theatlantic | “It’s no longer OK to be an open racist and an anti-Semite,” she said.
Instead, many members of these groups have adopted a claim first
popularized by Robert Whitaker, an elderly segregationist from South
Carolina, who in 2006 posted on his website a warning about “the third
world pour[ing] into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.”
The tract, known as The Mantra, helped promote the term “White
Genocide,” which has since become a watchword among white supremacists
for immigration and fertility trends
that could lead to whites losing their majority status in U.S. and
European populations in the coming decades. Beirich said it’s less that
there is a coordinated global white-supremacist movement than that the
rhetoric its adherents use has congealed around an issue that many
“white countries” are perceived to be facing.
And that rhetoric is distinctly international in scope. Whitaker’s mantra suggests the existence of a double standard, in which whites are denied privileges that others enjoy—“ASIA
FOR THE ASIANS, AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR
EVERYBODY.” It claims that only whites are being forced to accept
“multiculturalism.” A petition
to the White House posted last month, calling on the Obama
administration to “stop White Genocide in our country!”, encourages the
president to turn to Liberia, of all places, for lessons on racial
purity. It quotes approvingly from the Liberian constitution of 1986, which says
that “in order to preserve, foster and maintain the positive Liberian
culture, values and character, only persons who are Negro or of Negro
descent shall qualify by birth or by naturalization to be citizens of
Liberia.”
A group called the White Genocide Project, which drew notice
earlier this year for posting billboards in Alabama displaying Mantra
quotes such as “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White,” cites international law to establish the existence of white genocide,
specifically Article II, subsection (c) of the United Nations Genocide
Convention. The definition of genocide offered there includes
“deliberately inflicting on the group”—which can be a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—“conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part.” Under that definition, the White Genocide Project’s website
states that a “combination of mass immigration (of different groups of
people) plus forced assimilation would qualify as genocide.” The authors
compare the trend to Han Chinese migration into Tibet—which Tibetans have complained
dilutes their culture—with the only difference being that “White
Genocide is taking place across many countries, and it is being done to
the majority, rather than a minority.”
