Difficult for the radical right and extreme right, such a massacre in the American Buffalo by an all too zealous kindred spirit. In this case Payton Gendron, an eighteen-year-old man who was inspired by the infamous ‘population theory’.
According to this theory, devised by the French writer Renaud Camus (no relation to Albert Camus), a political (read: left-wing) elite deliberately tries to replace the original population of France and other European countries with a new people with a new culture and the Islam predominantly as a religion. Other mass murderers, such as Anders Breivik in Utoya (69 killed), Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh (11 killed), Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch (51 killed) and Patrick Crusius in El Paso (23 killed) also invoked such ideas.
Of the Tarrant massacre in New Zealand, I remember the horrifying footage of the perpetrator live-streaming him entering a mosque to shoot evading visitors in cold blood. Tarrant cited Breivik as his great example.
Renaud Camus is also admired in the Netherlands. When he visited a PVV demonstration in Rotterdam in 2018, he posed for a photo with Martin Bosma and had a beer with Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang. “A visionary man,” Dewinter tweeted. “Impressed,” Bosma reported. Thierry Baudet did not call it a ‘population’, but meant the same by ‘homeopathic dilution’.
Coincidentally, last week Dewinter was able to fully defend the repopulation theory (thanks NPO 1!) at Ongehoord Nederland: “Europe becomes Eurabia!” As early as 2007, Geert Wilders spoke of the “cowardly” elite from The Hague who participated in “a transformation of the Netherlands into Lower Arabia as a province of the Islamic superstate of Eurabia”. Although Wilders later distanced himself from Breivik, who had mentioned him as one of his sources of inspiration, nowhere do I find the beginnings of reflection in politicians like Wilders about the fact that they are touted by such merciless murderers.
They would rather be “impressed” by the creators of such deadly conspiracy theories. And they prefer to remain silent in such cases. When a bullet comes from the left, they go into a state of euphoria and are short of words, but bullets from the right are preferably ignored.
take No style, the radical right-wing current affairs website that used to call daily newspapers ‘dead trees’, but has now itself become a moribund shrub. On November 11, 2020, Pritt Stift (pseudonym of Marck Burema, owner of GeenStijl) wrote: “Because we have been under the yoke of migration champion Mark Rutte for ten years, who is turning the Randstad into an inclusive and diverse low-wage country. (That’s called depopulation, but because you can’t say that, they call it the migration pact.)”
That’s called conspiracy thinking, and of the stupidest kind, and because you can say that, we should keep doing it.
What would this ‘news website’ have written about the Buffalo massacre (ten dead) by a far-right butcher? At the time – five days later – of this writing: zero point nothing at all.
Difficult that the perpetrator was not a Muslim and/or migrant – too difficult.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 18, 2022