The Great Replacement is a conspiracy theory of white nationalists which says that the ethnic white populations in the West are being deliberately demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans.
As a conspiracy theory, the Great Replacement is rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview, and has generally been ridiculed for its blatant absurdity.
I always immediately reject conspiracies when used to explain large-scale events that have a negative impact and over which ordinary people have no control. In Lebanon, conspiratorial thinking is endemic. Nothing that happens in the country, the region, or the world can be due to political uncertainty, serendipity, coincidence, chance and the vagaries of constant change. Every issue, as it evolves over time, is the result of a planned plot or conspiracy - المخطط or المؤامرة.
Worse yet, conspiracies in Lebanon are often laced with a sense of despair that reflects itself in absurd self-inflating claims. In short, Lebanon is a victim of these conspiracies because it is such a smart(ass) country and has so much potential that others fear a stable prosperous Lebanon. The ultimate victim. But the Lebanese are not alone to wallow in this sack of composting despair. Many others in the third world adopt conspiracies as an explanation of their downtrodden status or societal unrest or economic uncertainty.
Examples:
- Why is Israel producing gas while Lebanon, right next door, is not? It's gotta be a plot. The operators of the world levers - understand the US, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, or ... take your pick.... - don't want any competition from a potential gas-producing Lebanon. The gas that Lebanon can produce is so abundant that it can overwhelm the world markets and destroy the economies of its competitors. Or
- Why has Lebanon been in eternal torment it seems, with successive wars, crises, invasions, occupations and political stalemates? It's gotta be a plot. The Lebanese, talking about themselves, say they are so smart that other nations around fear them. Israel in particular is held responsible because of its endless wars with armed groups operating from Lebanon: If Lebanon were to regain its stability, it would be such a dangerous competitor to Israel that the latter has been engaged in a long term war of attrition against stability and prosperity in Lebanon.
Yet, as you look around you in Lebanon: unmarked poorly-lit streets and roads that are full of potholes, rationed electricity, rationed water, a crushed Lebanese Lira, garbage strewn everywhere, dysfunctional banks...Nothing works in Lebanon. There is not a single television channel that tries to educate its audience with objectivity and science: Channels are either:
- Religious. Dedicated television channels with round-the-clock prayers and harangues by Christian and Muslim clergymen who attack science as a plot against religions and dig deeper untested and imagined religious beliefs into people's minds, or
- Entertainement. With locally-made or Syrian or Turkish sitcoms of abysmal quality, all around the same old single theme of forbidden love and betrayal ... no one ever smiles in these sitcoms, everyone is sad, frowning and crying, and most women are fake blondes with botoxed lips and cheeks, or
- Western-imitation shows (cooking, game, talk shows, etc.) with lots of shiny lights, rotating round tables, "stars" and an adoring audience, the whole thing being a copy-paste of some equally abysmal American production whose sole merit is that it is made by Americans for Americans. But when taken out of their American context and imported to a third world country like Lebanon, they become like a horrid immiscible disgusting mixture of tahini and ketchup.
It is so easy to attribute problems that have no clear answer or explanation to a plot. Why? Because the moment you accept that a bunch of people, corporations or governments sat down and planned what is happening to you, you stop thinking. The "plot" is the answer.
But I digress. Back to the "Great Replacement" theory.
Israel is the perfect example of a Great Replacement that worked. No need to theorize. This one is a huge and actual conspiracy: Millions of European Jews planned it: Theodore Herzel's Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897, the Balfour Declaration by England in 1917, and the English Mandate over Palestine. Then they executed it: massive illegal European Jewish migration into Palestine, coupled with decades of Jewish terrorism against the native Palestinian population between the 1920s and 1940s, including massacres, eradication of ancient villages from the map, rapes, forced displacement of millions of Palestinian into refugee camps, and the building of brand new Jewish settlements.
And the conspiracy is not finished yet. It goes on to this day in occupied Palestine. The ongoing Gaza War is only one of the Great Jewish Replacement Program installements in Palestine. The outcome after about 100 years is that Arab Palestine has being slowly erased while a Jewish Israel has gradually replaced it.
The Arab-Muslim world, as it was awakening from the brutal colonialism of the late 19th-early 20th- centuries, discovered its demographic and economic potential. Initially, rather than direct that potential to productive improvements in their dictatorship-brutalized and religiously-obscured populations, the Arab-Muslim world began dispatching preachers and building mosques to the liberal West with the declared objective of Islamizing Europe. Islam is such a great religion, they thought, that it was a pity not try to seduce western populations into converting. It had tried a military conquest (Al-Fatah in Arabic) of Europe but failed: The Ottoman Turks rampaged through the Balkans until they were defeated in Vienna in 1683, and the Moorish Muslim Arabs ruled over Spain and southern France for close to 800 years before they were expelled back to North Africa in 1492.
Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, Kuwait, Iran, Indonesia and other Muslim heavyweights "culturally retaliated" against their former colonizers by planning a program of Islamization of Europe and by extension the West at large. It was only after September 11, 2001 that the West woke up to the potential threat and the Islamic world had to revealuate its plans. As a secular non-religious West was not very receptive to adopting Islam (some idiots did but it didn't last), the Muslim-Arab world shifted to a campaign of marketing seduction: Turkey, the Emirates, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia .... present themselves today as beacons of modernity and openness. But is the conspiracy of the Great Replacement of whites by non-whites really dead? Or is it still simmering under the ashes?
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