What’s in a Word?
Renaud Camus, The Deep Murmur, Vauban Books, 2024, 82 pp., $11.95
Where are the “rivers of blood?”
We are all familiar with Enoch Powell’s dire prophecy in what he called his “Birmingham Speech” but what history calls the “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell decried the “madness” of the British government, warning darkly that within 15 or 20 years, there would be three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants in the UK. Today, there are about 12 million non-whites; yet there has been no revolt.
We should not simply call this cowardice, pathological altruism, misplaced idealism, or naivete. The British people have repeatedly supported parties that have promised immigration restriction, notably the Conservatives, who governed for more than a decade (and increased immigration to record levels). Brexit was largely motivated by the desire to cut immigration. The politicians ignored voters. Britain might be more democratic if King Charles III seized power and began personal rule.
The United Kingdom has strict regulations against free speech and pro-white activism. Crimes against whites, including the disgrace of Rotherham, have led to no real changes. In contrast, the rare crimes against blacks have become holidays and a focus of national re-education. The British people are not free to choose their fate — or free at all. When they do make a choice against replacement, they are ignored.
Explaining why is Renaud Camus’s goal in his collection, The Deep Murmur. The title is his explanation of what constitutes “race,” taking a quote from Georges Bernanos. “Alas, around the little French boys huddled together over their notebooks, pen in hand, attentive and sticking out their tongues a little, like around young people drunk from their first outing beneath the flowering chestnut trees in the arms of a little blonde girl, there was in times past that vague and enchanted memory, that dream, that deep murmur in which the race cradles its own.”
“An enchanted memory, a dream, a deep murmur, this is how race makes itself heard in the depths of the language, and this is what it is,” says Mr. Camus. He rejects the purely biological definition of race because race, like love, is hard to define even though we know it is real. Dismissing the word race from the language — as the French, for years, tried to do — does not make it cease to exist or allow us to think more clearly. It muddles thought and cripples action. This, Mr. Camus suggests, may have been the whole point of the campaign against the word.
Still, Mr. Camus’s nebulous definition will admittedly frustrate some race realists and white advocates, because it seems like a retreat from biological reality. However, accepting the biological reality of race does not necessarily mean caring about the fate of the white one. Certainly, some more hardline thinkers on racial matters than Mr. Camus also adopted this vaguely spiritual definition of race, among them Julius Evola (whose views helped define Fascist Italy’s racial policies) and Francis Parker Yockey (author of Imperium and The Proclamation of London.)
This is not a retreat if we understand Mr. Camus’s context, which is not biology, but language. Language is what drives political action, and it is highly significant that the very word “race,” once a standard feature of politicians’ rhetoric, has gone underground. Indeed, Mr. Camus reminds us that this did not happen just after World War II. For example, Georges Pompidou, President of the Republic from 1969–1974, could say without raising eyebrows that “the shock of the defeat, the extraordinary adventure of General de Gaulle, and doubtless a deep-seated reaction of our race have restored to us our vitality, a certain appetite for risk, and even some ambitions.”
Mr. Camus contends that the inability even to use the word, to be forced into acceptance of the “dogma of the non-existence of races,” is key to understanding why there has been so little resistance to The Great Replacement. Moreover, this was the consequence of World War II or the Holocaust, which led to the “first antiracism” of defending races against each other. Instead, it was a product of the “second antiracism,” which aimed to abolish race altogether. This has led to some amusing ironies, with the newly diverse populations imported into France in the name of antiracism unwilling to sit through antiracist indoctrination classes about the Holocaust because it offends their own ethnic grievances.
Mr. Camus argues that the radical creed of racial denial emerged almost from a fit of absence of mind. He quotes former president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who allegedly told him in 2009 that “all these absurd laws” were passed to appease Jews who were worried about the influx of anti-Semitic North Africans. Indeed, according to another conversation he quotes, the same source says the laws were simply to make Simone Veil happy. Mr. Camus does not identify the particular laws, but he presumably means the 1972 law that allowed the government to ally with “antiracist” groups, ban “racist” groups and speech, and punish so-called discrimination. More specifically, he refers to the 1975 Haby Law that standardized core curriculum and simplified instruction in the hope of overcoming class and racial distinctions. “It was at this time, 1975,” Mr. Camus says, “that culture no doubt irreversibly transitioned (a transition admirably reflected, from one day and hour to the next, on radio stations such as French Culture) from culture as patrimony, heritage, the voice of the dead to culture as leisure activity, entertainment, hobby, a way of passing the time, a way of killing it.”
