The Genocide of Native Europeans

Credit Image: © Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press

Clare Ellis, The Blackening of Europe, Vol. 3: Critical Views, Arktos Media, Ltd., 244 pages, $22.95 paperback, $6.99 e-book

Clare Ellis is a Scottish-born Canadian who earned a doctorate at the University of New Brunswick in 2017 with a dissertation on multiculturalism and mass immigration to Europe. Her thesis advisor was Ricardo Duchesne. The Blackening of Europe is a three-volume work based on that dissertation. The first volume, devoted to “ideologies and international developments,” was published in 2020; the second, which I reviewed, is on “immigration, Islam, and the migrant crisis,” and appeared in 2022. In February, 2023, her publisher, Arktos Media, was deplatformed by Ingram Content Group, the world’s largest book distributor. This setback delayed publication of this third volume by over a year, but it is finally available.

Volume three summarizes three consequences of mass immigration for native Europeans: demographic decline, political decline, and a decline in social trust and cohesion. The author argues that it constitutes genocide against Europeans under well-established principles of international law. She also reviews the work of prominent neoconservative critics of mass Muslim immigration, finding their work useful but inadequate.

Liberal individual rights vs. multicultural group rights

The reigning ideology of contemporary Europe might be called “liberal multiculturalism,” or perhaps “multicultural liberalism.” It has two components, and they may not even be compatible: Multiculturalism understands contemporary Western societies as divided into discreet groups, each with its own rights, while liberalism is a doctrine of individual rights developed within the unusually individualistic civilization of Europe long before mass immigration. Liberalism is a poor fit with the group-oriented inherited folkways of non-European immigrants — notably Muslims — and multiculturalism has been developed specifically for their needs and for their benefit.

Even the most thoroughgoing liberal individualists must consider the problem of whether group rights exist and what such rights should be. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948, asserted that “everyone has a right to a nationality” of which he must not be arbitrarily deprived. The world does not consist simply of individuals; men are everywhere tribal.

National self-determination is a group right widely recognized in international law. In 1966, the UN adopted an International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Its very first article declares: “All peoples have the right to self-determination” and, based on this right, “freely determine their political status.” The Italian jurist Antonio Cassese clarified this:

Internal self-determination means the right to authentic self-government, that is, the right for a people really and freely to chose its own political and economic regime — which is much more than choosing what is on offer from one political or economic position only. It is an ongoing right . . . the right to internal self-determination is neither destroyed nor diminished by its already once having been invoked and put into effect.

This means that there can be no irreversible governmental policies, including migration policy.

The word “genocide” — derived from the Greek genos, translatable as race, tribe, or kin — was coined in the 1940s by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. He was the initiator of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948, commonly known as the Genocide Convention. Lemkin stressed that his neologism was not meant to refer only to the systematic murder of all members of a group, but also to setting up conditions incompatible with long-term group survival. The Genocide Convention includes in its definition “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and provides for punishment not merely of state actors but of all who publicly incite or are complicit in genocide.

As Lemkin wrote: “Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.” In other words, protection from genocide is a matter of group rights, not the individual rights of liberal theory — even if antigenocide campaigners like to think of themselves as liberals or hold liberal principles in other contexts.

The multicultural ideal first emerged in the context of Western expansion and colonialism, which reduced native populations (such as American Indians) to relatively powerless minorities in lands of which they were formerly masters. Many people — not only members of such groups themselves but also sympathetic whites — came to believe that individual liberal rights were inadequate for protecting such relict populations. They should enjoy group rights allowing them to safeguard and perpetuate their distinct traditions, which would be unlikely to survive in a mass liberal individualist society where they were greatly outnumbered. Thus arose the concept of indigenous rights.

In 2007, the UN adopted a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Article 8 states that:

Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture. States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of and redress for a) any action that has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities; b) any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources; c) any form of forced population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights; d) any form of forced assimilation or integration; e) any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or ethnic discrimination directed against them.

Other articles in the declaration guarantee to indigenous people the right to govern themselves according to their own cultural norms, to form ethnically closed communities, and to control their own educational systems and institutions in order to ensure the transmission of their cultural legacy. The Declaration contains no fewer than 46 such rights.

