Fighting Intolerance by Cultivating Fascism

In 1971, while contemplating the Riviera shore, French author Jean Raspail had a flash of insight: the barefoot masses of the Global South were about to set sail for opulent Europe ‘like a tidal wave’.1 His novel Le Camp des Saints (1973) tells of a besieged continent, overrun by migrants who flout the law, refuse to integrate, and swiftly outbreed the natives, altering Europe’s demographics catastrophically. 

After the Algerians won the war of independence, defeating the occupying French forces in 1962, fantasies of reverse colonisation and the subjugation of white people became common in post-colonial France. As historian Todd Shepard details in Sex, France and Arab Men, 1962–1979 (2018), the humiliation France suffered was often expressed in the register of masculinity. Renaud Camus, now better known as the author of Le Grand Remplacement (The great replacement, 2011), is a pivotal figure here. In his racialised take on the gay rights movement, Terminus (1981), Camus insisted that ‘Mediterranean’ sexuality was hierarchic and repressive, unable to recognise the distinction between homo and hetero but fixated on the top-bottom one.2 The problem was not male homosexuality (or better put, sex between men) but ‘effeminacy’, tied not to the choice of the sexual partner but to the choice of sexual position.3 Hence the insult ‘enculé’. Sodomy, here, does not simply refer to a sex act. No longer tethered to empire, France now saw itself as an emasculated and defeated nation, sodomised by Arab men.4 One could call it political pornography, but we also find this particular racialised anxiety in one of the most influential environmentalist books of the 1960s, namely, Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling The Population Bomb (1968).

In the preface, Ehrlich details how he came to understand the population explosion ‘emotionally’, while on a family vacation in Delhi. He describes being driven in a taxi through a ‘crowded slum area’ where ‘the streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.’ ‘Frankly, frightened,’ Ehrlich states that the scene had a ‘hellish aspect’.5 There is something cinematic about his description: dark hands thrust through a taxi window, as if trying to pull the terrified (white) humans out, overwhelming the vehicle. If you feel you have seen this scene before it was probably in a zombie movie, where a handful of human survivors are crowded by inhuman swarms halfway between the animal and the fungal.6 What if they were to move West?

The great replacement theory was introduced in Camus’s L’Abécédaire de l’In-nocence (2002), before being reiterated in Le Grand Remplacement. According to Camus, the indigenous French are being replaced by ‘occupiers’ who work in tandem with, and under the aegis of, a ‘collaborationist’ elite. In 2016, Camus spoke in support of Pegida, a German movement to stop the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe. ‘A National Liberation Front,’ he reassured French people, ‘has begun already to organise the resistance’ to Islamisation.7 His reference for this ‘anti-colonialist front’ was the Algerian FLN (Front de libération nationale), the nationalist movement that fought and won Algerian independence.8

Camus embodied a new synthesis among French ultranationalists, both ‘feminist’ and ‘gay friendly’ – a synthesis that would be shaken by the ostentatious 2013 suicide of neo-fascist writer Dominique Venner, who shot himself in front of the main altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to protest the legalisation of same-sex marriage.9 For Venner, this new conception of marriage, no longer tied to reproductive futurity, signalled a suicidal tendency. France was welcoming its own extinction, expressing a refusal to survive, a desire to eliminate itself. Only the traditional family could stop white genocide. Venner’s death, in his own words, was not a suicide but a sacrifice. 

Venner’s obsession with natalism is not his alone. JD Vance, at present the most high-profile advocate for the war on women, constantly carps that ‘our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves’.10 He supports a national abortion ban, and would like to see single parents, who are usually single mothers, punished social and economically. ‘“Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,’ Vance posted on X, making plain that only traditional heterosexual families, in which one spouse, typically a husband, works, and the other, typically a wife, stays home, can be considered ‘normal’.11 

Vance believes the sexual revolution harmed children, and suggests that women should remain in unhappy or even violent marriages for the benefit of their offspring.12 Peter Thiel, who single-handedly launched Vance’s political career, went further and said women’s suffrage is responsible for the decline of America.13 Elon Musk also famously posted on X that ‘population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming’.14 Population is, needless to say, not collapsing; instead the Global North is undergoing a decline in birth rates. Natalism and demographic anxieties owing to low fertility rates have racial undertones: they express a fear that the wrong kind of people will reproduce and become the majority. 

In 2017, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) made the connection between fertility, natalism, securitisation, and the biopolitics of replacement explicit, with a poster with the slogan ‘Neue Deutsche? Machen wir selber!’ (New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves!), which was printed over an image of a heavily pregnant woman, her face cropped with only a gaping smile visible. 

