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The Camp of the Saints

Jean Raspail
Translated by Gerda Bikales**

The novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1973) has stirred new controversy recently having been cited in several stories in U.S. magazines and newspapers. To help our readers understand the author’s perspective, The Social Contract asked advisory board member Gerda Bikales to translate from the French his preface to the third edition, 1985.

Published for the first time in 1973, Camp of the Saints is a novel that anticipates a situation which seems plausible today and foresees a threat that no longer seems unbelievable to anyone it describes the peaceful invasion of France, and then of the West, by a third world burgeoned into multitudes. At all levels — global consciousness, governments, societies, and especially every person within himself — the question is asked belatedly what’s to be done?

What’s to be done, since no one would wish to renounce his own human dignity by acquiescing to racism? What’s to be done since, simultaneously, all persons and all nations have the sacred right to preserve their differences and identities, in the name of their own future and their own past?

Our world was shaped within an extraordinary variety of cultures and races, that could only develop to their ultimate and singular perfection through a necessary segregation. The confrontations that flow (and have always flowed) from this, are not racist, nor even racial. They are simply part of the permanent flow of opposing forces that shape the history of the world. The weak fade and disappear, the strong multiply and triumph.

For example, since the time of the Crusades and the great land and sea discoveries, and up to the colonial period and its last-ditch battles, Western expansionism responded to diverse motivations — ethical, political, or economic — but racism had no part and played no role in it, except perhaps in the soul of evil people. The relative strength of forces was in our favor, that’s all. That these were applied most often at the expense of other races — though some were thereby saved from their state of mortal torpor — was merely a consequence of our appetite for conquest and was not driven by or a cover for ideology. Now that the relationship between the forces has been diametrically reversed, and our ancient West — tragically now in a minority status on this earth — retreats behind its dismantled fortifications while it already loses the battles on its own soil, it begins to behold, in astonishment, the dull roar of the huge tide that threatens to engulf it. One must remember the saying on ancient solar calendars ‘’It is later than you think...’’ The above reference did not come from my pen. It was written by Thierry Maulnier, in connection with Camp of the Saints, as it happens. Forgive me for citing yet another, by Professor Jeffrey Hart of Dartmouth, a literary historian and a famous American columnist “Raspail is not writing about race, he is writing about civilization...”

from:
http://www.mnforsustain.org/camp_of_the_saints_bookreview_taylor_sj.htm