Camp of the Saints Revisited
Iconoclast
Camp of the Saints is about France and the French media, pitying, aiding,
and idealizing poverty-stricken immigrants and then being over-run and
destroyed by them. One of the traitors ends up in a whore-house available to
all comers diseased or not, a fate most richly deserved.
The American Conservative prints a good albeit tame review -- timely in
light of recent riots staged by mostly-second-generation immigrants in
France. You can order Camp of the Saints from the Social Contract Press,
Petousky [pardon spelling] Michigan.
---------------------
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_12_05/feature.html
-----------------------------------------
December 5, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
National Suicide
Jean Raspail foretold the breakdown three decades ago.
by James P. Pinkerton
We were warned. Three decades ago, Jean Raspail published a novel, The Camp
of the Saints, which served as a worst-case-scenario warning about the
consequences of unchecked immigration into his native France and, by
extension, into all of Europe. Raspail's book was a big seller in his home
country, but his message was not heeded. Now, of course, he is being
vindicated.
Today, after 9/11, Madrid, London, and the broad-daylight murder of Theo Van
Gogh, Paris is burning.
How could this have been allowed to happen? What led to this influx of lions
into countries full of lambs?
In The Camp of the Saints, Raspail provided his answer. Those who welcome
large quantities of immigrants, he gibed, were "righteous in their loathing
of anything and everything that smacked of present-day Western society, and
boundless in their love of whatever might destroy it." And so he spun his
outrageous tale: one million poverty-stricken people ship out of India,
bound for Europe. Along the way, other countries refuse to allow this
teeming armada even the meagerest docking privileges-and who could blame
them? As Raspail describes the scene aboard the immigrant convoy,
"Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts,
and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers . a welter of dung and
debauch."
But France is persuaded that these people are a "million Christs," whose
arrival will "signal the dawn of a just, new day." In other words, Raspail
writes, what the French are lacking is a proper sense of national-racial
consciousness, "the knowledge that one's own is best, the triumphant joy at
feeling oneself to be part of humanity's finest." Instead, he concludes,
after having been beaten down by decades of multicultural propaganda, "the
white race" has become "nothing more than a million sheep."
And so this Indian multitude-reduced to 800,000 by rampant onboard disease
and violence-is allowed to land in Southern France, whereupon the Ganges
Horde immediately commences rape, rack, and ruin. Then other immigrants come
pouring in to the West, too: "the swarthy millions roaming the streets of
New York and London, or the myriad blacks and Arabs ready to spew from the
cellars of Paris." And so the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Many, of course, have simply dismissed Raspail as racist. But two factors
elevate his writing and his message.
First, he demonstrates a canniness about human nature and what it takes to
motivate people to defend their homeland. "Man never has really loved
humanity all of a piece," he writes. It's inherent that we like some more
than others-and some not at all. Indeed, in the spirit of Edmund Burke, the
wisest of political scientists, Raspail invokes the spine-stiffening power
of stolidity and continuity that is unique to one's own place. Describing
one Frenchman's centuries-old house, he lyricizes, "Each object . proclaimed
the dignity of those who had lived there-their discretion, their propriety,
their reserve, their taste for those solid traditions that one generation
can pass on to the next, so long as it still takes pride in itself." Such
objects, and the ideas that connect them and give them value, are the
touchstones of patriotism. As another Frenchman, Emile Durkheim, observed,
nations survive only if they unite around common emblems of nationhood.
Another who agreed that group solidarity requires a sense of uniqueness was
George Orwell. Writing in 1941, when his country was in danger of losing to
Germany, Orwell rallied his fellow citizens, reminding them, "When you come
back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation
of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small
things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins
are heavier, the grass is greener." This paean is romantic, perhaps even
irrational, rhapsodizing, but Orwell had a war to win, and so he offered
even more particularist patriotism: "There is something distinctive and
recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that
of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays,
smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. . Moreover
it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is
something in it that persists, as in a living creature." After reading that
apostrophe, what son or daughter of Albion wouldn't leap to the defense of
their sceptered isle against invaders or despoilers?