In the film Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), there is a character called the Feral Kid. Armed with a razor-sharp boomerang, he speaks only in growls and grunts. The Feral Kid relishes in the sight of violence but is also overjoyed by a music box Max gives him and actively seeks his affection. Max wards him off. He lost his own son, Sprog (an affectionate nickname, simply meaning ‘kid’). Sprog is a cherubic child, whose defencelessness solicits our protection. The Feral Kid, by contrast, provokes aversion. This duality isn’t accidental – it’s cultivated. The affirmation of a value so obviously indisputable as the innocence of childhood is what distinguishes sentimentality from partisan politics. Its protection justifies societal intervention. But not all children are like Sprog. In the article ‘The Coming of the Super-Predators’ (1995), John DiLulio, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, predicted a rising tide of youth violence and unleashed a moral panic: pundits began to speak of a generation of homicidal ‘elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches’; juveniles who ‘kill or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive’ and are ready to terrorise the country.15  

In the 1980s, the term ‘anchor child’ was used to describe young Vietnamese refugees who were sent to the United States to make money and were expected to eventually sponsor family members back home for US citizenship. The term ‘anchor baby’ emerged in the early 2000s, becoming more widely used in discussions about immigration reform and border control. In 2015 images of a drowned Syrian toddler, the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who died attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos, shocked Europe.16 Aylan Kurdi hailed from the northern Syrian town of Kobani, and his family was reportedly escaping the Islamic State insurgency. For a brief moment Aylan was Sprog. In 2016, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a cartoon with the text: ‘What would little Aylan have grown up to be?’ The answer appears below the drawing of the drowned child, lying face down on the shore: a ‘tripoteur de fesses’ (‘ass groper’, i.e., sexual abuser) in Germany’.17 The cartoon was published on 13 January 2016, after the anniversary of the attack that saw 12 people killed by gunmen in Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices. Free-speech organisations around the world also came together to mark the anniversary and ‘to proclaim the importance of protecting dissenting voices’. The term ‘ass groper’ references the racial panic unleashed after the press widely reported that hundreds of women were mobbed and sexually assaulted in the city of Cologne, Germany, during New Year’s Eve celebrations in 2015.18 The anchor baby isn’t just a slur – it enables legislation. It also enables foreign policy. It justifies militarisation of borders, exclusion, and incarceration. 

Scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian coined the term ‘unchilding’ to expose the systematic process of violating children’s rights, depriving children of the normalcy, lightness, and innocence of childhood.19 Unchilding sets up a permission structure to dehumanise children and removes psychological barriers to enable brutality: you look at Aylan and you no longer see Sprog. Radicalised children, ‘raised with an extremist worldview that legitimizes violence toward others and belittles those who do not belong to their group’, pose a security risk, German authorities warned.20 Germany also blocked medical treatment for children from Gaza citing security concerns.21 Moshe Feiglin, a former member of the Israeli parliament (Knesset), told Israeli TV Channel 14: ‘The enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas. Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.’22

A great deal has been said about the West’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and its attendant genocide, with too much of the explanation laid at the feet of historical guilt. These simplistic rationalisations ignore a key pattern: the West has always felt good about feeling bad, bestowing belated recognition on the victims of past crimes and cultivating a sense of perpetrator trauma. There is an appetite for sentimentalised tragedy and the drama of repentance – an eagerness to assign universal meaning to the trauma it inflicts without ever taking material responsibility for it. This performance, however, has a caveat: certain pain must remain unacknowledged to avoid compromising the triumph of humanism.

Writing in the Guardian, novelist Howard Jacobson contends that ‘charging Jews with genocide is to declare them guilty of precisely what was done to them’. For Jacobson, this constitutes a breach of the ‘decorum’ that ‘in the past has marked us out as civilised’.23 Yet the geopolitical rivalries between the West and its adversaries only map neatly onto a moral binary of civilisation versus barbarism if we ignore inconvenient and destabilising facts. Jacobson quotes John Gray’s Straw Dogs (2002) in which he asks: ‘When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?’ However, Jacobson omits Gray’s crucial context. When Gray writes that those who suffer irreparable wrongs are rarely forgiven in the book, he has just referenced a lynching in 19th-century Georgia. Consciousness, he concludes, ‘blesses cruelty and injustice – as long as their victims can be quietly buried’.24

The meaning of Gaza today – and the question of whether its victims can be quietly buried – hinges on whether the Holocaust is seen as an anomaly, a distortion of modernity, or one of its constitutive features. If the Holocaust was a singular outburst of anti-modern barbarism, the postwar order represents the restoration of modernity’s moral project. But if it was informed by colonial violence and the genocidal practices unleashed across vast territories, then it becomes impossible to deny that behind the moral order of modernity a racial order remains hidden.

