By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I have been waiting for months now, in the wake of the nightly scenes of hordes North Africans and Arabs pouring into Europe, for commentators to call our attention to how this scenario mirrors what the French author Jean Raspail warned the world about in his 1972 book The Camp of the Saints. (The book is still available at a reasonable price in paperback on Amazon.) Great Britain’s recent vote to exit the European Union makes Raspail’s theme all the more relevant.
Raspail is still alive, now in his early nineties. I don’t know if he would consent to an interview, or, if he consented, whether he would be able to refrain from doing nothing more than fold his arms and smirk while muttering, “I told you so.” Raspail predicted it all. He was condemned as a racist and xenophobe for his efforts. The New York Times reviewer called Raspail the “white man’s Frantz Fanon,” but conceded he was a “writer of undeniable power” and that his “political fantasy has the fevered intensity of a unified vision, giving it a visceral impact — like a truncheon in the kidneys.”
(For the record, Raspail is a practicing Catholic and denies the racist charge, insisting that it is a smear tactic to maintain that a devotion to French nationhood and Western civilization implies racist motives.)
Raspail’s plot centers on a day somewhere in the future when the populations of Third World countries have reached pressure-cooker level. In response, a famished mob from the streets of India’s slums, led by a liberation theologian professing humanitarian motives, storms aboard a hundred cargo ships docked along the Ganges.
Their objective? Western Europe. Taking seriously the anti-imperialist pronouncements of guilt-ridden, one-world Western ideologues about the “global village,” they are coming to the white man’s land of milk and honey to retake the riches that they have been told were unfairly expropriated from them by the Western powers.
Raspail depicts the armada’s decks as swarmed with a famished adults and street urchins scooting about to snatch still warm feces for deckside fires. Dead bodies are heaved overboard, as well as some still in their death throes. The sick lie in crumpled, wheezing humps. They are coming to Europe, to stay.
But the sparks truly begin to fly when Raspail switches his lens to France. The armada is heading for France’s southern coast, the lush land of sun-drenched resort cities, seaside villas, poolside patios, and quaint restaurants with their umbrella-adorned tables overlooking the sea, surrounded by a countryside of rich farmlands, cobblestone streets, museums, libraries, and cathedrals — the West. And it is going to be occupied, not by the Saracen or Hun, but by liberal France’s one-world brothers come to share their wealth.
What will the French do? If the starving masses on the ships are permitted to come ashore, French men and women will still be able to live, breathe, and reproduce, but it will be not be in France. It will be in a society formed by the new arrivals. Raspail forces us to ask ourselves whether the French have a moral right to ward off that fate, even by force of arms. Will the French military be ordered to fire on the armada if it refuses to turn around?
Raspail offers page after page of stunning vignettes. He depicts an aging, but still gritty professor, waiting the armada’s arrival in his seaside cottage. He refuses to leave, preferring to sit listening to Mozart, appreciating more than ever his life in Europe: the folded white linens, old wines and family silverware, realizing it may be the last time for him to enjoy these moments.
The reader is presented with French leftists in the media and show business, who sit contemplating the reality that awaits them: the prospect of having to practice what they have preached about sharing their wealth — to really share it, to have it expropriated; or fight alongside the sort of Frenchmen they once labeled as “rightists” and “fascists” to preserve it.
Raspail depicts once-wheedling Arab servants and jolly black jazz musicians, suddenly assertive and hard in the face of their fearful patrons. Both masters and retainers sense that the tables are about to be turned and are reacting accordingly.
He gives the reader scenes of long-haired student radicals and unkempt street people, an early version of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, living in the moment, as usual. They dance and drink, reveling in anticipation of the freedom to loot and pillage that awaits them in the anarchical future to come.
We are given a depiction of a cantankerous editor of the last newspaper of the French right, who sits pondering if the crisis awaiting France is worth one last editorial, a call to arms to defend the France of Roland and Jeanne d’Arc.
But these scenes only scratch the surface. The phrase “you won’t be able to put it down” is overworked by book reviewers. Not in this case. This is a blistering page-turner. Tolle, lege. . . .
What of the charge that racism motivated Raspail and those who reacted favorably to his words? There is a memorable passage in the book that encapsulates Raspail’s view of the matter. It occurs during the give-and-take between two members of the French Foreign Legion assigned to defend France’s shoreline, one black, one white. The moral dilemma facing the black soldier is obvious. He may be called upon to fire at dark-skinned people seeking to enjoy the way of life of white French men and women. He hints at his uneasiness over the prospect that awaits him.
The white Legionnaire is not an educated man. He fumbles over the words to express his feelings on the question, finally coming up with the following: “Look, white doesn’t have anything to do with color,” he tells his black comrade-in-arms.
And that is the point, isn’t it? The tidal waves of refugees sweeping over Europe at our moment in history will change more than the facial characteristics of the typical European. The British people who voted to leave the European Union understand that. Some of them may be racists, but there is no reason to make that assumption about the masses favoring Brexit. What they feared was the loss of their culture, their heritage, their folkways, the moral framework of their society, the neighborhood pieties of their everyday existence — the prospect of no longer being British.
They do not want to live as outsiders, as dhimmis (non-Muslims living in Muslim societies under Sharia law), even respectfully treated dhimmis. There is nothing base-minded about that sentiment. Third Worlders feel the same about their homelands. It is why they wanted an end to colonialism, why they were so uncompromising in their demands for self-determination.
At just about the time that The Camp of the Saints was published, President Boumediene of Algeria spoke to a European journalist about what he foresaw for Europe:
“We could search together for a new style of life which would make possible the sustenance of the eight thousand million human beings that are estimated to people the planet by the year 2000. Otherwise no quantity of atomic bombs could stem the tide of billions of human beings who someday will leave the poor southern part of the world to erupt into the relatively accessible spaces of the rich northern hemisphere looking for survival.”
Would it take a morally troubling use of force to prevent what Boumediene and Raspail predict? The 19th-century British economist Walter Bagehot has something to offer in this matter:
“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
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