With comparable sentiments, Raspail summons up his poetical-historical
defense of France. In the novel, an aging professor, clearly a symbol of
France itself, muses aloud about long-ago Gauls who defended their homeland.
"Had I been with Aetius," he pronounces, "I think I would have reveled in
killing my share of Hun." Girding himself further as he prepares to take up
arms against the looming sea of trouble, the old man reflects about what it
might have been like to fight alongside Charles Martel, Godfrey of Bouillon,
the Byzantines, and Don Juan of Austria, who defeated the Turks at the naval
battle of Lepanto in 1571. In Raspail's view, the ghosts of the past should
speak loudly to the present with their common adjuration: repel the
barbarians.
Second, if Raspail was right about what motivates people to defend their
homeland, he was equally right about what it takes to de-motivate them. His
novel may be a dystopic parable, but he was dead-on in his depiction of the
systemic guilt-tripping that has afflicted the West. Only a few years before
he published his book, Susan Sontag had wailed, "The white race is the
cancer of human history." Using such suicidal sentiments as grist for his
fictional mill, Raspail sets up a confrontation between a conventional
Everyman and a group of self-hating multiculturalists. Says Everyman:
"There's
not one of you proud of his skin, and all that it stands for." To which the
answer comes, "Not proud, or aware of it either. ... That's the price we
have to pay for the brotherhood of man. We're happy to pay it."
Yet just as Raspail was right about the beliefs of many fellow
Westerners-our breed is bad, we deserve to be birth-controlled and aborted
out of existence-he was also right about the grand strategy of many in the
Third World, for whom "the winning of the North," through
immigration-invasion, has been the ultimate goal. So while Raspail did not
know the specifics of Vicente Fox's slow-motion demographic crusade to
recapture much of America for Mexico, he apprehended the general truth,
decades before Fox first articulated his reconquista.
The irony of France's situation today -as immigrants and the children of
immigrants commit exactly the kind of mayhem that Raspail warned against-is
that far more than most peoples, the French have a strong sense of
nationhood, from their overall striving for la gloire to their picky
campaign to purge non-French words from their vocabulary. And unlike, say,
the British, the French have no advanced tradition of civil liberties that
prevents a tough approach in the assimilation of foreigners. Yet on the
other extreme, unlike, say, the Germans, they have no totalitarian history
to live down. So in theory, there's no reason why the French couldn't use
statist coercion to turn North African Muslims into good and loyal
Frenchmen.
But now we know, in reality, that Paris has failed. And why is that?
Most obviously, the French have a lot of people to Gallicize; almost 10
percent of the population are Muslims, not the gentler Hindus of Raspail's
imagining. Moreover, many of these Third Worlders have imbibed the radical
ideology of Frantz Fanon, the French West Indian who became a partisan for
radical causes, culminating in his 1961 book, Les Damnés de la Terre (The
Wretched of the Earth). Fanon's influence has always been greatest in the
Francophone world, and so his hymns to the "cleansing power of violence"
have been northstars of Euro-leftist philosophy.
Piled on top of Fanon is the legacy of 1968, which hit France even harder
than the United States A critical mass of the French intelligentsia has
permanently embraced the worst of '60s ideology, which holds that all
authority is terrorism, that the cure of nationalism is internationalism,
and that the West, in particular, is guilty as charged-of all charges. These
were the people that Raspail most feared and at whom The Camp of the Saints
was most targeted.
In the decades since, the premiers of Paris cultivated an image of
hard-nosed realpolitik, in which the coolly calculating descendants of
Descartes would use facts and logic to resolve the Ethnic Question. And so
in 2004, the government imposed a ban on headscarves-worn mostly, of course,
by Muslim women-in state schools and in other public institutions. The new
law was intended to accelerate the French-ification of the non-native
population, and it might have worked, if it had come 10 or 20 years earlier.
Instead, mostly unemployed Muslim youths, with no citizenship in their home
country, and no loyalty to their new country, have staged their own Lord of
the Flies along the Seine. No wonder the French are so cynical about
everything, especially their government; they have paid their taxes,
suffered through the political speeches, and now they discover that l'etat
has failed in its most elemental Hobbesian function, which is the
maintenance of order in the streets.
