A Review of The Camp of the Saints.

What if in some surreally bizarre future, an invasion took place not by hordes armed with rifles and artillery, but by hordes armed with pity and guilt? Today, it’s quite obvious to all who can see that the future is now. This outcome, and the Endless Night that followed, was predicted by Jean Raspail in his best known work, The Camp of the Saints.

This was first published in 1973, and has been much discussed since then. I recall that it made a bit of a splash during the 1990s immigration debate. For example, I noted a newspaper column in which some Latina talking head, a figure in an immigration advocacy outfit or such-like, hotly dismissed The Coup [sic.] Of the Saints as a “racist fantasy.” Well, gosh, I guess that’s all we need to know about it, right? The book did get better acclaim than that elsewhere.

Jean Raspail himself distributed autographed copies to French notables all over the political map. Surprisingly, several leftists – even the big banana François Mitterrand – wrote back with kind regards for the author in private, even the ones who didn’t agree with the message. Oddly enough, some did agree, such as the Socialist writer Max Gallo. Such courtesy and divergence from the globalist hymnal hardly seems possible!

On this side of the pond, President Reagan found the book quite impressive. This is the great conservative hero who unfortunately legalized a few million illegal aliens back in 1986. (The deal was that after this, then the Republicans would fix the immigration problem, boy howdy!) In so doing, Reagan turned his beloved California into a permanent blue state which now has 54 Electoral College votes. William F. Buckley also had kind regards for The Camp Of the Saints. He was undeniably quite talented, though the sneaky snake of Con Inc. oversaw decades of salami-slicing purges from his flagship magazine. This was to the detriment of paleocons who wanted to fix the immigration problem for real. Both Reagan and Buckley were highly influential, and apparently they knew the score at least to some degree, yet they failed to make the right decisions.

Prelude to the Endless Night

This famous anti-epic opens in the near future from the perspective of 1973. It is Easter Sunday, and night is falling. A refined old professor emerges from the house that’s belonged to his family since 1673. With a telescope, he watches the scene unfolding on the Mediterranean beach. An overcrowded flotilla of not particularly seaworthy ships, carrying upwards of 800,000 migrants from India, has run aground. They dump carcasses onto the shore of the Promised Land. A military detachment heaps the dead onto macabre funeral pyres.

The symbolism is quite profound already, though this recap just scratches the surface. If that weren’t enough, across all stations, the radio is playing “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” Mozart – the second greatest Austrian of all time, a composer whose music was so civilized it hurts! I’ll further add that this recalls the broadcast of Götterdämmerung in the spring of 1945, heralding the end of the good old days.

Then a looter, out to greet his swarthy new brethren on the beach and celebrate the end of the society that nourished him, confronts the professor. The leftist rotter’s fate ends in a positive population adjustment. After preparing a meal, a glance at some old linen prompts the professor to contemplate telescopic philanthropy, including this except on how the concept of charity had mutated, complete with the tear-jerker advertisements that you too remember if you were around back then:

Then, after a while, there were too many poor. Altogether too many. Folk you didn’t even know. Not even from here. Just nameless people. Swarming all over. And so terribly clever! Spreading through cities, and houses, and homes. Worming their way by the thousands, in thousands of foolproof ways. Through the slits in your mailboxes, begging for help, with their frightful pictures bursting from envelopes day after day, claiming their due in the name of some organization or other. Slithering in. Through newspapers, radio, churches, through this faction or that, until they were all around you, wherever you looked. Whole countries full, bristling with poignant appeals, pleas that seemed more like threats, and not begging now for linen, but for checks to their account. And in time it got worse. Soon you saw them on television, hordes of them, churning up, dying by the thousands, and nameless butchery became a feature, a continuous show, with its masters of ceremonies and its full-time hucksters. The poor had overrun the earth. Self-reproach was the order of the day; happiness, a sign of decadence. Any pleasure? Beneath discussion. Even in Monsieur Calgues’s own village, if you did try to give some good linen away, they would just think you were being condescending. No, charity couldn’t allay your guilt. It could only make you feel meaner and more ashamed.

When the reverie concludes, soon the book’s familiar refrain appears: “Could that, perhaps, have been one explanation?”

The plot, in brief

This book is quite well-known by now, and has had many fine reviews, so I won’t present my usual blow-by-blow. The basics are that hordes of Third Worlders decide to move in, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, many of our countrymen are delighted by the prospect. Some collaborators are eager to be culturally enriched; these liberals and do-gooders are so open-minded that their brains fell out. Others are fever-brained radicals who want to burn down society, and now’s their chance. Then there are resentful minorities among us – the enemy already inside the city walls – ready to lash out. The media’s spin on everything, of course, is quite predictable.

