Book Review Samuel Jared Taylor: Camp of the Saints

Fiction can be more powerful than fact. Authors have always lent their talents to causes, often swaying events more effectively than journalists or politicians. Fiction, including virtually everything emitted by Hollywood, has usually been in the service of the left, but occasionally an author declares his allegiance to culture and tradition.

In "The Camp of the Saints", Jean Raspail goes further and declares his allegiance to his race —though it is an allegiance tinged with bitterness at the weakness of the White man. It is the story of the final, tragic end of European civilization which falls, like all great civilizations, by its own hand.

The novel is set in the near future in France, where the leftist sicknesses of multi-culturalism and multi-racialism have undermined all natural defenses. As Mr. Raspail writes of young Europeans:

By then, "the White race was nothing more than a million sheep," beaten down by decades of anti-White propaganda. As Mr. Raspail explains, it was "a known fact that racism comes in two forms: that practiced by Whites -heinous and inexcusable, whatever its motives -and that practiced by blacks -quite justified, whatever its excess, since it's merely the expression of a righteous revenge . . . ."

This is the state of mind with which the West confronts its final crisis: nearly a million starving, disease-ridden boat people -men, women, and children -set sail from the Ganges delta for Europe. Practically no one is willing to say that this flotilla must be stopped at all costs. Instead, liberals and Christians spout confident nonsense about welcoming their Hindu brothers into the wealth and comfort of Europe.

The thought of this wretched brown mass sailing for Europe is a source of great joy for the World Council of Churches. Its men are "shock-troop pastors, righteous in their loathing of anything and everything that smacked of present-day Western society, and Woodford Green, Essexss in their love of whatever might destroy it." They are determined "to welcome the million Christs on board those ships, who would rise up, reborn, and signal the dawn of a just, new day . . . ."

One of the few Europeans who recognizes that what has come to be called the "Last Chance Armada" spells the doom of Christendom reproaches a group of anti-Western churchmen: "There's not one of you proud of his skin, and all that it stands for. . . ." "Not proud, or aware of it either," replies one. "That's the price we have to pay for the brotherhood of man. We're happy to pay it."

Europe is rife with fifth-column propagandists, products of earlier capitulations. Typical of these is Clement Dio, "citizen of France, North African by blood . . . . [who] possessed a belligerent intellect that thrived on springs of racial hatred barely below the surface, and far more intense than anyone imagined."

Knowing full well that acceptance of the first wave of third world refugees will only prompt imitators that will eventually swamp the White West, he writes happily about how "the civilization of the Ganges" will enrich a culturally bankrupt continent:

As the flotilla makes for Europe, school teachers set assignments for their students: "Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail, by imagining, for example, that one of the desperate families comes to your home and asks you to take them in."

The boat people steam towards the Suez Canal, but the Egyptians, not soft like Whites, threaten to sink the entire convoy. One hundred ships turn south, around the horn of Africa -towards Europe. The refugees run out of fuel for cooking and start burning their own excrement. Pilots sent to observe the fleet report an unbearable stench.

A few deluded Whites have boarded the ships in Calcutta and sail along with "the civilization of the Ganges," dreaming of Europe:

"Already they saw it their mission to guide the flock's first steps on Western soil. One would empty out all our hospital beds so that cholera-ridden and leprous wretches could sprawl between their clean White sheets. Another would cram our brightest, cheeriest nurseries full of monster children. Another would preach unlimited sex, in the name of the one, single race of the future . . . ."

The Hindus tolerate these traitors until almost the end of the voyage and then strangle them, throwing their naked bodies overboard so that they drift onto a Spanish beach as the armada heads for the south of France. The boat people have no need for guides of this kind, from a race that has lost all relevance:

"The Last Chance Armada, en route to the West, was feeding on hatred. A hatred of almost philosophical proportions, so utter, so absolute, that it had no thoughts of revenge, or blood, or death, but merely consigned its objects to the ultimate void. In this case, the Whites. For the Ganges refugees, on their way to Europe, the Whites had simply ceased to be."

