hen the slave trader Edward Colston’s statue was sent tumbling into the harbour in Bristol on Sunday, it was easy to anticipate that the event would be folded into Britain’s febrile culture war surrounding colonialism and empire, and easier still to foresee the kinds of commentary it would arouse on the right. A broad spectrum of reasons this was a Bad Thing was immediately brought to bear, from the relatively sensible (it would have been better to bring the statue down through democratic process, as indeed campaigners had been trying to do for years); to the equivocatory (Colston should be left on his plinth as testament to the complexity of history, his trade in human lives having been balanced out somewhat by his civic philanthropy); to the historically illiterate (Colston, being a man of his time, should not be judged for trading in human lives). As the campaign against statues has widened, the right’s response has been to cast it as a totalitarian campaign against history itself: hence the Mail’s borderline demented headline of “Toppling the past”, and its comparison of Black Lives Matter to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But what has begun to emerge most worryingly from the comment pages and talking heads is an implicit narrative that has been creeping ever more insistently into the debate about history, memory and education in this country: the spectre of racial replacement. “The great replacement” owes its current name to the French far-right writer and activist Renaud Camus, who formulated it in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement. Camus’s main argument was that the “indigenous” white population of France was being replaced by North African and Muslim migration at the behest of “replacist elites” in government and international institutions such as the EU, and their intellectual handmaidens. As a conspiracy theory, however, it has a long pedigree and a wide variety of forms. Its basic contours are this: “indigenous” white populations, and their cultures, societies and institutions, are being replaced by a tide of racial others – Black people, Africans and Muslims. Moreover, this is happening not because of any natural demographic trend, but because enemies within have willed it, not only through weakness but through a suicidal, self-hating malice towards the civilisation of which they are a part. Although no mainstream British figure is yet to commit explicitly to the great replacement as a conspiracy theory, its essential features haunt the language of the right’s culture wars. Broadcaster Melanie Phillips’ piece on the Colston statue in Monday’s Times is as good an example as any. Headlined “We’re giving in to the race revolutionaries”, Phillips’ piece took aim at the “spineless reaction” of the authorities to protesters’ attacks on statues and memorials – not simply because lawbreaking should be punished but because, she argued, the protesters’ aims and motivations were inherently antithetical to our society itself. “They are accusing the police and white society of being fundamentally evil,” she wrote; “these demonstrations have been a form of insurrection against western society and its institutions”. Let’s pass over, for moment, that easy slippage from “white society” to “western society”, and move on to the next bit: “On both sides of the Atlantic, this mayhem is the result of decades of appeasing those determined to bring down western culture … Deeming western culture to be racist and colonialist, the education establishment set out to teach instead that black people were the inescapable victims of white society.” This is a familiar refrain, especially when it comes to education: Toby Young, for example, has written that British universities have become “leftwing madrassas”. When in 2017 Lola Olufemi, the then women’s officer at Cambridge University Students’ Union, wrote to the university’s English faculty recommending that the curriculum be broadened to include more non-white authors, the Daily Telegraph put a picture of her on its front cover beneath the heading “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors” – an inaccuracy, as the Telegraph was forced to admit. But the passage from putting non-white authors on reading lists to replacing white ones was an easy one to make, and a potent way of stirring up a sense that white culture is being not simply eroded but replaced, intentionally, and with the aim of destroying it. As Phillips has written elsewhere, “War is being waged against western culture from within”. This is not a difficult sentiment to find replicated on a daily basis, either in the fever-swamps of the online right or the comment pages of respectable newspapers. The narrative goes that decadent liberals – “the education establishment” [sic] for Phillips, rootless “anywheres” according to journalist David Goodhart, or “cultural Marxists” in the words of attorney general Suella Braverman and various rightwing commentators – are a fifth column intent on pulling down the whole façade of western civilisation and letting the barbarian hordes in. In many variants, this enemy within is Jewish: this is what the Unite the Right protesters at Charlottesville meant, in 2017, as they marched against the removal of a statue of the confederate general Robert E Lee, chanting “Jews will not replace us”. It’s also what lies behind much of the rhetoric on the far right, popularised in Orbán’s Hungary and consistently flirted with by senior Tories, casting the Jewish financier George Soros as a dedicated enemy of European national cultures. That these kinds of narratives inspire violence is no surprise: after all, if the fight is existential, what means are off the table? One recent adherent of replacement theory is thought to be Robert Bowers, the suspect in the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Bowers is said to have written that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish refugee charity, “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Another is Anders Behring Breivik, whose fantasies about “European genocide” led him to murder 77 people, mostly youth members of the Norwegian labour party attending a summer camp, in 2011. Breivik quoted Melanie Phillips in his manifesto: challenged on this, Phillips responded that the revelation had “the left in general wetting itself in delirium at this apparently heaven-sent opportunity to take down those who fight for life, liberty and western civilisation against those who would destroy it” – reproducing, of course, Breivik’s concerns almost exactly. What this kind of rhetoric is supposed to accomplish is open to question, but its effects are plain to see. Before Sunday was out, an association of football fans in Plymouth had posted a chilling photo of themselves standing on the steps of a war memorial to “defend” it from BLM protesters; Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) and the Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance have announced their intention to come to London en masse this weekend to make sure that the monuments of our national heritage are defended from – well, by now you know who from. It might be in the interests of the media to recognise the narratives they are promoting before it’s too late. • Peter Mitchell is a writer and historian