Who stands against this unholy alliance? The opposition to the Pajeethad is effectively paralyzed. A long campaign of leftist ideological subversion has created a major taboo against standing up for ourselves. Everyone with a functioning brain knows the invasion will be a civilization-ending disaster, but few dare speak out, and fewer yet will act. It’s as if braving the ideological headwinds is more daunting than facing the Endless Night.

Why does all this sound so familiar? You don’t even have to be French to recognize this plot. If you’re from any other Western country, you know the score already.

As for the rest of the story, the migrants land, and the military stands down. The French flee northward – as if the White Flight strategy ever did us much good – and chaos breaks out. Despite whatever “refugees welcome” fantasy the collaborators expected, the future most certainly won’t be anything like everyone holding hands and singing “Kumbayah.” Lots of bad guys get their comeuppance during the Pajeethad, but France is done for anyway. The only resistance is a platoon-sized band of armed civilians, the story’s Camp of the Saints. Now under orders from the new leftist régime, the military that wouldn’t defend its borders promptly bombs the few who did. Meanwhile, spurred on by white irresolution, more Third World greenmarches break out across the world. After that falls the Endless Night.

Some major themes

The translator’s note in the 2011 preface describes a key distinction: those who are loyal to the French people versus those who are loyal to the French Republic. For the former, France is a biological and cultural unity. For the latter, France means the national government located in Paris and its ideology of liberty, fraternity, equality, and peppermint tea. It’s the basic globalism versus nationalism tension.

A parallel situation exists in the USA. Is the American nation identical to its founding population joined by kindred peoples assimilated to Anglo-American culture? Alternatively, is America a “proposition nation” defined by the Washington régime, its ideologies like neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and the corpus of secular mythology with Saint Dr. Rev. MLK Jr. heading the pantheon.

The analysis says that the divide between the viewpoints is so great that both sides don’t belong in the same country. To that, I’ll add that this tension wouldn’t be such a problem in a racially homogenous country, or at least one in which the ruling class didn’t wage demographic warfare against the nation’s founding population.

Another key factor in the book is the influence of religion which became corrupted by secular politics. Jean Raspail was a devout Catholic and still hopeful for an eventual revival, though he pulled no punches about the way things actually were going. In the novel, there’s already been a Vatican III conference, apparently even more squishy and universalist than the last. The reigning Dope in the story is named (surprise!) Benedict XVI, a Brazilian, and severely infected by Herz-Jesu-Sozialismus. The resemblance to how things worked out with the real Pope Benedict’s recently deceased successor – a South American noted for liberal theological flourishes – was quite prescient!

For another example, the book’s procession of monks attempting to drive back the hordes of heathen Pajeets, while armed solely with a Jesus cracker in a monstrance, is simultaneously touching, quixotic, tragic, and right out of Monty Python. If my interpretation is correct, Raspail’s point is that the Church was once a bulwark of Western civilization, but the magic is long gone. God helps those who help themselves, so Deus Vult doesn’t accomplish much if the people’s will doesn’t back it. Eventually the Vatican succumbed to modernity and error, becoming yet another corrupted institution working against the society it should serve. The Church obviously wasn’t always like this – and it certainly needn’t remain this way – but its present condition is worse than unhelpful.

Raspail’s literary genius

Occasionally The Camp Of the Saints gets criticism for its style. Some consider the dialogue as not conversational. This is to be expected in novels driven by ideas, much like Ayn Rand’s philosophical fiction. Instead, I found the style to be brilliant. Raspail’s skewering of politicians, journalists, limousine leftists, radicalinskis, and resentful minorities is unfailingly flawless. On a more horrific note, the leader of the invasion fleet and his mutant child are the ultimate picture of bioleninism and dysgenic deterioration:

Untouchable pariah, this dealer in droppings, dung roller by trade, molder of manure briquettes, turd eater in time of famine, and holding high in his stinking hands a mass of human flesh. At the bottom, two stumps; then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted and bent out of shape; no neck, but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head, and a bald little skull, with two holes for eyes and a hole for a mouth, but a mouth that was no mouth at all—no throat, no teeth—just a flap of skin over his gullet.