This document would seem to be tailor-made to use against the Great Replacement, and it seems equally obvious that white Europeans are “indigenous” to the European continent where their ancestors have been living for 40,000 years. In the realm of international human-rights law, however, things are not always as they seem.

Although the UN has never officially endorsed any precise definition of the term “indigenous,” some of its documents speak of such people not simply as the natives of a given region, but as ethnicities that have been dispossessed of previously dominant positions through conquest, colonization, or settlement. As Dr. Ellis remarks, this appears to postpone any European claim to indigenous status until the natives are reduced to a minority. On the day that tipping point is reached, all the rights given by the UN to the indigenous will suddenly devolve upon Europeans. By then, of course, it may be too late. And this also assumes no one comes up with a rationale for denying such rights to Europeans per se even if they become minorities. That would be well within the capacities of any imaginative “human rights expert.”

However, it is not necessary to appeal to “indigenous rights” to see that the European Union’s migration policies violate its own principles. According to the EU treaty, the organization’s aim is to “promote peace and the well-being of its peoples.” It seeks to “respect” the “rich cultural and linguistic diversity” of Europe and “ensure” that its “cultural heritage” is “safeguarded and enhanced.” The treaty also commits the EU to respecting the “national identities” of its member states.

Ongoing immigration of non-Europeans is obviously not compatible with these principles. Mass immigration gives rise to ethnic conflicts likely to lead to war; it threatens the identities of nations; and it will eliminate national self-determination as soon as the political alliance between immigrants and disloyal native Europeans (commonly called “the Left”) outnumbers those who support national and cultural survival.

Dr. Ellis calls this antipatriotic alliance the substitution of political majority rule for ethnic majority rule. Andrew Neather, a speechwriter for the British Labour Party, has been among the few to speak openly of this strategy by admitting that the Blair Government wanted to “rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” These are people for whom fellow countrymen are interchangeable with foreigners; not because they love everyone equally, but because any population can serve as a base for their power.

In sum, the fundamental problem with the governing ideology of Europe we have called “multicultural liberalism” is that it grants immigrant communities in Europe both individual and group rights, while recognizing only individual rights for natives. In Dr. Ellis’s words: “The host (Western) culture is expected to function as a neutral promoter of universal values with no particular traditions of its own. Both multiculturalism and liberal universalism fail to acknowledge the ethnic particularism of Europeans.”

The Left never justifies this double standard, but it gives immigrant groups a nearly insuperable advantage in their battles with natives. Those who uphold this conflicted moral standard are — to cite the words of the Genocide Convention — “deliberately inflicting on [Europeans] conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] physical destruction.” If UN declarations were anything more than words on paper, Europe’s rulers and pro-immigration activists would be made to answer for the crime of genocide against their own people.

Arguing — or refusing to argue — for immigration

The rationales usually offered by Europe’s rulers to justify mass immigration are low native birth rates and an aging population. Europe can hold its place on the world stage, they argue, only by importing a new population to replace Europeans. These ideas were developed in a 2001 UN report called Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Aging Populations? It offered five possible scenarios, of which Dr. Ellis discusses two:

1) immigration to keep the size of the working population constant. This would require bringing in 80 million persons, or 1.6 million per year. By 2050 persons with a non-European background would make up over 25 percent of the EU population. This scenario is fairly close to what has actually been happening.

2) immigration to maintain the ratio between the working and retired population. This would require nearly 700 million newcomers, or 13 million per year. Within a few short generations, native Europeans would be reduced to a status something like that of American Indians in North America.

This UN report sees humanity in economic terms and people as interchangeable producers and consumers. It also assumes that unending economic expansion is both possible and morally necessary in spite of our finite planet.

The report also completely ignores a people’s identification with the land of their ancestors. According to Monica Duffy Toft, a scholar of international relations, ethnic groups “view territory as inextricably bound up with their identity and thus ultimately with their survival as a group,” something independent of the territory’s objective value as real estate. The national homeland has a symbolic significance so great that it can motivate self-sacrifice on a grand scale. According to Miss Toft and Dominic D. P. Johnson, almost three-quarters of all ethnic wars between 1940 and 2000 were about the control of territory.

