Following Saturday’s deadly shooting rampage in Buffalo, N.Y., a 180-page purported manifesto attributed to the suspect has surfaced, which outlines the shooter’s motives, details how he had been radicalized and how he “planned to kill as many Blacks as possible,” according to officials.
The manifesto’s author also wrote about something called the “Great Replacement.”
Sister station KCRA 3 ‘s Brittany Johnson ‘Gets the Facts’ on what this theory is all about.
What is the theory about?
The theory has different iterations but in a nutshell, the “great replacement” theory, which is sometimes called “replacement theory,” is the belief that your group is being replaced or extinct because another group is growing in number and you see this other group as a threat to your group’s existence.
The theory goes back centuries
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the theory goes back centuries but was popularized by French Author Renaud Camus when he published an essay titled, “Le Grand Remplacement” or “The Great Replacement” in 2011. The term was coined when Camus warned of “reverse colonization” and explained native White Europeans are being replaced by non-White immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. He believes this trend will lead to the “ethnic and civilizational substitution” of the White race in Europe and the West.
Great Replacement Theory linked to Buffalo shooting
The shooting in Buffalo, NY has been connected to this theory because it was repeatedly referenced in a 180-page document linked to the reported shooter. The author used racist, anti-immigrant and anti-semitic beliefs, and wrote about how he planned to “kill as many blacks as possible,” according to NBC News.
Great Replacement theory linked to previous mass shootings and terrorist attacks, here are a few:
In 2019, a suspect investigators said subscribed to the great replacement theory killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
That same year the man suspected of targeting Latinos in an El Paso Walmart and who is on trial for killing 23 people, who authorities attribute a four-page racist screed that decried a Hispanic “invasion” of Texas and the U.S., and called for ethnic and racial segregation, also subscribed to the great replacement theory.
The suspect in the 2018 shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue “made statements regarding genocide and his desire to kill Jewish people” during the attack, according to prosecutors.
Eleven people were killed in the shooting in what the ADL has said is the “deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the U.S.”
Sister station KCRA 3 spoke with Assistant Professor Milan Obaidi of the University of Oslo in Norway, where he said the great replacement theory has also been used to carry out the 2011 Norway attacks.
Obaidi researches violent extremism and radicalization.
Sister station KCRA 3 spoke with Obaidi about a recent publication he authored with three other professors titled “The Great Replacement Conspiracy: How the Perceived Ousting of Whites Can Evoke Violent Extremism and Islamophobia.”
Q: What did you study in relation to this publication?
Obaidi: In these studies, we looked at intentions to commit acts of violence toward another group. We didn’t look at an actual act of violence, you know that is it clearly and practically impossible. In psychology we usually rely on attitudes, measuring people’s attitudes and intentions. So yes, in these studies, we persistently found a link between the idea that your group is being replaced, and people’s willingness to support or express extreme attitudes toward other groups. … The implication of this theory is that it may legitimize violence, because it specifically portrays one group as being a victim of, of being under existential threat, and then it justifies violence as a necessary means to actually avert such threats. It {the theory} justifies the use of violence, because one group is being seen as a victim of being extinct by another or being replaced, and then violence becomes a means to actually prevent this. So, people who believe in this theory, do believe that they will be extinct and then they use violence to justify this or to avert this from happening.
Obaidi: These studies were conducted in the Scandinavian context in Norway in Denmark. So, we basically looked at these in these studies, whether the perception that your group is being replaced by another group. With most of it, people also express negative attitudes, but also extreme intentions toward the group that they perceived as replacing their group. We used experiments, but also we run three surveys in these experiments. People are shown video clips of Norwegian TV where they were shown that in Norway in 20 years there will be a large number of this particular group of people and they will actually exceed the number of living Norwegians in certain areas in 20 years and then we were looking at how people would respond to this idea that their group will be shrinking and another group will be increasing in size. We found that the people who were in these replacement, treatment, or conditions also expressed more Islamophobic attitudes toward Muslim minorities in the regional context.
Q: Is there always a direct link between believing in this theory and then carrying out an act of violence?
Obaidi: It’s also important to emphasize I think, that yes, maybe a lot of people believe in this theory, but not everyone would actually do something like, go and shoot other people. So there’s not a not always direct link, because then we would probably have a lot of people going around shooting people. I think there are a large number of people who do believe and I mean, we know that the public, mainstream politicians, and media personalities, have touted these kinds of ideas. But it is so important to say that not every person who believes in it would do something such as going and shooting other people.
Q: What is the discussion we should be having about this?
Obaidi: A discussion would probably whether we see more of these kinds of attacks. Based on previous attacks, we know that there have been a lot of some of these attacks, they’ve been just copycatting other attackers, and they’ve been quite heavily inspired by previous attacks. And some of the tactics are quite similar. For example, the Christchurch attack, he was live-streaming his attack. And the same thing happened with the Norwegian attempt terror attack a couple of years ago in Norway, and we saw it Saturday in Buffalo. So there’s clearly this group of young, certainly young people who are inspired by each other. My worry is probably, or maybe, a lot of people, whether we will see something similar because it is inspiring other people because this is what happened in recent years. I think that is probably something that most people are worried about these days.