I’ll illustrate the author’s brilliance with a few excerpts. For one example, a gaggle of do-gooders and limousine leftist types arrange to send supplies to the invasion fleet, since surely their tummies are hungry. This results in a figurative pathological altruism pastry that reads like Tom Wolfe at his most daring:

They would show those poor wretches—and the whole world, in fact—what the white race was really like! In no time the São Tomé airport was buzzing, besieged from all sides. The great mercy-go-round. A hundred planes circling the leaden equatorial sky, waiting their turn to land. The mad scramble was on! Choice morsel of noble emotions. Monumental confection of selfless ideals. Magnificent antiracist pastry, filled with the cream of human kindness, spread with a sweet egalitarian frosting, sprinkled with bits of vanilla remorse, and on top, this graceful inscription, in flowery caramel arabesques: “Mea Culpa!” A cake to tug at the heartstrings, if ever there was one.

Mercy-go-round? Good one! The chapter is far from over. The planes fly in, described in detail: from the Vatican, the World Council of Churches, the Red Cross, and the Order of Malta. The Maltese princess disembarks and exclaims:

“Take me to the poor dears! I want to hug and kiss each one!” It had to be explained that the poor dears were sailing the vast ocean deep, somewhere off the coast. “Good Heavens,” she replied, “I do hope they’re not seasick!” And she turned to the old duke. “You see, Georges, we always forget something! All that medicine, and not a single package of Dramamine!” Good-hearted for all her naïveté, she was known the world over, turning up here and there, anywhere suffering reared its aching head, always perfectly at ease, dashing after “the poor dears” like the game hunter, off on safari, mad for a kill.

As if this send-up of gauche caviar virtue signaling weren’t enough, a fabulously wealthy British band arrives. You know the type! Their contribution to the relief package isn’t food and medicine, but rather “two cases of tricks and jokes, a box of harmonicas, fifty Indian sitars, a load of portable tape recorders, perfume for the women, incense, thirty kilos of marijuana, fancy chocolates from London Candies and Co., a box of erotic picture books, another full of comic strips, and a complete supply of fireworks (with instructions in Hindi) ‘to set off on board when you catch sight of Europe.’” Finally, representing the media, a jet packed with celebrities lands on the island. The collected “mercy-mongers” (quite a turn of phrase) engage themselves in an orgy of self-congratulation over their telescopic philanthropy.

When the invasion fleet sails past the island, the objects of charity refuse the aid supplies quite resentfully. This includes trying to ram the Maltese relief barge, throwing crates of aid supplies into the ocean, bombarding the British poseurs with their own fireworks, and heaving the freshly-strangled carcass of a white renegade into the papal barge. All told, the pathological altruism pastry goes entirely to waste! Most of the virtue-signalers simply can’t grasp that their charity was spurned with bitter hostility. The renegade’s murder is covered up.

When the media runs the story of the relief attempt through the Narrative Filter, the results are far from the truth, of course. The Duke of Malta, one of the few who came to his senses, attempts to set the record straight. Little comes of it except for the media making him out to be a nut with one hit piece headline after another:

This time, the beast let loose with a roar, and strode boldly out of its lair for all to see. The country echoed to its every growl: “Senile Old Man Tells Story . . .” “Those Maltese Clowns . . .” “Aristocrats Fight to Preserve Race Supremacy . . .” “Exclusive Interview with Fra Muttone . . .” ” Archbishop of Paris Chides Duc d’Uras . . .” “Peaceful Demonstration at Order of Malta Headquarters” etc.

Raspail’s satire is spot-on. Furthermore, it’s remarkable that the MSM’s histrionic hyperbole remains unchanged after five decades.

The story has its funny moments too; quite often black humor, of course. After the French Republic collapses, a messenger from the Paris police chief approaches the revolutionaries, appealing for calm and inviting their delegates to negotiate “an appropriate governmental reorganization, acceptable to all.” How does the bioleninist coalition react to the sudden victory falling into their hands at long last?

The child has thrown his tantrum in front of the toy-shop window, screaming that he’ll smash it. Now he has what he wanted. No more window between him and the toy he was after. And he holds it in his hands. He looks it all over, fingers it, sniffs it, and realizes that he doesn’t even know what it’s for. Will he throw it down and break it? Will he leave it in a corner and go play with his bits of string? It wouldn’t be the first time. Besides, he’s suspicious. Just what are they up to? What will they make him do in return for his nice new toy? Work hard? Be good? “It’s a trap!” someone shouted. [. . .] “The people’s multiracial revolutionary movement isn’t just some fun and games, some mask for all the old privileges to hide behind and thumb their noses!” He rattled on and on, and was loudly applauded.