This is why we see so little guilt and so much glee: a cartoon that was shared with me recently shows a charging Muslim horde, armed to the teeth, held back by a single IDF soldier. The bespeckled and queer-coded woman he shields sports a Palestinian-flag T-shirt and tuts in disapproval while sipping her oat milk latte. She is the enemy within, unwittingly supporting the enemy without. White supremacy demands a hardened, militarised masculinity to protect the imagined purity of the nation and its reproductive future. The symbolism of the lone male soldier is also relevant to the disconcerting alliance between a great many antisemitic actors – like the AfD in Germany – and the current Israeli administration. The figure of the feeble and effeminate left-wing Jew, plagued by self-doubt and hesitancy, is contrasted to the assertive and manly Israeli, while the globalist diaspora, decadent and treacherous, is contrasted to the Israeli state: a warrior nation animated by a unique fighting spirit. The far right is also famously obsessed with the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, as dramatised in Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 (1998) and eponymous 2006 film, in which the warrior king Leonidas and his vastly outnumbered army, hold off the Persian advance into Greece, sacrificing their lives to defend a narrow pass. 300 represents Thermopylae as a clash of civilisations, hence the Orientalist undertones and the queer coding of the Persian army. ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ, the defiant refusal Leonidas allegedly gave to the Persian envoy, which roughly translates as ‘come and take it’, became a motto for US gun-rights activists. In Europe, the Identitarian movement adopted the lambda sign as their official symbol.25 On 15 September 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the ‘media siege’26 on Israel and the country’s increasing isolation as analogous to Sparta’s, whose economic model he described as an autarky. This is a recurring antisemitic reference for the far right, for whom Sparta is perceived as a non-capitalist society that abolished money and run limited trade.

Echoing 300, the current war on Gaza is mediated by a post–9/11 Orientalist narrative that frames Palestinians solely as irrational, bloodthirsty savages who strike without cause.27 Commenting on the recent attacks on Iran, Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz defended Israel, saying it was ‘dirty work Israel is doing for all of us’.28 The contours of his moral universe are clear: only illiberal means can protect liberalism. But this is also where the slippage between social norms and population tally occurs: every baby becomes a future enemy combatant, waging a demographic war on ‘our values’.

As Donald Kinder and Tali Mendelberg argue, principles are best understood by how they are ‘put to use’.29 Prejudice is always expressed in a language the majority finds familiar and compelling; it is always expressed in the language of principle. Thus, if migration is framed as a threat to female emancipation, free speech, and Jewish safety, then fighting for ‘dignity and democracy’ logically means fighting migration. This makes the oppression of racialised minorities appear not as bigotry, but as the desirable outcome of a struggle for humanism, openness, and equal rights.

Take Germany, for instance. While all political parties pay lip service to constituting a ‘Brandmauer’ (firewall) against the far right, the political centre simultaneously accommodates police brutality, exhibits a gleeful disregard for civil rights, and erodes domestic and international law. The shameless dehumanisation of Palestinians and Arabs more broadly indicates a desire to deport or denaturalise segments of the population. These measures pave the way for ethno-national states in which immigrants are stripped of civil rights – particularly the right of assembly and political speech. By unmaking citizens, nations endorse a paradoxical creed: one needs to upend democracy to protect democracy; one needs to break the law to uphold the law; only by unleashing barbarity can one protect the promise of a civilised future. 

From this perspective, Gaza is not only the unspeakable truth that must be buried for Western representations of freedom and civility to ‘sustain their power of universal reiteration in contemporary political theory’.30 Gaza also serves as a laboratory. Antony Loewenstein describes how Israel’s military uses the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology.31 But Gaza is also the site where, ultimately, the threads of emasculation anxiety, natalist panic, and imperialist brutality are woven into a single, coherent ideology. The place where reconstituted imperial masculinity is normalised through mass violence, and where the logic of fascism is honed for a future of climate barbarism and fortified borders. The hourly streaming of bombardments, of images of children caked in blood and dust, of grieving relatives – all coming out of Gaza against the backdrop of absolute impunity – inure the global public to the spectacle of mass death about to be unleashed by coming environmental disasters and attendant crises. In this light, efforts to combat antisemitism are often less a commitment to ‘Jewish life’ and more an attempt to recruit the struggle against antisemitism into a broader struggle for imperialism.