The “Great Replacement” Showcases in Michigan

Hamtramck, Michigan

2,649 words

I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. — H. L. Mencken

From the Anti-Defamation League website:

“The Great Replacement:” An Explainer

Once largely relegated to white supremacist rhetoric, “The Great Replacement” has made its way into mainstream consciousness in the past several years. From the chants of “Jews Will Not Replace Us” on the University of Virginia campus to then-U.S. Rep. Steve King’s tweeted protest, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s complaints that the Democratic party is attempting to “replace the current electorate” with “third-world voters,” the racist conspiracy theory has well and truly arrived. (italics mine)

What else has recently “truly arrived”?

From the trusty, non-white supremacist Detroit Free Press:

Hamtramck City Council will be all Muslim, likely first in US, in January

The six-member City Council of Hamtramck will consist of all Muslims starting in January, another historic first for the metro Detroit city known for its sizable immigrant population. The newly elected mayor, Amer Ghalib, 42, is also Muslim, which means all of the city’s elected officials will be Muslim.

This swell “historic first” will no doubt give way to seconds, thirds, and more, but have a peek at what this first one looks like. Clink on the link and study the faces of the six City Council members. Five are men, including a couple of Mohammeds and a Khalil. At first glimpse I did a double-take on the pic of the sole woman, Amanda Jaczkowski, a very white, European-looking lady with a European (Polish) surname. Turns out, as the article notes, Ms. Amanda “is a convert to Islam with ancestral roots in eastern Europe.” The “ancestral roots” of all of the Councilmen visibly appear to be distinctively Third World, and a safe wager to make is that they are absolutely non-European.

The Free Press article author is Niraj Warikoo. From this name that makes you think of an exotic bird species, we can probably guess why he wants to reassure his readers that these incoming Islamic city council members are staunch church/state separatists and as religiously tolerant and ecumenical as Boston Unitarians. From City Councilman Hassan we learn, “Religion is not inside the [City Hall] building. It’s outside in the mosque and temple and the church. Not in City Hall.”

Well, maybe not in City Hall, but Mr. Warikoo neglects to mention that in Muslim-majority Hamtramck “religion” in the form of the “call to prayer” wafts loudly through the public space, beckoning all the residents of Hamtramck to have a religious experience five times a day — like it or not.

From NBC News:

Mich. town upholds Muslim call to prayer

Residents of this once-predominantly Polish city on Tuesday upheld an amendment to the city’s noise ordinance, a victory for those in favor of allowing mosques to issue the call to prayer over loudspeakers. The City Council unanimously passed the amendment to the noise ordinance in April.

No lawyers from the ACLU — always eager to ban any symbols or practices that “privilege” the Christian faith in public spaces — were heard from.

With 49% of its people below the poverty line, ancient and crumbling housing stock, and a crime rate that puts it at only 17% safer than all US cities, Hamtramck’s demographic conversion to Islam has made the “We are the World” propagandists and virtue-signalers ecstatic. In 2013, Hamtramck — all the praises and thanks be to Allah — became the first majority Muslim city in the country with a majority Muslim City Council. During the 2016 presidential election primaries, Politico ran the story under the headline, “What America’s Only Muslim-Governed City Thinks of Donald Trump.”

Eight years later and having progressed unscathed under Donald Trump’s four-year reign of Twitter-terror, the city’s entire governing body is now completely Muslim. What better occasion for an edifying celebration of “diversity”? 43% of residents were born outside of the US and there are 27 languages in the public schools. What a stern rebuke for the naysayers and bigots who might wonder if a mini-reproduction of Bangladesh and Yemen in the bowels of the Motor City is a such a grand idea?

In the 1970s, blue-collar Hamtramck was around 75% Polish-American, many of whom worked in the Detroit auto plants. Now? Around 10%.

What happened to all those citizens of Hamtramck with a Polish heritage reaching back a century? Well, Bangladesh, Yemen, and Bosnia now account for around 60% of residents. May we dare to say the Poles have been “replaced”? The Catholic churches have been replaced by mosques as well, and Arabic has replaced English as the most common language spoken in the city.

It’s a challenge to find a better word than “replacement” to describe what has happened in Hamtramck since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler “landmark immigration reform [sic] bill” into law at a ceremony beneath the Statue of Liberty on October 3, 1965. As he routinely and brazenly did throughout his long political career, Johnson lied about it. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives . . .” How about the “structure” of Hamtramck? How about life of Justine Damon, murdered by an affirmative action cop in Minneapolis, one of approximately 50,000 Somalians imported into that state?

