Posted on May 18, 2022

Irreplaceable: An Interview With Renaud Camus

Benjamin Braddock, IM-1776, May 17, 2022

Renaud Camus is a French writer, political theorist and intellectual. {snip}

To most in the West however, Camus is known for coining the term “The Great Replacement” in his 2011 work Le Grand Remplacement. {snip}

{snip}

Benjamin Braddock: When ‘The Great Replacement’ is spoken of in English-language media it is invariably described as a “conspiracy theory”, one undertaken by some shadowy cabal in which mass immigration is the result of a deliberate plot to destroy Western civilization. When I read your book Le Grand Remplacement however, I find instead a sober work of political economy that advances a critique of materialist globalism as an impersonal force stripping people of their cultural, spiritual, and ethnic attributes, and turning them into fungible units of homogenous labor. So what is “replacism”, and why do you think there’s such a radical difference between your work and the way it is perceived?

Renaud Camus: The Great Replacement is not a theory at all, but just a sad fact, a ‘chrononym’, i.e. name for an epoch after its most important phenomenon, indeed replacism (or more exactly globalreplacism), mainly developed in my most recent book La DépossessionDispossession. It rests on the observation that replacement, the substitution of something else to everything and the replacement of everything by something else, is the central gesture of modern societies, at least since Taylorism and Fordism, and probably since the First Industrial Revolution. Think of how writers are replaced by intellectuals, intellectuals by journalists, journalists by TV-show hosts, marble by chipstone, stone by concrete or plaster, wood by plaster, or plastic, the signature material of global replacism which spoils even the depths of the oceans; Venice by Venice in Las Vegas, Las Vegas by a fake one in the deserts of Spain, Paris by a cheaper mock version next to Peking (which is much safer to visit these days) and so on.

Neither the Great Replacement nor global replacism are conspiracy theories — the phrase is infinitely too limited for what they are — but global replacism is indeed a theory of the machination, the substitution of machines (and computers) to men and women, i.e. the dehumanisation of humanity, or what I call today davocracy, the management of the human park (in the words of Peter Sloterdjik) by Davos, bankers, international finance, multinational companies, pension funds, hedge funds, Big Five, and all kind of more or less private powers. Henry Ford, much admired and much imitated by both Hitler and Stalin, had the brilliant idea of making clients out of his workers: consumers out of his producers. Post-fordism and global replacism go one step further, and, out of the producer-consumer, they make a product: man, woman, humanity and post-humanity — the most precious of all goods, the consumer. The number one requirement of davocratic replacism is the general exchangeability of the product. Hence the urgency of the absurd dogma of the inexistence of the races, which has become the main point and the modern form of antiracism, at least in Europe, and which, of course was made possible, for antiracists, only by taking the word race exclusively in the incredibly narrow, purely biological and pseudo-scientific meaning to which it had been limited before by the worst kind of racists. And now that the races have been successfully taken care of and suppressed, at least conceptually, it is very obvious that the current requirement of global replacism is the inexistence of the sexes.

As to why there is such a colossal difference between my books and their image, between my thought and the thoughts currently attributed to me, the answer is very simple: Practically none of those people has read me, and certainly not the diverse mass murderers whom the general press is only too pleased to associate with my name. {snip} There are two social or professional categories one can rest assured their members have never read me: they’re mass murderers and journalists.

Benjamin Braddock: Emmanuel Macron was just re-elected as President. After five turbulent years which saw continued mass protests against his government and warnings of civil war from the French military, Le Pen only managed to capture 41% of the vote in the run-off, a marginal improvement from her 2017 result. Furthermore, France is one of the only countries I’m aware of where the youth leans considerably more to the Right than the elderly. For both Le Pen and Zemmour, Millenials and Zoomers were their strongest demographic. What does this mean for the future of France and where does the French Right go from here?

Renaud Camus: I do not care much for the future of the Right, which has betrayed the country and the people just as much as the Left and the present ‘centre’. Elections do not mean much today since opinion is manipulated more than ever in history; by school and university teachings, by the so-called ‘new means of communication’, by the collapse of general culture and the progress of mass hebetude, and by the mainstream Press, which is entirely devoted to global replacism and practically belongs to it, and now even official Government “disinformation boards.” In such conditions, it is difficult to take electoral results seriously. When a country is handed over to foreign peoples and foreign forces, occupied, colonised, daily humiliated in every way and its indigenous people daily attacked, robbed, raped, slaughtered, Left vs. Right are not the most urgent of issues. Resistance is.

There are a growing number of youths indeed which are infuriated and dispaired by the present state of their country, but there are also, unfortunately, an alarming mass of young and not-so-young people who are stultified by permanent propaganda and mass deculturation and ardently serving davocratic power while sincerely believing, for instance, they are fighting capitalism, or what they call “fascism.” The best allies and instruments of global replacism and of the Industries of Man, the producers of what I call Undifferentiated Human Matter (the main product of the Industries of Man and the principal demand, as much as the principal result, of Great Replacement) are not the old values of the Right (which have long been abandoned by the Right anyway) but the so-called progressive values of the Left, especially ‘equality’ and ‘antiracism’, which make people so much easier to exchange and so much easier to replace; so much easier to liquefy and so much easier to liquidate. Publicity, which is the natural literature of global replacism, its epic poetry as well as its common law — and which clearly tells and shows what money wants — is very obvious on that point: mix you must (and disappear).

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Benjamin Braddock: How can Western Europeans overcome their innate pathological altruism and lack of in-group preference?

Renaud Camus: This exaggerated altruism and lack of in-group preference are indeed pathological, but I am not sure they are innate. It seems to me they are entirely created, modern, and a result of recent history. This is a thesis I have developed in the short essay The Second Career of Adolf Hitler, and also in the pretended children’s tale allegedly rediscovered from Hans-Christian Andersen, Ørop: how Europe has withdrawn from history after the traumatism of Second World War, and how Hitler dead is even more efficient, as an inverted figure, as a ghost, as the terminus ad quem of every sentence and every thought, than he was living. Europe has not always suffered from a pathological altruism and has for centuries shown signs of the opposite character, often in a somewhat exaggerated manner. It should now settle for a reasonable middle, just as the pendulum of colonization and counter-colonization should now settle in the middle, i.e. the Mediterranean, and put an end to all colonizations, North-South or South-North. But it obviously cannot do so without getting free, first, of totalitarian replacism and davocracy.