But even before the recent riots, the aging Raspail-he was born in 1925-was
bluntly pessimistic about France's fate. Last year he published a piece in
Le Figaro, declaring
[T]hose of French stock-bludgeoned by the throbbing tom-tom of human
rights, of 'the welcome to the outsider,' of the 'sharing' dear to our
bishops etc., framed by a whole repressive arsenal of laws known as
'anti-racist,' conditioned from early childhood with cultural and behavioral
'crossbreeding,' with the requirements of 'plural France' and with all the
by-products of old Christian charity-will no longer have any alternative but
to degrade their own children, or merge, without offspring, into new-mould
French 'citizen' of 2050.
Because I am convinced that the fate of France is sealed, because 'My
house is their house' (Mitterand), inside 'Europe whose roots are as much
Muslim as Christian' (Chirac), because the situation is moving irreversibly
towards the final swing in 2050 which will see French stock amounting to
only half the population of the country, the remainder comprising Africans,
Moors and Asians of all sorts from the inexhaustible reserve of the Third
World, predominantly Islamic, understood to be fundamentalist Jihadists,
this dance is only the beginning. . France is not the only concern. All of
Europe marches to its death.
Of course, it might not be only Europe. America faces threats, too. And just
on Monday came news that Australian authorities had arrested 17 men
allegedly involved in a terror-bombing conspiracy. One of these
"Australians" is Abu Bakr, a "spiritual leader" born in Algeria, who until
the arrests was best known for extolling Osama bin Laden as a "great man."
This should serve as a reminder to us all: while a few in the West have been
sounding the alarm against foreign invasion for many years now, many in the
East have been sounding a clarion call of their own-that they're coming to
conquer us.
_____________________________________________________
James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday and a fellow at the New
America Foundation in Washington, D.C. He served in the White House under
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
December 5, 2005 Issue
charles bash
I think Christianity weakens civilizations, resulting in a course of No
Resistance to policies that are essentially 'Race Suicide" when carried
out to their limit in the name of Christian charity,,, or whatever. (An
exception to the Rule can occur = whipping up a whole Christian nation
to Relish and support war )
There are many preachings in the official Christian dogmas based on the
new testament that tend to lead to self destruction,, in deference to
raw self preservation.
The most outstanding examples of life Self Negativity can be found among
the American Friends Service Committee people. <<< instilling Quaker
values >>>
They were forever protesting the Vietnam war in Washington DC because
they were <<< Opposed to Killing! >>> Period. Simplistic. No debating
the encroachment of Communism by force,, and America trying to hold it
back.
College kids <<< opposed to killing >>> I would go over to Lafayette
Park, on a nice Sunday afternoon to chat with assorted protesters, who
might be willing to debate their philosophy with me.
One afternoon, I had occasion to chat with an attractive Quaker college
girl,, mebbie a Junior or possibly a Senior.
I opened with <<< so you are Always opposed to Killing! ,,, no matter
what the circumstances. >>> She said << That's right. I would never
Kill ! >>> I followed with <<< You mean to say if someone Came at you
with a Knife = and you were lucky enough to have a gun in your hand =
you mean you wouldn't Shoot Him right on the spot? >>>
She visibly turned "Pale" in a moment. Her answer?? (( honest to god))
<<< No I wouldn't shoot. I Would Never Kill!! >>>
Now I maintain :: that kid isn't being raised right! Furthermore I do
believe that the young draft age males, who believed as she did, saw
Nothing at all Wrong about fleeing to Canada in lieu of going in the
military service here.
(( but in reality, this country has got to stop entering wars of
aggression, particularly if we don't intend to win them. ))
C. Bash
<<< The Americans Will Grow Tired of The War = Then They Will Go Home
>>> ==o== Ho Chi Minh
<<< They Have Slit The Throats Of Women & Children = and Of Our Monks
and Our Sheep and Our Tourists. Someday They Will Slit Our Throats Too
= And We Will Deserve It >>> ==o== brigitte bardot ,, animal rights
activist.
Iconoclast
"charles bash" <C6...@webtv.net> wrote in message
news:4248-438F...@storefull-3318.bay.webtv.net...