Anticipating the anti-white rhetoric of today’s critical race theorists, Johnson added insult to injury:

For it [the legislation] does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation.

The bill’s co-author, Phillip Hart, was by the way a Michigan Senator. His New York Times obituary in 1976 noted that he was known as “the conscience of the Senate.” That gives you a benchmark to measure the moral rot of that august body.

How, then, does replacement Hamtramck-style square with what the “experts” from NPR, aka Pravda Radio, say to assure us that the Great Replacement theory is an idea cooked up by Right-wing fringe groups; indeed, as Lulu Garcia-Navarro says, one the “canons of white supremacist thinking”?

So Great Replacement Theory is sort of the latest term for an old set of ideas. And we’ve seen this appearing in one form or another at least throughout the twentieth century. The idea is that somehow, nonwhite people or outsiders or strangers or foreigners will overtake the United States via immigration, reproduction, and seizure of political power.

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.

As the Z-Man said in a recent Taki piece: “Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.” The “reality” in Hamtramck seems to be that non-white outsiders, strangers, and foreigners moved in – sorry, immigrated — recently and seized political power. The newly-elected Mayor, Ghalib, is an immigrant from Yemen. The “believers” who disseminate the agitprop at NPR never let reality get in the way of their message.

National attention on the replacement of the electorate in Hamtramck has been going on for some years. A couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, a reporter from NPR came to Hamtramck to interview its non-Muslim residents. Not everyone was gushing about the transformation of the city into “Hamtramistan,” the city’s new moniker:

The Hamtramck they knew had changed. “It’s now more like a Bangladeshi town, so, that’s a different story,” says [Alek] Fidler [a Polish-American immigrant who came 10 years ago]. “Seems like, you know, they were basically taking over.” St. Florian’s priest, Miroslaw Frankowski, recalls his first impression of this city when he arrived in Hamtramck about 10 years ago. “I’m almost like in Cairo,” he says, “because you know, the call for the prayer — and people covered up under clothing typical for Middle East. Yeah, it seemed like I’m working in Middle East.” In Hamtramck streets, it’s common now to see women fully veiled, with only their eyes exposed.

Around that same time, Lianna Aghajanian of Teen Vogue — that’s right, Teen Vogue — tootled her way through Hamtramck, thereafter condescending to tells us that “[t]he city has been subject to a narrative full of inaccuracies, but the real story is just how quintessentially American it is.” Just when this crazy old world gets way too hard to understand, leave it to a savant from Teen Vogue to let us in on the “real story.” Now, when more of America becomes more “quintessentially American” as the new Hamtramck, Ms. Aghajanian might want to pause a moment before the purchase of her new beach thong and think carefully about how the standard current fare in the hypersexualized fashion pages of Teen Vogue such as “Rihanna Responds to Fenty Beauty Fan’s Message About Trans Models” and the monthly “Lovescope” will go down with the ascension of the imams and burqa trendsetters.

Then arrived Tom Perkins, reporting for The Nation with nothing much to report after his visit:

In reality, there’s not much tension worth mentioning in Hamtramck. . . . To the contrary, many of the city’s non-Muslim residents are proud to be a part of a historic first, and reports of tension and conflict are the work of those with an agenda or reporters capitalizing on a hostile national discourse.

Perkins, apparently, didn’t think it was “worth mentioning” just why these non-Muslims were so proud, but we can take his word for it because we know that reporters from The Nation are far removed from “hostile national discourse” and never operate with “an agenda.”

Here, though, was the nub of Perkin’s non-agenda: Added to the Western world’s sin of “racism,” he reminds us, is “Islamaphobia.” After spending a day or so there, his conclusion was, so to speak: “Hey, I’ve been there. Muslims in charge? No problema!”

Still, people might want to know what life is actually like in an American city where Muslims are in charge. The Polish Catholics who ran Hamtramck for a long time are gone. The Muslims haven’t been in charge for very long, so let’s not jump to premature conclusions. Perhaps, however, it is not unreasonable to suggest that those inquiring minds should be reminded about what places like Aden and Dhaka, where Muslims have been in charge for a very long time, are really like. These, I suspect, are not the sort of “model home” communities that exude tolerance, inclusivity, and equality of women, the norms so prized by our betters at the Washington Post, New York Times, and Teen Vogue.

Let us grant for the moment that Islamophobia, like racism, is washing over us (more on that in a bit). But did Perkins ever wonder, given this tsunami of fear and loathing experienced by Muslims in the Western world, why so many of them (by the millions) continue flocking to it? But let’s first get to what led to his trip: to contemplate an American city where at last, as he says, “Muslims are now fully in charge.”

