For example, in today’s New York Times Patrick Kingsley, who has written extensively on Hungary of late, called attention to the fact that Orbán also condemns the concept of a multi-ethnic society and repeatedly calls for the defense of European Christian culture because, as he said just yesterday, otherwise “we lose Europe.” And, as the readers of Hungarian Spectrum are only too well aware, he blames Brussels, George Soros, and Angela Merkel for the calamitous death of white, Christian Europe. Naturally, Tarrant’s call to “remove the invaders” and “retake Europe” reminded several commentators of Viktor Orbán’s views. Doesn’t that sound familiar? It looks as if the prime minister of Hungary is the greatest promoter of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, with its millions of true believers.
For example, Laurent Wauquiez, the leader of France’s conservative party, called Camus’s idea “a reality” in 2017.
Since then, its ideas have spread far and wide, even reaching the political mainstream. The theory gained wider attention after 2012 when the right-wing French polemicist Renaud Camus wrote a book with that title. Those who believe in the “replacement theory” blame a global and liberal elite in Brussels, who are portrayed as directing a deliberate plot to carry out the replacement of Europeans with Muslim Middle Easterners and Africans. Tarrant left behind a 74-page document titled “The Great Replacement,” pointing to a right-wing conspiracy theory which claims that there is a systematic replacement of the white European population with non-European people through mass migration and demographic growth. He visited Europe several times in the past few years, especially frequenting the eastern fringes of the European Union–Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Croatia, and naturally the Balkans, the region where Muslims and Christians live together, often not in the greatest harmony. Europe also has its own firebrands, and it looks as if Tarrant’s ideas came mostly from Europe. They are inspired by the growing hate-mongering of far-right politicians like Donald Trump himself. The more we learn about Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian accused of a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the more we come to understand that these horrific acts are not being committed by a small, random group of psychologically disturbed people, as Donald Trump would like us to believe.
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