After the hotheaded white radicalinski representing the faction of “extremists, anarchists, fanatics, and fools” finishes, a pragmatically-minded migrant counters him.

“Man, you stupid! Mamadou say you don’t know ass from elbow! I don’t want no pigpen, man. Sure, I want country too. Like everybody wants. But it’s gotta be country that don’t go fall apart. I eat good, you eat good, I drive car, you drive car. Everybody happy. But if you gonna drive car and you gonna eat good, you gotta have bosses. And government, man. And cops. They know how. You? You don’t know nothing. As long as you give orders, man, that’s all the fuck you care!”

I’ll give Mamadou an extra point for being the more sensible of the two.

Translation and version differences

As for the English translation by Norman Shapiro, the text with which most of us will be familiar, Instauration wasn’t impressed. Their début issue called the translation “pedestrian and at times tasteless.” (I think they didn’t like his last name!) Still, at least it credited him with helping to make the book publishable at all, along with the book’s low level of Jew-naming. Raspail himself notes that Shapiro did good work despite being a leftist. To settle the matter, I smurfed a copy of the French text. I gave the beginning a brief once-over for comparison; it’s nice that my education hasn’t entirely gone to waste! This turned out to be the third edition from 1985. A few interesting details stand out.

The first of the opening quotes is from the Book of Revelations; the translation – following the French original – calls the text Apocalypse. Very well. I don’t expect Mr. Shapiro to be familiar with the New Testament. His translation of the French, which of course itself was translated from the original Greek, is the following:

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison, and will go forth and deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and will gather them together for the battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up over the breadth of the earth and encompassed the camp of the saints, and the beloved city.

Revelations 20 from the classic King James Bible includes the following:

7: And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison,

8: And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.

9: And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city. . .

Very good, so far. Not bad with the spot-check. The next two opening quotes in the third French edition have been changed entirely. The original preface is very brief. Shapiro translates it as such:

I had wanted to write a lengthy preface to explain my position and show that this is no wild-eyed dream; that even if the specific action, symbolic as it is, may seem farfetched, the fact remains that we are inevitably heading for something of the sort. We need only glance at the awesome population figures predicted for the year 2000, i.e., twenty-eight years from now: seven billion people, only nine hundred million of whom will be white.

But what good would it do?

I should at least point out, though, that many of the texts I have put into my characters’ mouths or pens—editorials, speeches, pastoral letters, laws, news stories, statements of every description—are, in fact, authentic. Perhaps the reader will spot them as they go by. In terms of the fictional situation I have presented, they become all the more revealing.

As the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator Joseph Smith, Jun. would’ve put it, “And so it came to pass. . .” (The author Jean Raspail was quite a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator himself, now wasn’t he? I suppose that quip will send me to Outer Darkness. No biggie; I’m already there.) In the third French edition, the preface was indeed lengthy. The brevity of the preface in the 1972 original manuscript had something going for it.

In the main text, a striking difference I spotted was the professor’s dialogue with the leftist looter. Holding his shotgun, he describes how – despite hardly being the soldierly type – he would’ve fought the Huns, the Saracens, the Slavs, and time and again the Turks. Then he further imagines modern foes, finally concluding that the looter is all the above rolled into one. The latter adversaries are the following:

Perhaps I’ve done my bit, killing a pinch of Oriental at the Berlin gates. A dash of Vietcong here, of Mau Mau there. A touch of Algerian rebel to boot. At worst, some leftist or other, finished off in a police van, or some vicious Black Panther.

The selection above was deleted in the third French edition. Between 1973 and 1985, apparently that got too hot to handle. I have to wonder what else was expurgated. It’s just as well, then, that we have a suitable English translation from the original edition.

I’ll add further that the 2011 preface states that The Camp Of the Saints barely squeaked by and got grandfathered in just before the first in a series of “hate laws” was enacted. If not for that, the book would’ve been illegal to publish. Voltaire must be rolling in his grave about his distant ideological descendants becoming censorious pukes.

The story in development

The 2011 preface also describes how the idea came to the author in 1972. He was staying at a Mediterranean villa with an ocean view.

From the library where I was working, all you saw for 180 degrees was the endless expanse of the sea, such that one morning, my gaze lost in the distance, I said to myself, “What if they came?” I didn’t know who these they were, but to me, it seemed bound to happen that the inevitable poor from the south, in the manner of a tidal wave, were one day going to set out for this opulent shore, the open border of our blessed lands. That’s how it all got started.