Finally, on the morning of Easter Sunday, the 100 creaking hulks crash onto the beaches. The local inhabitants have abandoned all thought of taking in a family of Hindus, and have fled north. Many of the fashionable leftist agitators have likewise left their editorial jobs and radio programs and disappeared, with their gold bars, to Switzerland. The army has been sent south to prevent a landing, but there are doubts as to whether Whites can be made to slaughter unarmed civilians.

As one government official explains to another, "[D]on't count on the army, monsieur. Not if you've got . . . genocide in mind."

The other replies: "Then it just means another kind of genocide . . . . Our own."

At the last moment the French President is unable to give the order to fire. He urges the troops to act according to their consciences. They throw down their rifles and run.

Bands of hippies and Christians, who have come south to welcome their brown brothers also turn and run as soon as they get a whiff of the new arrivals. "How could a good cause smell so bad?"

The few remaining Whites with any sense of their civilization find they can communicate practically without speaking: "That was part of the Western genius, too: a mannered mentality, a collusion of aesthetes, a conspiracy of caste, a good-natured indifference to the crass and the common. With so few left now to share in its virtues, the current passed all the more easily between them."

A handful of citizens drive south with their hunting rifles on suicide missions to do the job their government is unable to do. One of these, ironically, is an assimilated Indian. As he explains to another band of citizen-hunters, "Every White supremacist cause —no matter where or when— has had blacks on its side. And they didn't mind fighting for the enemy, either. Today, with so many Whites turning black, why can't a few `darkies' decide to be White? Like me."

The Indian is killed, along with his White comrades, in an attack by fighter-bombers sent by the French government to put down resistance to the invasion. Soldiers who were unable to kill brown people make short work of "racist" Whites.

All over France non-Whites take the offensive. Algerians on assembly lines rise up and kill their White bosses. African street cleaners knock on the doors of deluxe Paris apartments and move in. A multi-racial government, including a few token Whites, announces a new dispensation.

Capitulation by the French means capitulation everywhere. Masses of ragged Chinese pour into Russia, whose troops are likewise unable to fire on hungry civilians. Huge fleets of beggars set sail from every pestilential southern port, heading for Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The same drama unfolds In the United States. "Black would be black, and White would be White. There was no changing either, except by a total mix, a blend into tan. They were enemies on sight, and their hatred and scorn only grew as they came to know each other better." Americans lay down their arms just as the French do.

Raspail hints here and there at what the new Europe will be like: "At the time, each refugee quarter had its stock of White women, all free for the taking. And perfectly legal. (One of the new regime's first laws, in fact. In order to 'demythify' the White woman, as they put it.)"

The first provisional government also has a Minister of Population -a French woman married to a black -to ensure a permanent solution to the race problem. After all: "Only a White woman can have a White baby. Let her choose not to conceive one, let her choose only nonWhite mates, and the genetic results aren't long in coming."

And so ends the saga of Western man, not in pitched battle, not in defeat at the hands of superior forces, but by capitulation.

Even after a quarter century, the novel is astonishingly current. It was written before Communism collapsed, and the new French revolution is spiced with anti-capitalist slogans that now sound slightly off key. One might also complain that a few of the characters verge on caricature. Nevertheless, the central tragedy -suicidal White weakness- is brilliantly portrayed and could have been written in 1995.

Mr. Raspail obviously loves his culture and his race, and wrote in the afterward that although he had intended to end the book with a spasm of White self-consciousness that saves Europe, the final catastrophe seemed to write itself. Perhaps he could not, in good faith, write a different ending. In the preface to the 1985 French edition he observed:

The Camp of the Saints puts the White man's dilemma in the most difficult terms: slaughter hundreds of thousands of women and children or face oblivion. Of course, a nation that had the confidence to shed blood in the name of its own survival would never be put to such a test; no mob of beggars would threaten it.

