What is “White Nationalism”?

THE SURGE in terrorist attacks by white nationalists includes, this year, the massacres in Christchurch (51 dead) and El Paso (22 dead). Often the killers cite fears of white “replacement” and draw inspiration from other, similar atrocities, especially Anders Breivik’s slaughter in 2011 of 77 people in Oslo and a nearby island. But what is white nationalism, and where did it come from?

The phenomenon is hard to define because of its ideological and geographical fractiousness. Broadly, white nationalists want to achieve an ethno-state of, and for, whites. Some do their best to avoid overtly claiming that any race is inferior, arguing that each should have its own ethno-state. The majority, however, are white supremacists, who also believe that races form a normative hierarchy with whiteness at the top. They demand policies ranging from stricter controls on immigration to wholesale ethnic cleansing, or even genocide. All this is often tied to the fear of “white genocide”, or white “replacement”, ie, the notion that the “white race” is being squeezed out of existence through its own low birth rate, miscegenation and more prolific reproduction by non-white people.