Colonization, Replaceable Man, and Love of One’s Own

Last autumn I was invited to deliver some remarks at a conference hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. I spoke as part of a panel on the growing relevance of the much-unfairly maligned French thinker Renaud Camus, originator of the constantly-mischaracterized “Great Replacement” (which is not a “conspiracy theory,” as Camus explicitly posits no conspiracy, but simply an observation of the fact of sweeping cultural and demographic change produced by liquid liberal-modernity). Because my remarks drew on my previous writing here on colonialism and “anti-colonial struggle,” I decided to not bother posting them on Substack. But the much-deserved ongoing firestorm in the UK over grooming gangs, migration, and the British state’s deliberate abandonment of the nation’s own children in the name of multiculturalism led me to revisit the brief speech, which seemed more relevant now than ever. So here you go. – N.S. Lyons

In his writings, Renaud Camus strikingly, if briefly, describes the ongoing replacement of Western peoples and cultures as a form of “counter-colonization,” or sometimes simply as “colonization” full-stop. I find this word very intriguing, colonization. Because while Camus naturally speaks of colonization in the context of mass migration – highlighting the irony of Europe’s former colonial powers being overrun by the very peoples they once colonized – I think there’s actually much more to the idea than that.

In fact, if we do start thinking of the Western world as having been subject to a process of colonization, it can help us explain not only the phenomenon of uncontrolled mass migration, but also the much broader notion “replaceism” that Camus has sacrificed his reputation in polite society to try to catalogue and describe. Moreover it can, I believe, also explain the real root causes of the cultural decline and political strife we see consuming the West today, including the great populist backlash we’ve recently seen expressed in the U.S. election.

So, setting aside the woke left-wing rants about “decolonization” that we’ve all grown used, I think we ought to take a real look at what the process of colonialism actually does involve, practically and historically.

Almost universally, the first imperative of colonialism is de-nationalization. Colonialism is something waged by empires – supranational political entities that control many different nations, or peoples, under one imperial umbrella. The antithesis of empire is national identity and national self-determination. Which is why the chief task of