The story that Mr. Raspail tells -the complete collapse of Western man even when the very survival of his civilization so clearly hangs in the balance -may seem implausible to some. And yet, what Whites do in The Camp of the Saints is no different from what they have done every day for the past forty years. The only difference is that the novel moves in fast forward; it covers in months what could take decades.

Whites all around the world suffer from Mr. Raspail's "monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience." South Africans vote for black rule. Americans import millions of nonWhites and grant them racial preferences. Australians abandon their Whites-only immigration policy and become multi-cultural.

Even if he did not actively cooperate in his own destruction, time works against the White man. As Mr. Raspail writes in the afterward, "the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, irretrievably to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles No other race subscribes to these moral principles —if that is really what they are— because they are weapons of self-annihilation."

Mr. Raspail's powerful, gripping novel is a call to all Whites to rekindle their sense of race, love of culture, and pride in history —for he knows that without them we will disappear.

[ MFS note: This book review is made available for information only. ]
_______
* Courtesy of the British National Party.
See original at < http://www.bnp.org.uk/reviews/camp_saints_raspail.htm >.
Originally published by the American Renaissance < http://www.amren.com/ >.

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..."

"... my true character came through in this book, precisely in the coarse humor found in it, derisory humor, the comical under the tragic, a certain amount of clowning as an antidote to the apocalypse ..."

After all, Camp of the Saints is a symbolic book, a sort of prophecy, dramatized rather brutally by means of shipboards, at the rhythm of inspiration. For if any book came to me through inspiration, I confess that it was precisely this one. Where the devil would I otherwise have drawn the courage to write it? I came out of these eighteen months of work unrecognizable, judging by the photograph on the back of the jacket of the first edition in 1973 my face exhausted, older by ten years than my age today, and with the look of someone tormented by too many visions. And yet, my true character came through in this book, precisely in the coarse humor found in it, derisory humor, the comical under the tragic, a certain amount of clowning as an antidote to the apocalypse. I have always maintained that in spite of its subject matter Camp of the Saints is not a sad book and I am grateful to some, notably to Jean Dutour, who have understood that exactly ''That West of ours having become a buffoon, its final tragedy could well be a joke. That is why this terrible book is basically so funny...''

But, to go back to the action in Camp of the Saints — if it is a symbol, it doesn't arise from any utopia; it no longer arises from any utopia. If it is a prophecy, we live its beginnings today. Simply, in Camp of the Saints, it is treated as a classic tragedy, according to the literary principles of unity of time, place and action everything takes place within three days along the shores of Southern France, and it is there that the destiny of white people is sealed. Though the action was then already well developed along the lines described in Camp of the Saints (boat people, the radicalization of the North African community and of other foreign groups in France, the strong psychological impact of human rights organizations, the inflamed evangelism of the religious leadership, a hypocritical purity of consciences, refusal to look the truth in the face, etc.) in actuality the unraveling will not take place in three days but, almost certainly, after many convulsions, during the first decades of the third millennium, barely the time of one or two generations. When one knows what constitutes a generation in our old European lands — a rump-generation in the image of a rump-family and a rump-nation — the heart constricts in anticipation, and is overwhelmed by discouragement. It's enough to go back to the scary demographic predictions for the next thirty years, and those I will cite are the most favorable ones encircled by seven billion people, only seven hundred million of them white, hardly a third of them in our little Europe, and those no longer in bloom but quite old. They face a vanguard of four hundred million North Africans and Muslims, fifty percent of them less than twenty years old, those on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean arriving ahead of the rest of the world! Can one imagine for a second, in the name of whatever ostrich-like blindness, that such a disequilibrium can endure?

