The recent racist massacre in Buffalo has a global history that predates it. In fact, the terrorist’s 180-page “manifesto” praises Argentina on its front page for its alleged racial status. The murderer idealizes the South American country through the racist and delusional lie and claims that Argentina is the only “white” country with a high birth rate that would defend it from the enemies of the white race. Where does this delusional fantasy of a “white Argentina” come from?
Argentina is a diverse country, often open, tolerant and generous. And it is also a country that, like many, has a long history of multiple fascism and racism.
The “Big Replacement Theory”
The Buffalo terrorist adheres to the so-called “great replacement theory”, whose origins date back to the ideas of social degeneration and scientific racism of the late 19th century.
According to them, Western civilizational superiority should be maintained biologically and culturally to avoid chaos and social collapse. This ideology was widely accepted by political elites in several countries on both sides of the Atlantic and gave way to eugenics, segregationist, anti-immigration and, ultimately, fascist and genocidal policies.
In the 1930s, the Nazis radicalized the lie of a Jewish conspiracy whose purpose was to organize a mixture of races, leading to an extermination of white populations worldwide. Since then, the idea of ”white genocide” has been used by fascist and related organizations during the Cold War to justify political violence in the name of existential defense of ethnic nationalisms.
In the 1970s, the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation introduced notions of “genocide and white supremacy” that influenced the doctrines of the agencies responsible for Operation Condor. The dictatorships of Bolivia, Chile and Paraguay were very receptive to such ideas due, in part, to the presence of ex-Nazis and ex-ustaše (Croatian nationalist terrorist organization based on religious racism and allied with Nazism) in high positions.
The Latin American military junta saw themselves as warriors in a historic crusade against a global conspiracy and in defense of Western Christian civilization. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was strong transatlantic cooperation between junta agents, European paramilitary and neo-fascist organizations such as P2, the apartheid governments of Rhodesia and South Africa, and elements of the US extreme right.
These relationships bore fruit during the wars and genocidal massacres in Central America, in which Argentina played a direct role by sending “advisors” who were experts in illegal repression. This allows us to understand where the delusion of a Latin America with a central role in the defense of the West comes from.
Let’s not forget that the Buffalo terrorist also said that this racial struggle could start in countries like Argentina or Venezuela and even mentions Uruguay as one of the countries “anchored in the white race”, along with Australia, Argentina, New Zealand and the United States.
Anyway, why does the terrorist put Argentina in a central place?
This emphasis on the Latin American nation can only be understood in terms of shared histories and fascist traditions, transnational racist fantasies. They are the global memories of international fascism. On internet forums, global neo-fascism extremists admire the Argentine dictatorship and also Augusto Pinochet as actors to be emulated.
While one of the founders of Argentine fascism, Leopoldo Lugones, defended Argentine imperialism for its “white” superiority over other Latin American nations, the generals of the last military dictatorship (1976-1983), who killed tens of thousands of citizens in their ” dirty war” launched in the name of the “Christian West”, used a similar logic.
In 1976, General Videla highlighted the global nature of the dispute: “The fight against subversion is not limited to a purely military dimension. It is a global phenomenon. It has political, economic, social, cultural and psychological dimensions”, he said. .
In particular, ideas of replacement and invasion and paranoid fantasies about the expansion and migration of non-white Europeans are central to the Argentine fascist tradition. The infamous statements of General Albano Harguindeguy, Minister of the Interior under the Argentine dictatorship, can only be understood in this historical perspective. In 1978, Harguindeguy spoke of the need to encourage European immigration so that Argentina could “remain one of the three whitest countries in the world”.
This overt racism in Argentina took the form of an open recognition of the need to eradicate other “non-European” expressions from the nation. The depth and scope of this desire was manifested, once again, in the concentration camps, which functioned as centers of clandestine detention and torture, in which racism and anti-Semitism played a central role.
The fight against the enemy had no limits. International cooperation between fascist and white supremacist organizations continued after the end of the Cold War. If before they fought to defeat communism in Angola, Chile or Nicaragua, now the enemy was Islam and multiculturalism, which the anti-Semitic frenzy considers to be financed by Judaism.
The attacks in Utoya, Munich, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Christchurch and now Buffalo, among others, are the continuation of fascist violence against minorities – to whom, in an ideological delusion, the future destruction of Western civilization and Christian values is attributed.
Fascism is and has always been transnational. This American history cannot be understood with ideas of exceptionalism, because almost nothing is exceptional in American fascist traditions. Still, it is understandable that much attention has been paid to the local dimensions of the phenomenon, if not so much to American history. But what has been completely ignored so far are the global stories of fascism behind these attacks.
*Translation from Spanish by Giulia Gaspar.