As Dr. Ellis explains, the state does not share this attachment to the homeland. The state seeks power and survival by controlling material resources and physical territories. For the state, land is just real estate, and people are “productive resources.” European rulers may thus rationally calculate that their power depends on mass-importation of foreigners to replace the existing population. That is the natural viewpoint of men without loyalty, incapable of seeing themselves as trustees of their particular people’s destiny, even if they give their own indifference the fine-sounding name of “tolerance.”

Low European birth rates are a genuine problem, but in their haste to recommend mass migration as the solution, the UN does not stop to ask how the problem arose. Obvious culprits include female careerism, declining legal and cultural support for marriage, and widespread birth control and abortion; these trends can be reversed, but the UN ignores that possibility.

Furthermore, as Dr. Ellis points out, “low demographic growth does not necessarily mean low economic growth or declining political power.” Europe enjoyed its most impressive growth and the height of its power and influence during the 19th century when many Europeans were emigrating. Today, increasing labor productivity through robotics and artificial intelligence is a far more rational strategy than importing non-Europeans, who are largely unskilled and not especially productive. Moreover, such workers compete against the poorest of the native population, lowering wages for all. Many foreigners fail to find work, and live on welfare or crime. Europe cannot give jobs to unlimited numbers of such migrants.

The author stresses that economic arguments are just pretexts. Since the mid-1970s, the overwhelming majority of immigrants have been admitted not as workers but for reasons of family reunification or marriage, and many such marriages are arranged, not admissions of spouses left behind. Any adult can marry, so this leads to chain migration, a “right” now jealously protected by a host of lobbies, laws, and “human rights” attorneys.

Dr. Ellis has also unearthed the single most ridiculous argument in favor of mass immigration to Europe I have ever heard: In 2016, Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble declared that “isolating” Europe by halting immigration would cause the native population to degenerate through inbreeding.

In fact, white Europeans have long been the most exogamous, least inbred population on earth. For a time, the Church officially forbade marriage between sixth cousins, a level of restriction probably unmatched anywhere. Many recent immigrants to Europe are Muslims, for whom first-cousin marriage is normal. They suffer from high rates of genetic defects, which increases their burden on European taxpayers.

Many who favor mass immigration don’t even bother to argue for it. Instead of trying to convince people it will be beneficial — by now a nearly impossible task — they assert that it is inevitable. As Myron Weiner and Michael Teitelbaum explain in their book Political Demography, Demographic Engineering (2001), these advocates “prefer to describe international migration as an inexorable process, driven by hugely powerful economic, demographic, and social forces that overwhelm any efforts by government to affect them — a kind of human tectonics.” They conclude that this is, at the very least, greatly overstated. Mass migration is an elite project. The enormous efforts and resources spent on “anti-racist” propaganda and ever-expanding hate crime legislation aimed at suppressing native resistance are sufficient proof that the process is not natural. The inevitability argument is intended as psychological warfare against opponents of immigration, an effort to demoralize them the was villains in a science fiction movie do: “RESISTENCE IS FUTILE!”

A good example is this 2015 declaration of European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans:

Europe will be diverse, like all other parts of the world [because] diversity is humanity’s destiny. There is not going to be, even in the remotest places of this planet, a nation that will not see diversity in its future. That is where humanity is heading.

Even apart from this claim to be able to see the future, Mr. Timmermans’ assertion is false. Professional demographers such as Weiner and Teitelbaum write instead of a

current worldwide trend toward demographic unmixing. . . . The demographic tendencies have been toward ethnic consolidation rather than diversification, and the processes of exodus and return have resulted in increasing homogeneity along religious, linguistic and other ethnic lines.

Some observers even speak of “re-indigenisation.” The West is the outlier: the only area where diversity is increasing.

In the face of claims about inevitability, we should recall Antonio Cassese’s remark quoted above that “the right to self-determination is neither destroyed nor diminished by its already once having been invoked.” No political actor has the authority to make decisions binding all future generations; all political decisions are subject to reconsideration any time. If the rising generation of Europeans have any say in the matter, the old continent may yet enjoy its own era of “re-indigenisation.”

Immigrants or settlers?

