Posted on 11/24/2019 2:19:15 PM PST by karpov
One morning in 1972, the French author Jean Raspail was at his home on the Mediterranean coast when he had a vision of a million refugees clamoring to enter Europe.
“Armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil,” he wrote. “To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.”
At the time Raspail was a respected writer best known for his travelogues. But the racist novel that resulted from that episode, “The Camp of the Saints,” would become his most famous, most controversial and, surprisingly, most influential work.
For some 30 years, “‘Camp of the Saints’ has been one of the top two books in white supremacist circles,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center leaked emails earlier this month in which the Trump adviser Stephen Miller touted the book to Breitbart staffers as a work with strong parallels to recent waves of migration.
Published in 1973, the dystopian novel details how a flotilla of Indian migrants reach France’s southern coast to invade the country. Political elites fail to respond to the influx, and the continent is overrun. For nearly half a century, the book has stoked fears of immigration that have, to its supporters, seemed increasingly prescient as growing numbers of refugees and asylum seekers have arrived in Europe in recent years.
“Raspail can boast himself about being a prophet,” said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs. “People now buy ‘The Camp of the Saints’ because they want to read the book written by the writer who saw what would happen before everybody else.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Article lost all credibility when this was added.
With the MSM, there is hardly any difference between opinion and news coverage, movie and book reviews, even sports and weather.
War is demographics sped up.
Read the book. More prophetic than racist I would say. I would recommend it to people. And yes, they may think you racist for agreeing with the author. Not sure he is racist or just a nationalist that loves his country and culture and does not want to see it destroyed.
You will see a lot of the book in today’s world events with refugees ad immigrants.
It’s available free online. The author has the same prescience as Ayn Rand with all the usual suspects as characters. The actual invasion occurred from land instead of sea, and it was Muslims not Indians, but everything else in the book was pretty accurate in respect to people’s attitudes and the end results.
I haven’t read this book, although the French, alas, had some of the worst colonies in the world (well, actually, the Belgians were worse) and have always had a racial problem. They were very much into phrenology and all sorts of fake sciences in the 19th century to demonstrate that the French were the masters of the universe.
However, what the French don’t acknowledge is that by abandoning Christianity, they have abandoned the root of Europe and they’re on their own now and have no defense against the hordes (from where ever, but mostly now I would say from Islamic lands).
Read The Mosque of Notre Dame.
What he predicted is happening before our eyes now.
I read and re-read The Camp and sent copies to others who have done likewise.
Only a fool would dismiss this book as some racist screed.
It is prophetic.
I recommend reading it.
ML/NJ
The book was advertised for years in the back of National Review. Nobody thought it was “racist” then.
“Racist”, as used by the left, is what they say when they’ve lost the argument to a non-leftist. And they always lose the argument.
The rule of opposites—the exact opposite of what the New York Times says is closer to the truth—on any topic.
I don’t know about this book, or what else is written inside it, but this seems to be fairly empathetic and objective view “To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.” That would seem to be an honest view of a humanitarian crisis described. People in need of help would be destroyed without the help. The people who need to give help would have trouble adapting to such a dramatic shift in numbers and the people coming for help would bring a different set of values that might threaten the giving society’s ability to help anyone in the future. It doesn’t sound racist to me it sounds like the description of a cultural and social conundrum.
People escaping a natural disaster is different from people escaping a culture/society/government that doesn’t promote values of self-reliance and civil society and the rule of law. People coming from a place that dig wells and carry water in buckets and don’t have sophisticated industries or agriculture can’t contribute much to a society with indoor plumbing. It is not anybody’s fault. The solution is to export the ideas and technologies that make the west a place to seek refuge to the place from which the refugees flee. But we have institutions from US Aid to the United Nations that are just corrupt and bureaucratic. Very little real humanitarian relief on a global scale; except in those situations where food and supplies are airlifted due to extreme and sudden ecological/natural disasters.
No surprise that a group like the SPLC is demagoging here. They hate this Stephen Miller guy for some reason I am not all that familiar with the reasons but this kind of story is just the cult of personality - it doesn’t accomplish any material good for anyone.
The immigrant/invaders of the novel possess no desire to assimilate, only to plunder, and one can see why that might make no-borders types nervous. Equally awkward is the near total inability of the supposed defenders of their own native cultures to do so. It isn't even a fight, because they won't. The Swiss are, characteristically, the lone holdouts in Europe because they will.
The author projects this sense of paralysis a little too far for prophecy but fine for a novel - certainly in real life there are strident proponents of that no-borders surrender philosophy elsewhere in the West but they appear to be rather stoutly resisted at least at the moment. France, and Europe, however, might justifiably feel that the book cuts a little too close to the knuckle for comfort.
No, it is neither Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries, and common among critics who insist that it is, is that they haven't read any of them. The very last place I would go for literary advice is the ignoramuses at NPR or the SPLC.
Who wrote it?
I would also recommend Submission (French: Soumission) a novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq. Available in a French and English translation.
Hollebecque. Available in English on Kindle.
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