>I share Iconoclast's thoughts essentially completely.
>
> I think Christianity weakens civilizations, resulting in a course of No
> Resistance to policies that are essentially 'Race Suicide" when carried
> out to their limit in the name of Christian charity,,, or whatever. (An
> exception to the Rule can occur = whipping up a whole Christian nation
> to Relish and support war )
>
Perhaps that is why Christian missionaries were sent out to parts of the
world targeted by Europeans for colonialism, i.e., to indoctrinate and
soften the local population for "race suicide." While preaching "thou shall
not steal" and "thou thall shall not kill," the Conquistadores did just the
opposite -- even coveting thy neighbor's wife, so to speak, in the case of
the Spanish invaders who intermarried with the local, indiginous
populations. What a fascinating subject to turn into a discussion in and of
its own. Good post, Mr. Bash.
Lets Roll
"Iconoclast" <Icono...@tiscali.co.za> wrote in message
news:UbWdnckwOZMWjRDe...@comcast.com...
> This is well worth the read, whatever your perspective:
>
> Camp of the Saints is about France and the French media, pitying, aiding,
> and idealizing poverty-stricken immigrants and then being over-run and
> destroyed by them. One of the traitors ends up in a whore-house available
> to all comers diseased or not, a fate most richly deserved.
>
> The American Conservative prints a good albeit tame review -- timely in
> light of recent riots staged by mostly-second-generation immigrants in
> France. You can order Camp of the Saints from the Social Contract Press,
> Petousky [pardon spelling] Michigan.
> ---------------------
>
I still have not read "Camp of the Saints", and have been meaning to for a
long time.
I am reading another right now that is not focused on immigration, but is
providing some fascinating insights into liberalism, somewhat in the same
vein as this article. "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" - Robert H. Bork.
Fortunately for me, someone else has already done a superb job of writing a
review on the book at Amazon, and I agree with them, so I am going to
plagarize their published review.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060987197/ref=sib_rdr_dp/104-0513692-7743122?%5Fencoding=UTF8&me=ATVPDKIKX0DER&no=283155&st=books&n=283155
Reviewer:
Judge Bork does a superb job of describing the various elements of
destruction that have arisen from the application of modern liberalism to
American society. He also offers best and worst case scenarios for the
future of the Republic if the current trends continue.
Bork makes it clear that he speaks not of the traditional liberalism
exercised by the Founding Fathers but rather an ideological departure from
that tradition that has hijacked and bastardized the name.
The modern form of liberalism consists of radical egalitarianism, which
inherently requires a coercive State. It also consists of a radical
individualism that corrodes institutions of restraint (i.e. family,
religion, etc.) eventually leading to a free-for-all that will require the
strong hand of government to contain. The centrality and powerfulness of the
State in modern liberalism is its most radical departure from traditional
liberalism.
Bork does not deride the successes and accomplishment of liberalism when it
still possessed the goals and intentions compatible with its tradition -
e.g. civil rights for minorities, suffrage for women, etc. However, it
quickly evolved into an entirely different beast in the mid-to-late 1960s
and has never looked back. The fact that there are currently fifty-five
professed Socialists in the U.S. House of Representatives (all Democrat) is
testimony to the extreme left-turn taken by those calling themselves liberal
today.
Bork does deride the goals, intentions, and actions of this new breed of
liberal. It is virulently anti-American and anti-Western Civilization. As it
has with the term "liberalism," the modern liberal has hijacked worthy
causes (e.g. civil rights) and has politicized them in order to advance
their radical agenda. Modern liberalism wishes to rob America of its unique
heritage and to replace it with a revolutionary concept of human nature and
human governance.
Bork goes through the various components of society where modern liberalism
has left the mark of its poison - crime, illegitimacy, welfare, abortion,
assisted suicide, sex (feminism), race (racial-preferences), ethnicity
(multi-culturalism), education (anti-intellectualism, post-modernism),
religion, etc. While Bork is careful not to place the blame entirely on the
1960s radicals, he does point out that they were the climax of an
ideological swing.
