentiated industrial pulp.
You often compare the Holocaust with replacementism. What do you think the common features of these two phenomena are?
– First of all, it is industrialization, that is treating humans as matter. I don’t conflate the two things at all. The specific features of the Holocaust show up distinctly to me. However I do believe we can always compare everything to everything else, even if only to distinguish things better. We always view the Holocaust as a crime against the Jews and of course we are right about that. But this was also a crime against man, against the humanity of man. I have had a great debate about this topic with my friend Alain Finkielkraut who considers the Holocaust as a unique, an unparalleled horror story which nothing should be compared with. I think on the contrary, in darker colours, that it was the epicentre of Evil, the very heart of darkness, the most appalling chapter of history which began well before. It started probably with the Industrial Revolution and it’s not over. Far from it! It’s about the dehumanization of man, it’s about reducing man to matter, to ashes, to lamp shades, to pasta. It’s about humans’ dwelling boxes in Asia’s megacities and elsewhere where workers pay real fortunes for rooms where they can’t even stand up only so they could be be close to their jobs where they earn barely enough to pay for their rent. These are the successors to the barracks in Auschwitz. They belong to the same story. We must never forget that the Ford factories in Germany were closely related to the death camps and they worked in close symbiosis with them. Hitler was a great admirer of Henry Ford, an ardent anti-Semite, whose photograph he had on his desk at the Chancery. Ford was the man who put Taylor’s tenets into practice in the best way. He had the brilliant idea of selling his cars to the workers who had made them in order to make the manufacturer a consumer. Today’s global replacementism goes even further: It makes the consumer the product: see how the Gafa (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) works.
“Hungary and the other Visegrád countries are the citadel of our hopes” – you wrote in your response to my interview request. Do you think Central Europe is the last bastion in the fight against replacementism?
– I think you mean anti-racism, don’t you? The resistance to replacement? Yes, I think that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been vaccinated by the horrors of the Communist occupation, of this totalitarianism, against this other totalitarianism, this coming totalitarianism which is already prevalent in Western Europe, replacementism. To paraphrase Marx, we may say that a specter haunts Europe, it’s the specter of replacementism. It’s Western Europe and Brussels where its grip is the strongest. These countries, which used to be the free world, a deafening repression comes down on the opponents to global replacementism, on those who, like me, are driven from everywhere and they become undead. Freedom has turned in her bed. She has changed sides and blocks. If the Iron Curtain reinstall, God forbid, then Western Europe’s dissidents will risk their lives to “go to the East”. I have more and more friends who keep telling me that they are looking for an apartment in Budapest. And I recommend only half-jokingly that France should apply for a membership in the Visegrád alliance.
Politics in Hungary 