We do not need to deny the biological reality of race to admit that what defines a people (what those like Theodore Roosevelt would have called a race) is a sense of ineradicable attachment to a history, culture, identity, and interest. When Abraham Lincoln appealed to the “mystic chords of memory,” it was precisely to argue that Americans still constituted one people because of their shared struggles, in a speech in which he referred to the deeds of “our fathers.” “Race” was used to refer to peoples, lineages of kings, and even psychological types. French leaders, well into the postwar era, could refer to the “French race.” This did not imply a denial of biological racial types, though Mr. Camus argues that the French race has “very few ethnic characteristics.” “For roughly thirty years after 1945, the word race was widely used in the language, and there was still nothing pejorative associated with it,” says Mr. Camus. “In the school textbooks of the fifties, it was still taught, with the aid of illustrations, that there existed four races – white, yellow, black, and red; when the children got a little older, this was somewhat fine-tuned but without, as far as I can recall, calling into the principle of the division.” In other words, though people might have quibbled with the categories or boundaries, no one denied race existed as a meaningful concept.
The main objection to race, Mr. Camus says, is that it supposedly has no scientific reality. He pleads that he has little real interest in the question and is mostly focused on language. Yet Mr. Camus does not concede this point so easily. He dismisses the argument from imprecise boundaries, which holds that because race may be difficult to define at the margins it is therefore meaningless as a concept. Such a standard, he says, could mean we could dispense with concepts like national histories, families, or even colors. More importantly, he argues that science is “far from being independent of the political authorities, particularly the most powerful amongst them, ideological authority.” He proposes an experiment.
I ask you to imagine what would happen to a young scholar should he today discover (God forbid — that’s all we need!) that women’s intellectual capacity is 17.48% lower than that of men. Does one believe that this scholar, no matter how rigorously he carried out his study, would be acclaimed for miles around by the academic and civil authorities? That peer-reviewed journals would fight over the honor of publishing the results of his research? That ministers of Research, Higher Education, and the Woman’s Question would immediately open a line of credit for him to pursue the aforementioned research, offering him new laboratories and immediately providing him with a bevy of fully dedicated assistants? It is immensely more likely that our unfortunate scholar would there and then find himself obliged to give up all hope of ever having a career.
We are thus not really talking about science, or even about simply language, but power:
I am for my part persuaded that the fearsome taboo that was placed on the word race and that contagiously spread to everything to which it might have referred over the course of its immensely rich, centuries long history is the decisive element, the node, the inflection point of all recent, modern, contemporary ideological history: the most consequential effect of language, not only for what is thought to be the delimitation of its acceptable, admissible space, beyond which social death begins, but also for history itself and the geography of the world, at least the human one. . . .
It is doubtless not this that threw hundreds of millions of men and women (above all men, in point of fact) onto the roads and seas, but it is this that rendered what once would have been the natural reaction to this type of upheaval, any serious resistance to this floodtide, any self-confident riposte on the part of thousand-year-old cultures, nations, and civilizations impossible and obsolete. For the interests that demanded that men be exchangeable at will, like a product — that he be interchangeable, replaceable, delocalizable and so be forthwith delocalized, disaffiliated, de-originated, denationalized — it was essential that this sturdy barrier, race, be brought down; and to prevent it from ever going back up again once it had been brought down, anyone who recalled having ever seen it or who spoke to its past existence had to be criminalized.
It is for this reason that we have not seen “rivers of blood” in countries like England. That country, “which displayed such exemplary heroism, such unparalleled steadfastness, such spirit of resistance faced with previous threats of invasion, has this time extraordinarily seen to its own submission, a submission not so much, if at all, to the invaders themselves as to the forces, and mechanism, and interests that have brought them in ever greater numbers, that have imposed them and that protect them.” He asks whether Enoch Powell would not have preferred war, which would not have been civil after all, but a “decolonial uprising of the natives, their revolt against the genocidal, ethnocidal governments.” It is a dark scenario that might yet be preferable to the present: something “yet worse, uglier, baser, dirtier, more foolish, sadder, infinitely less glorious, and less English than what he had foretold and which was already so frightening.”
Mr. Camus argues that the interests that benefit from the present are a kind of worst-case combination of both Right and Left. The profit-driven with a “purely managerial conception of the world” along with the egalitarian fanatics have given us a world with something less than humanity. It is what Mr. Camus calls an Undifferentiated Human Material, infinitely exchangeable, spreadable at will, pressed by the press and ground down by the courts and ready-made for every shanty of the global shantytown. It is a world devoid of inheritance and identity, trapped in an eternal present. Such a world is devoid of authenticity and meaning.
Mr. Camus’s message is more prominent than ever. The Wall Street Journal recently granted him respectful coverage. The United Kingdom banned him from entering the country. His publisher, Vauban Books, recently published his novel Ørop. Yet repression seems to be intensifying, and center-right governments in Europe have proven incapable or unwilling to actually reverse demographic transformation. The situation often seems desperate.
What weapon do we have against such a fearsome enemy? Only the truth, Mr. Camus says, which he argues was enough eventually to overcome Soviet tyranny. Yet there can be no false comfort. The last essay in this slim collection is an endorsement for the candidacy of Eric Zemmour, who posted disappointing results in the French presidential election that Mr. Camus called the “last chance [for the French ethnos] to reclaim its rights.” If so, that chance failed. Yet so long as the race endures, defiance will endure, and if defiance endures, so can hope. However, if this collection shows nothing else, we must fight openly in the name of race. We cannot expect to prevail unless we are clear about what it is we are fighting for.