The 1960s radicals are now tenured professors and hold other positions of
leadership and influence. They may no longer be assaulting police officers
and burning buildings, but they continue to spread their poison in
institutions of higher learning, government bureaucracies, think-tanks, and
on the judicial bench. The impact of their influence permeates throughout
society and is manifest especially on college campuses where the students of
radical professors carry the torch of anti-Americanism, anti-Europeans,
anti-capitalism, anti-Western Culture, anti-white, anti-male, etc.
Bork makes it clear that continuing down the current path can only spell
disaster for America's future - where inter-racial, inter-gender,
inter-ethnic antagonism reaches a peak of resentment and hostility leading
to the breakdown of civil order.
Perhaps this is what modern liberals want - a revolution to remake America
in their own image and dispense with its entire heritage. But this is
clearly not what most Americans want, which leads to Bork's point that the
liberal radicals are a small minority of élites that have an impact totally
out of proportion to their numbers.
Bork offers several options for reversing the trend towards social
implosion. However, he quickly reduces the choices to one that focuses on
the re-assertion of institutions of order and virtue - family and religion.
It is only by reviving these institutions that there may be any hope of
taking the momentum out of the modern liberal onslaught. While Bork does
sense a glimmer of hope in this approach, he wonders whether such an
approach may merely slow the onslaught that will eventually end in the
disintegration of our society and culture.
This book is an absolute eye-opener to what damage has already been wrought
by modern liberalism. If there is any chance at all of taming and turning
back the beast, the first step is to "know thy enemy." This book serves that
purpose. Hence, I recommend it to every freedom-loving American. Obviously,
most liberals won't like what Bork has to say, but I think most people
calling themselves liberals today have no idea what some are doing under
that label. Therefore, I recommend this book to liberals as well so that
they can read for themselves what liberal radicals have done and are doing
to undermine American culture and society.
Iconoclast
"Lets Roll" <lets...@meet-me-in-hell.com> wrote in message
news:Eujkf.8521$N45....@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>
> "Iconoclast" <Icono...@tiscali.co.za> wrote in message
> news:UbWdnckwOZMWjRDe...@comcast.com...
>> This is well worth the read, whatever your perspective:
>>
>> Camp of the Saints is about France and the French media, pitying, aiding,
>> and idealizing poverty-stricken immigrants and then being over-run and
>> destroyed by them. One of the traitors ends up in a whore-house available
>> to all comers diseased or not, a fate most richly deserved.
>>
>> The American Conservative prints a good albeit tame review -- timely in
>> light of recent riots staged by mostly-second-generation immigrants in
>> France. You can order Camp of the Saints from the Social Contract Press,
>> Petousky [pardon spelling] Michigan.
>> ---------------------
>>
>
> I still have not read "Camp of the Saints", and have been meaning to for a
> long time.
I read parts of it and have it on my bookshelf. It seemed a bit trashy, but
something may have been lost in the translation to English. It's one of
those books that are more suited for a review or Readers Digest summary
rather than trying to read them in their entirety, IMHO. Camp of the Saints
was prophetic, no matter how poorly translated, in any case.
> I am reading another right now that is not focused on immigration, but is
> providing some fascinating insights into liberalism, somewhat in the same
> vein as this article. "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" - Robert H. Bork.
>
> Fortunately for me, someone else has already done a superb job of writing
> a review on the book at Amazon, and I agree with them, so I am going to
> plagarize their published review.
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060987197/ref=sib_rdr_dp/104-0513692-7743122?%5Fencoding=UTF8&me=ATVPDKIKX0DER&no=283155&st=books&n=283155
>
> Reviewer:
> Judge Bork does a superb job of describing the various elements of
> destruction that have arisen from the application of modern liberalism to
> American society. He also offers best and worst case scenarios for the
> future of the Republic if the current trends continue.
> Bork makes it clear that he speaks not of the traditional liberalism
> exercised by the Founding Fathers but rather an ideological departure from
> that tradition that has hijacked and bastardized the name.
>
I'll have to look for his book. Thanks for the comments and review, LR.
myal
> I share Iconoclast's thoughts essentially completely.
>
I feel pity for you
--
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