At this juncture, the moment has arrived to explain why, in Camp of the Saints, it is human masses coming from the far-away Ganges rather than the shores of the Mediterranean that overwhelm the South of France. There are several reasons for this. One pertains to prudence on my part, and especially to my refusal to enter the false debate about racism and anti-racism in French daily life, as well as my revulsion at describing the racial tensions already discernible (but for the moment not fit for discussion) for fear of exacerbating them. To be sure, a mighty vanguard is already here, and expresses its intention to stay even as it refuses to assimilate; in twenty years they will make up thirty percent, strongly motivated foreigners, in the bosom of a people that once was French. It's a sign, but it is only one sign. One could stop there. One could even engage in some skirmishes, all the while ignoring, or pretending to ignore that the real danger is not only here, that it is elsewhere, that it is yet to come, and that by its very size it will be of a different order. For I am convinced that at the global level things will unleash as at a billiard game, where the balls start moving one after the other following an initial shove, which can start up in this or that immense reservoir of misery and multitudes, such as the one over there, alongside the Ganges. It will probably not happen as I have described it, for the Camp of the Saints is only a parable, but in the end the result will not be any different, though perhaps in a form more diffused and therefore seemingly more tolerable. The Roman empire did not die any differently, though, it's true, more slowly, whereas this time we can expect a more sudden conflagration. It is said that history does not repeat itself. That's very foolish. The history of our planet is made up of successive voids and of the ruins that others have strewn about as they each had their turn, and that some have at times regenerated.

"It will probably not happen as I have described it, for The Camp of the Saints is only a parable, but in the end the result will not be any different…"

For the West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level — nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. I can hardly discern any soul in us. Looking, for example, at my own country, France, I often get the impression, as in a bad dream dreamt wide-awake, that many Frenchmen of true lineage are no longer anything but hermit-clams that live in shells abandoned by the representatives of a species, now disappeared, that was known as ''French'' and which did not forecast, through some unknown genetic mystery, the one that at century's end has wrapped itself in this name. They are content to just endure. Mechanically, they ensure their survival from week to week, ever more feebly. Under the flag of an illusory internal solidarity and security, they are no longer in solidarity with anything, or even cognizant of anything that would constitute the essential commonalities of a people. In the area of the practical and materialistic, which alone can still light a spark of interest in their eyes, they form a nation of petty bourgeois which, in the name of the riches it inherited and is less and less deserving of, rewards itself — and continues to reward itself in the middle of crisis — with millions of domestic servants immigrants. Ah! How they will shudder! The domestics have innumerable relatives on this side and beyond the seas, a single starving family that populates all the earth. A global Spartacus... To cite but one example from hundreds, the population of Nigeria, in Africa, has close to seventy million inhabitants which it is incapable of feeding even while it spends more than fifty percent of its oil income to buy food. At the dawn of the third millennium, there will be a hundred million Nigerians and the oil will be gone.

But the petty bourgeois, deaf and blind, continues to play the buffoon without knowing it. Still miraculously comfortable in his lush fields, he cries out while glancing toward his nearest neighbor ''Make the rich pay!'' Does he know, does he finally know that it is he who is the rich guy, and that the cry for justice, that cry of all revolutions, projected by millions of voices, is rising soon against him, and only against him. That's the whole theme of Camp of the Saints.

I am a novelist. I have no theory, no system nor ideology to propose or defend. It just seems to me that we are facing a unique alternative either learn the resigned courage of being poor or find again the inflexible courage to be rich. In both cases, so-called Christian charity will prove itself powerless. The times will be cruel.

— J. R.
_____
* Courtesy of The Social Contract Press.
The Social Contract Winter 1993-94. p115:117.
See at < http://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/four-two/raspail.pdf >
or < http://www.thesocialcontract.com/cgi-bin/showarticle.pl?articleID=318&terms= >.

Please send mail to webmaster@mnforsustain.org with questions or comments about this web site. Minnesotans For Sustainability (MFS) is not affiliated with any government body, private, or corporate entity. Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004 Minnesotans For Sustainability