What is going on in the head of a young white man who, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, draws his gun in a grocery store in a popular neighborhood of Buffalo frequented mainly by blacks and kills 10 people?
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
While we still mourn the innocent victims of the terrible racist attack in Buffalo, the reassuring response is to say that it is an “isolated act”, committed by a “crazy” supremacist and that we are safe from this type of violent extremism on this side of the border.
The attack on the great mosque of Quebec showed us in a cruel way that we are unfortunately safe from nothing.
Like the Christchurch bomber who denounced so-called ‘white genocide’, the alleged Buffalo bomber posted a hate-filled manifesto online ‘cut and pasted’ watering the racist theory of the “great replacement”. According to this far-right conspiracy theory with very old roots and multiple hateful variations, there is a secret plan of the multicultural elites so that white people are “replaced” by people from minorities. Hence the importance for supremacist heroes to defend themselves against these “foreign bodies” which risk annihilating them.
“It’s the idea that inspires the most mass killings in white supremacist circles right now,” the New York Times Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism at the University of Michigan1.
What is particularly worrying is that this killing theory, once associated with the most radical fringes of the extreme right, is more than ever normalized by right-wing media and politicians who exploit the fears of the population in front of the demographic changes and the arrival of migrants, as my colleague Richard Hétu observed on Monday2.
The “great replacement” theory, repopularized in France by the author Renaud Camus in the early 2010s, is no longer only promoted in the dark shadows of the web, but also by mainstream media.
This is probably not unrelated to the fact that one in three Americans today believe that a Machiavellian plan is being deployed “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants in order to obtain electoral gains”, as the reports a recent Associated Press poll3. Unsurprisingly, viewers loyal to right-wing outlets like Fox News are more likely to believe the “great replacement” theory than those who tune in to a channel like CNN.
On this side of the border, the adhesion to this deadly theory without any foundation is also very worrying. One in five Canadians believe in the “great replacement”, according to a survey by the UNESCO Chair in the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism conducted in June 2021.
The exact statement of the poll was as follows: “Immigration is deliberately organized by our political, intellectual and media elites to ultimately lead to the replacement of the Canadian population by an immigrant population”. If 21% of Canadians believe that such a thing is true, support is a little lower in Quebec, at 15%, which is no less alarming.
“These theories are gaining public space. Even when we remove the conspiratorial dimension of the theory – the fact that it is “organized” – the idea that white populations are being replaced by immigrant populations and losing their values, their identity, is very popular and well established,” observes David Morin, professor at the University of Sherbrooke and holder of the UNESCO Chair in the prevention of violent radicalization and extremism.
We saw this in particular during the presidential campaign in France with Éric Zemmour, who campaigned by raising the specter of the “great replacement”, and Marine Le Pen, who spoke of “migratory submersion”. We also see it in Quebec with Éric Duhaime and his concept of “civilizational compatibility”.
It is not forbidden to discuss immigration and demographics. But this fundamentally racist way of constructing the story poses a problem, underlines David Morin.
There is a trivialization of this racist discourse in the public space when we act as if everything that is not white is a foreign body to the nation.
David Morin, professor at the University of Sherbrooke and holder of the UNESCO Chair in the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism
We are on the wrong track by dissociating the passage to violent action from the polarizing discourse that underlies it. The two are connected. We cannot dispense with a reflection on this subject by telling ourselves that it is just “an opinion” like any other and by denying that it is the symbolic violence of a discourse that ends up justifying physical violence.
As the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) recently pointed out, we are currently witnessing a rise in violent extremism of an ideological nature in the country. Taken together, the pandemic, the growing influence of social media and the spread of conspiracy theories have created a perfect cocktail for extremists and an environment “likely to encourage the perpetration of acts of violence”. The threat is notably fueled by racist and anti-authority extremist opinions4.
The threat posed by the far right is just as great as that posed by jihadism. The difference ? “The extreme right in the broad sense has a capacity to destabilize our Western societies greater than that of jihadism, believes David Morin. Why ? Because she walks beside people who can take power. Historically, it is majorities that bring down democracies. Not the minorities. »
In short, these far-right speeches that kill should worry us much more than Wokism, which has never killed anyone.