Living in The Camp of the Saints

... At this moment, Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, a fifty-year-old parable about the swamping of France by a million invaders from India, is perhaps the most dangerous book of all to the decades-long Left project of replacing the populations of the West with alien migrants...

Raspail... published this work in 1973... his crucial work is this one... because it predicted the future - not only mass migration, but even more presciently, the actions of Westerners, both elite and not, in response to a "peaceful" invasion by alien migrants...

The book is most of all an indictment of the Western self-hatred that has inevitably led to our destruction, which Raspail saw long before most did...

It is meant, explicitly, as Raspail said in 1985, as "symbolic, a parable... The Third World invasion of the West is unavoidable. If we don't see it, our children will." We are those children...

Alarm slowly grows in the West, but all press is censored by governments, who fear "racism" more than anything else... Raspail, in fact, specifically refers to the actual "hate speech" laws passed in France in 1972, and their inevitable exclusive use, as has unsurprisingly turned out, to prevent whites from complaining about their abuse and replacement...

Raspail wrote it as a warning; but we are living in his post-landing phase. The Europeans, or rather their rulers, have voluntarily admitted many millions of invaders over the past decade, and are now reaping the reward, both in crime and in the destruction of their societies...

And here in America, what need have we to read about future problems, when all around us migrants are robbing, raping, and murdering Americans with impunity...

Today, however, the book is known primarily through its caricatured demonization as "raaaaaacist," meaning in this case mostly that it is willing to see white interests in the same terms as the interests of other racial groups...

The real target of Raspail’s ire, however, is the French themselves, and by extension all those who have inherited the West, the most glorious civilization in human history, by an order of magnitude, and then thrown it away...

Raspail acknowledges that being white is only in part a question of color, but also a "whole mental outlook" - really, a culture...

The goal of the Left was always total expropriation of white people and then, if at all possible, their extermination, a goal made explicit by many powerful people in 2020...

So, again, what does all this say about America in 2024?... As I’m fond of saying, Europe is over. There is no redemption for that ancient civilization. Raspail saw that in 1973, and it is vastly clearer now...

The solution, in America, isn't much different, but I suspect there is much more will here. We need to shut the border and expel every person here in the categories of unacceptables I list above, both by the direct means of mass deportation at gunpoint, and by indirect means, such as cutting off all free money and aggressively criminalizing employment of non-citizens without special, and very difficult to obtain, permission. (We also need to retroactively eliminate the misreading of the Constitution that allows so-called birthright citizenship...

... The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the century is Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It’s an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies...

The book’s significance does not hinge on whether Raspail was correct to predict mass immigration or describe it in catastrophic terms. Rather, the novel’s genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term. Properly translated, apocalypse is rendered as revelation, disclosure, literally an "uncovering." The Camp of the Saints unveils the perverse logic that pervades late Western civilization, and throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt whereby the West welcomes its own destruction...

... The Camp of the Saints is best read as a long thought experiment, a fictional depiction of the civilizational consequences of this way of thinking...

The West's brand of moral universalism, Raspail's novel suggests, causes its demise...

The intelligentsia shrinks the Overton window, portraying mass ­immigration as both morally obligatory and inevitable...

The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to the future of humanity. The new civic liturgy of Western nations must express submission to the morally superior non-Western "other."...

The only contemporary event referred to in The Camp of the Saints that is historically real rather than imagined is the Pleven Law, passed in 1972. This law banned racist speech. Characters in the novel ponder how this law quickly extended to restrict speech that is unfavorable to multicultural progressivism. In practice, it bans any speech about race, except that which is anti-white...

Again and again in the novel, cowardice and self-hatred are masked and moderated by the conviction that mass immigration into Europe and the deconstruction of European identity will somehow take away the sins of the West. But Raspail knows the truth: Third World immigrants do not have the power to deliver Europeans from their sense of worthlessness...

Sometime during those seemingly good years after World War II - Les Trente Glorieuses, as the French call this period, which still prevailed when The Camp of the Saints was published - the West lost its soul. In a sense, the apocalypse has already happened...