We have arrived at the foundational premise of cultural Marxism, which is all about who should be in power (“in charge”) and who should not. The Polish Catholics, Perkins gloated, don’t get to “run Hamtramck” anymore. They might be unhappy about it, but who cares? As Chuck Berry would put it: “Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Out with the old, in with the new. Polish Catholics were part of the problem — the old, oppressive, white, eurocentric, Christian order — and the historically oppressed Muslims, so stylishly multi-cultural and now in charge, are the solution — the future. “Diversity” thrives in rustbelt America, and what it looks like is a mosque on every street corner, and all you are allowed to see of the ladies are their eyes. Oh, yes, and as Obama said, “The most beautiful sound in the world is the Muslim call to prayer at sundown.”

Hamtramck is a microcosm of what today’s proud progressives call “progress.” They are unable to conceal their glee with the disappearance of an America that takes its cultural heritage from Europe and worshipped at Christian altars — America on its way to resembling a kaleidoscope of Third World slums: Tijuana, Port-au-Prince, and Mogadishu.

The constant drip-drip-drip of propaganda from the organs of the ruling class says that one form of resistance to “progress” is a pathology known as “Islamophobia” — a phobia, discovered by newspaper columnists, cable-TV talking heads, sociology professors, and politicians, and just like “racism,” “Islamophobia” infects only white people.

“Phobias,” as we know, are diseases of the psyche: irrational thoughts, fears, and impulses that turn those who harbor them into disordered and dysfunctional personalities — in this case, bigots who thrive on “conspiracy theories.” The consensus of the cognoscenti that “Islamophobia” is now a great affliction of the Western world would suggest that we must all now admit that the West itself is a diseased, pathological organism, and that the only acceptable moral future for the West is a surrender to the “Other,” a Spenglerian sort of historical moment. The Hamtramck experience would seem to be a surrender in miniature, but certainly emblematic of The Decline of the West portending the triumph of the crescent over the cross.

But as we can see with the SJW shills at NPR, we are grappling with agitprop, not psychology. “Islamophobia,” like “racism,” does not refer to a real disease. It’s just another word with a clinical ring to it, contrived by the traducing ideologues firmly entrenched in our opinion-shaping institutions. It is a Schimpfwort, a word of abuse. Its purpose is to rationalize and dramatize their moral outrage and to demonize the subjects of that outrage. After a period of sufficient repetition by the right people, it firmly entrenches itself in the expanding vocabulary of victimhood — “transphobia” has recently made its debut with yet one more subset of “deplorables” fighting the march of “progress” — and sustains the orthodoxy of egalitarian politics with its relentless aggression against hierarchy and people of European heritage.

How, in general terms, this game of pin the bigot’s tail on the white European donkey called the “wave of Islamophobia” is played was brilliantly described by the political philosopher, the late Kenneth Minogue, over 30 years ago:

In ideological criticism . . . [there is] a kind of perverse-reverse logic, i.e., condemnation goes before explanation, or, rather the moral precedes the factual. A sort of intellectual show trial. Censure leads to theory rather than theory to censure. But then, of course this is problematic because it is better to discover something that brings condemnation, than to shop around for a theory to support your moral outrage.[1]

Stalin’s chief hit-man, Lavrenti Beria, expressed the application of this perverse-reverse logic in the most practical, succinct of terms: “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Tell Beria who you want to be put in the dock, and he invents the charges. “Islamophobia” is another invention of our contemporary Berias, the “theory” they shopped around for that bolsters their moral outrage at the sins of the West, condemns the unrepentant (the “irredeemables”), and seeks their extinction.

But back to the response to the hip-hip-hooray by the Social Justice Mafioso for the Islamization of once-Polish Catholic Hamtramck. Niraj Warikoo, in his Detroit Free Press report, needs an “expert” to pronounce an imprimatur on this replacement that is really not a “replacement.” If you can’t trust Sally Howell, Director of the Center for Arab American Studies and Associate Professor of History at University of Michigan at Dearborn, who can you trust? She says “she hasn’t heard of any other US city council in history with all Muslims as members.” That appears to be good news: “The all-Muslim council in Hamtramck is another barrier broken.”

“Breaking barriers”: euphemistic phrasing that operationalizes the Great Replacement theory. RIP Hamtramck. Long live the barriers!

Note

[1] Kenneth Minogue: Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 58.

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