A Prophetic Novel?

Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), an English essayist, wrote that if you want to make a point, you must exaggerate it. His remark applies to a T to the dystopian novel of Jean Raspail (b 1925) The Camp of the Saints. The title comes from Revelation 20:7-9 depicting the apocalypse. Raspail, a French writer, traveler, and explorer with conservative views from a country with predominantly leftist ones, has been adopted by the anti-immigration movement for the apocalyptic vision he paints in his novel of the West's being inundated by migrants from the Third World.. He has written other novels about historical figures, exploration and indigenous people. He has received prestigious French literary awards, including Grand Prix du Roman and Grand Prix du Litterature from the French Academy. He is someone not to be dismissed lightly. For many years his novel sold hardly any copies, but took off recently because it apparently struck a nerve.

What is all the fuss about?

A poor Hindu demagogue, named “the turd-eater” and a deformed, psychic child who sits on his shoulders, together lead an armada of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Indecisive European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America (sic), argue whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — according to the author — by recognizing the threat and killing all the migrants.

Meanwhile, the non-white people of Earth wait silently for the Indians to reach the French shore . Their landing will be the signal for the people of color everywhere to rise up and overthrow white Western society.

The French government gives the order to repel the armada by force, but the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream ashore, trampling the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people overrun Western civilization. The Chinese pour into Russia; the Queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Oh, woe is us. Raspail’s heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed.

Calgues, a stand-in for Raspail, is among those who takes up takes up arms against the migrants and their culturally “cuckolded” white supporters. Just before he kills a radical hippie, he compares his actions to past heroic defenses of European Christendom, harkening back to famous battles in the clash-of-civilizations — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire and the fall of Constantinople.

Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human. The armada brings “thousands of wretched creatures” whose very bodies arouse disgust: “Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms.” Poor brown children are spoiled fruit “starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”

Oh, my.

The migrants are also sexual deviants who turn their journey into a sexual orgy. “Everywhere, rivers of sperm streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”

Gosh.

Raspail argues that the white Christian world is on the brink of destruction because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost the necessary belief in its cultural and racial superiority. As Calgues talks to the hippie he will soon kill, he explains how the youth went wrong:

“That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”

In other words, if you believe in your civilization, you are a racist. The ancient Greeks were surely racists because they referred to non-Greeks as “barbarians.”

The novel is a call to arms for the Christian West to revive the spirit of the Crusades and prepare for bloody conflict with the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations to its own grim parable about modern migration. “The Fall of Constantinople,” the unnamed narrator says, “is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.”

Maybe that’s not so far fetched.

The reactions to the novel were such as to be expected.

Liberals used such expressions as stunningly racist, sickening, racist and paranoid, xenophobic, and Kirkus Reviews compared it with Mein Kompf.

Conservatries and moderates had a different assessment.

William F. Buckley, Jr. called it “a great novel,” while Chilton Williamson praised the book as one of the most uncompromising works of literary reaction in the 20th century.”

Raspail denies that he is a racist. He says he has traveled the world and written with sympathy about indigenous people threatened with extinction. On the other hand, he loves France and Western civilization

In an interview he gave for Le Point as late as 2015, he said that the collapse of our civilization is inevitable unless we forsake our Christian compassion. Otherwise, we will be overwhelmed.

Accusing Raspail and his politically incorrect book of racism misses the point. The issue is not race but civilization and culture. If we believe that our Western civilization is worth preserving, we have to overcome our self-loathing and resolve to defend our way of life even at the cost of putting aside Christian charity.

Raspail’s thesis is not new. Fifty years before his book, when whites constituted 1.5 times the population of India versus 0.5 times today, Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard in The Rising Tide of Color (books that today are discredited due to their association with the eugenics movement and fascism) raised the alarm. As a final note, some scholars say that the Aryans who invaded India around 1000 BC instituted the caste system to prevent being swallowed by the indigenous population.