Demographers Weiner and Teitelbaum even suggest that “immigration” is not the proper term for the human waves pouring into Europe. Properly speaking, immigrants are newcomers who want to join an already-existing host society: they are looking to belong. By contrast, settlers regard themselves as superior to natives and want to establish political authority; they want victory.

The difference becomes clear in cases like that of Sukant Chandan, an Indian with a British passport who has expressed gratitude to his host nation as follows:

The West wanted us to do their dirty work here and [then] they wanted us out. But we fought for our right to stay here, against the government and against the Far Right and racist organizations. We’re here to stay. Now, I think, the final challenge is for us to completely take over the West. Black and Asian people should come here in the hundreds of millions. It’s not right that for 500 years, imperialism has looted our countries of all their wealth, has destroyed our countries. We will continue to come here until Europe will turn Black!

Lee Sam-dol is a Korean who settled in Sweden. He says: “Knowing the white race is inferior on every conceivable plane is natural, considering its history and current actions. Let the white race perish in blood and suffering.” The reader must not suspect this gentleman of racism, however; his is a cofounder of Expo, the most prominent “anti-racist” organization in Sweden.

A prominent Imam says: “One of the goals of immigration is the revival of the duty of jihad and enforcement of power over the infidels.”

In light of how easy it is to find statements like these, it is remarkable how many observers still propose “assimilation,” as if the decision to “assimilate” was entirely up to us. There is much evidence that Muslim immigrants, especially, become more strongly attached to their traditions the longer they live in Europe. It is good that they fail to assimilate; mass repatriation would be far harder if assimilation were actually happening.

Not only do Muslim settlers remain attached to their ancestral ways; they collaborate with governments and Islamic organizations in their homelands. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Turkey fund Islamist groups in Europe, and some countries refuse to take back their own nationals.

Objectively weaker countries can easily manipulate European governments. Turkey, for example, let hundreds of thousands of migrants cross into Europe in 2015, agreeing to stop them only when European leaders offered to pay money. Turkish President Erdogan says he wants to recreate the Ottoman Empire through conquest, describing the Germans and Dutch as Nazis and fascists. In 2017 he urged Turks living in Europe to outbreed the natives, telling them “you are the future of Europe.” Astonishingly, Turkey is still an official candidate for EU membership.

Organizing against the nation state

The ethnic transformation of Europe is closely tied to the rise of supranational organizations: the EU, the UN, and various “humanitarian” non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that challenge the nation state because they benefit from eroding its legitimacy. NGOs support US-led wars in the Middle East because they produce the refugee flows to Europe they want.

One example is Calais Migrant Solidarity, part of the broader, transnational No Border Network. Calais Migrant Solidarity specializes in helping migrants reach Britain from Calais, France. It sets up squats for illegal migrants, and helps them organize protests and riots that have included blocking the Channel Tunnel, storming ferries, and stealing boats. It also trains, organizes, and incites vandalism, arson, and mass-violence against police and other authorities.

Possibly the most important pro-migration NGO is financier George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Mr. Soros’s description of his “open society” is “a universal concept” that “transcends all boundaries,” ruled by a “global system of political decision-making.”

Mr. Soros explains that “closed” societies “derive their cohesion from shared values . . . rooted in culture, religion, history and tradition” — a description that would fit nearly every society in history. Such societies are the enemy. Perhaps Mr. Soros’s clearest principle is that any European society trying to control its borders and retain its inherited ethnic majority is “closed,” and must be opened. He funded a number of organizations that facilitated the 2015 migrant “crisis.”

Among Mr. Soros’s more interesting recent projects has been Boats4People, a coalition of 14 organizations that support Africans entering Europe illegally by crossing the Mediterranean. Some of the organizations in Boats4People distribute handbooks in Arabic with advice about the best places to cross. This has a double effect. Boats4People can blame the authorities for lives lost at sea when its own operatives have encouraged illegal and reckless crossings.

In what could be a fitting conclusion to her many excellent arguments, Dr. Ellis writes:

Attempting to strip countries of their ability to defend their borders and flooding the shores of Europe with illegal entrants is simply criminal activity: human smuggling, violation of national sovereignty, incitement against decrees of authority, and so on, and should be prosecuted as such.