IS ETHNIC REPLACEMENT 'UNDEMOCRATIC'?

by William Solniger

On the traditional conservative Right, it is a commonly-heard refrain that the introduction of mass immigration and multiculturalism into European nations – hereafter referred to in less euphemistic terms as “ethnic replacement”, for that it what it amounts to in practice – was and is fundamentally undemocratic. For example, we have the view of Patrick Buchanan, who states that:

“What is most significant about [ethnic replacement in the USA] is that the American people never voted for it and do not want it. It is being imposed from above, anti-democratically, by a regime that refuses to enforce our laws and is now at virtual war with the American people.”

Similarly, Paul Weston of Liberty GB argues that:

“Mass immigration is undemocratic. [The British people] were never asked by any government if we wished to open our borders to the rest of the world…the people replacing us have been encouraged to retain their culture, despite their culture having little to do with Western civilisation and liberal democracy.”

To state that the peoples of the West never consented to ethnic replacement is a perfectly legitimate line of criticism, and one which I have no intention of disputing here. Nor do I take issue with the idea that inviting the Third World into the West does not bode well for the survival of political forms specific to Western culture, and largely absent from the Third World.

However, these points must be separated from the broader claim that ethnic replacement is “undemocratic” or “anti-democratic”; that is to say, contrary to democratic ideology. When the historical record shows a period of mere decades between the fall of monarchical Europe to democratic ideals in the wake of World War I, and the beginnings of present-day replacement immigration soon after the victory of the democratic powers in World War II, are we really on firm ground in claiming that ethnic replacement is an aberration contrary to democracy?

As we learn from Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy, modern “liberal democracy” has very little respect for specific communities united by identity and history, despite the fact that these were considered essential prerequisites for citizenship in ancient democracy. Instead, the ideals of modern democracy consist of the anti-communitarian “rights” of egalitarian individualism on the one hand, and the quasi-religious phantasy of utopian rule by the largest possible number of these atomised individuals on the other. Believers in historical “progress” thrill to a narrative of the triumphant advance of democracy through the ever wider enfranchisement of “excluded” groups such as women and the unpropertied, and the natural conclusion of this would logically be the further destruction of “barriers to participation” and extension of voting rights and citizenship in the future. Furthermore, the foreign crusades of the United States are proof enough that modern democratic ideology has no respect for national borders, nor many reservations about the competence of certain non-Western groups to practice democratic politics.

In light of these considerations, ethnic replacement can be seen as consistent with democratic ideology in that it leads to the “inclusion” and “enfranchisement” of the Third World peoples who form the vast majority of the world’s population, and before whom the native peoples of the West appear as a minority group (or even, in modern parlance, a “privileged aristocracy”). “Representation”, however incomplete, of Third World peoples within Western democratic politics can only be seen as a plus for a ruling order which claims from the chrism of “democracy” not only legitimacy at home, but also moral leadership abroad.

Although we can legitimately argue that ethnic replacement is being carried out against the will of the native peoples of the West, as long as we continue to venerate “democracy,” we can expect the particularist rights of our people to their own land to be trumped by the universal and absolute “rights” – backed up by cheap votes for anyone in power who succeeds in making them a reality – of the world’s largest and fastest-growing populations to be “included” and “enfranchised.” As for the argument that Western democracy should be restricted to those peoples who alone are capable of sustaining it (another well-worn refrain of conservatives), the time for that argument was in the bygone era of initial Third World penetration of the West; it is ludicrous to think that such an argument will be heard today, now that the genie is already well and truly out of his bottle.

At this point, although more hardly needs to be said, it is appropriate to quote a thought experiment of Hans Herman-Hoppe:

“Imagine a world government, democratically elected according to the principle of one-man-one-vote on a worldwide scale. What would the probable outcome of an election be? Most likely, we would get a Chinese-Indian coalition government. And what would this government most likely decide to do in order to satisfy its supporters and be reelected? The government would probably find that the so-called Western world had far too much wealth and the rest of the world, in particular China and India, had far too little, and hence, that a systematic wealth and income redistribution would be called for.” (Herman-Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed)

However far from reality this may be in literal terms, in broader ideological terms this is the very hymn-sheet from which the “democratic” rulers of the West are so fond of singing, and never louder than when objections to ethnic replacement are raised by the native peoples of the West. Moreover: although the simmering resentment of the Third World can never touch the wealth and power of the oligarchs and bureaucrats who actually rule the West, it can be lulled and sated within democratic politics by that ceremonial humiliation of lower-class Europeans which goes under the name of “anti-racism,” and which in turn owes its plausibility to the democratic myth of common unity between the rulers of a “democracy” and its people.

                                                                                        

This last remark leads me to address a possible objection. Against the argument that ethnic replacement represents the extension of modern democratic ideology on a world scale, some will no doubt oppose the fact that “elitist” interests within the West – corporate plutocrats, electoral advocates for the bureaucracy, and the decadent and privileged strata that tends to espouse “progressivism” – are in fact all profiting handsomely from the influx into the West of cheap labour, the creation of new progressivist voting blocs, and the “solvent effect” of cultural fragmentation on the bonds of traditional Western morality. However, all of this stands in no real contradiction to “democracy”, unless we choose to believe the absurd myths still clinging to this ideology like lipstick and mascara on a pig. As the “elite theory” school of Mosca and Pareto teaches us – and the proliferation of billionaires in both the ruling and shadow Cabinets of Britain’s “Mother of Parliaments” in the present day should further remind us – a society that is not ruled by anyone other than the amorphous “people” is an impossible phantasy, and all democracies are in fact dominated by a ruling class. I would go further than this and say that for democracy (“rule of the people”) in the present day we should almost always read kakistocracy (“rule of the worst”) – that is to say, the rule of a class which is not just manifestly incompetent, corrupt and myopically short-termist, but by definition maintains its position by practicing the mass deception necessary to hide its own actions behind the mythical “will of the people”, and manipulating the basest appetitive elements in man so as to increase its own power.

                                                                                         

However, whether we choose to understand it as the “enfranchisement” of Third World peoples or merely their inclusion in a mechanism of ruling-class control, the fact remains that ethnic replacement is consistent with both the glittering ideals and the darker real-life motivations of modern liberal democracy. I have presented this idea in the hope that it will provide food for thought for those who do not see at first glance the common cause between the defence of Europe from foreign invasion on the one hand, and the more general thrust of Reaction or traditional Restoration on the other. The fundamental assumptions of our ruling democratic ideology (which extend far further than politics) will have to be discredited in the minds of a significant number of Westerners before either movement can get anywhere; however, perhaps the argument of this essay can one day make an effective contribution on this front as well.

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