After that, the book basically wrote itself from beginning to end:

I had no plan and not the slightest idea of how things would go, nor of the characters who were going to populate my tale. I used to stop for the night without knowing what would take place the day after, and to my great surprise, the next day my pencil raced across the paper without a snag.

I can imagine that apparently with no need for plot outlines, character sheets for his very colorful cast, or writer’s tricks to boost inspiration, it almost streamed onto the pages like Aleister Crowley’s reportedly spirit-channeled foundational work Liber AL vel Legis. In an interesting twist of fate, on the evening of February 20, 2001, a freighter full of Kurdish migrants deliberately ran aground on a rock outcropping merely fifty meters from the villa where Raspail wrote the book. Journalists wittily used the first three paragraphs of The Camp Of the Saints as boilerplate for the press report.

Early on, Raspail contemplated writing of an invasion from Africa. That would’ve been closer to how the situation developed for real – and in fact was developing by then. Whenever I’ve been in Europe and seen a continental weather forecast, the looming presence of the Maghreb to the south seems a bit menacing. This would be hardly a threat, of course, if European governments protected their borders and stood up for the interests and the will of the people they’re entrusted to govern.

It’s possible the subject of an invasion from Africa would’ve been too hot to handle in 1973. So instead, the author wrote of the fleet setting sail from India. Although the place is remarkably dysfunctional now, it was considerably worse in the 1970s, a Third World poverty theme park overpopulated with more than half a billion starving Pajeets three steps away from a Malthusian catastrophe. After globalization shipped countless jobs from white nations overseas, India’s conditions improved somewhat while ours declined. Now India’s masses have more than doubled since Raspail put pencil to paper. Just as predicted, India exports citizens by the millions, though there’s no need to commandeer a fleet of ships to do so, since Western governments are happy to turn their own countries into overpopulation safety valves for the Third World.

The author also intended at first that the whites would come to their senses at the last minute. Again, the book pretty much wrote itself, so that’s not how it went. (It would’ve been interesting to see an alternate ending.) Perhaps the French President’s dramatic final exit marks the point of no return. This is sort of like in a Greek tragedy, where there’s always one or two lines in the play after which everything irrevocably goes to shit.

How history unfolded for real

For some background, after Charles de Gaulle gave up Algeria in 1962, approximately a million ethnic French were suddenly expelled, usually leaving with no more than a suitcase of their belongings. This included many whose families had been there for generations. Meanwhile, waves of Muslims and Sephardic Jews from North Africa began flooding into France, along with immigrants from elsewhere. (So the pieds-noirs were forced to leave hastily in the name of Algeria’s ethnic self-determination, but Algerians were welcome to colonize France. Ah, diversity!) The thin end of the wedge had begun before then, though the faucet opened wider during the 1960s at this point.

By 1972, surely Jean Raspail could see where this was headed. On another note, the French government nearly collapsed four years prior under the weight of massive leftist protests. That could’ve turned into a tremendous setback in the Cold War, possibly even a fatal one. If civilization seems on very fragile ground now, this isn’t the first time.

By 1980, when the French situation was explained to me, masses of Algerian idlers formed ghettoes surrounding Paris. They weren’t getting jobs or fitting into society; instead, they were collecting welfare checks and breeding. The French government had offered them money to repatriate, but they refused. Although I was still liberal at the time, it seemed utterly absurd to support hordes of unassimilable moochers who don’t belong. Why didn’t the government send them back whether they liked it or not?

By now, of course, the situation has advanced greatly. When I arrived two decades ago, my first impression of France was the Paris subway system. Going through one métro station after another, I asked myself, “Where are all the French people?” Looking over the great crowds, other than me and my friend, there wasn’t a single blond in sight. An Egyptian guy we chatted with briefly was the closest I noticed to any whites. Later I found out that the government has a policy of not collecting statistics about ancestry. Needless to say, this is to try to keep the real French in the dark about what’s happening to their country.

Lately, a racket reminiscent of The Camp Of the Saints is continually under way. Ships operated by do-gooder NGOs pick up load after load of unwanted welfare entrepreneurs from unseaworthy vessels and, exploiting technicalities in maritime law, dump the flotsam on Italy. Then there are the arrivals from overcrowded rubber dinghies, of course. Often friendly Israeli NGOs greet them on the beach, as if by magic knowing the time and place their buddies will arrive, and distribute handouts on where to apply for welfare bennies. Quite often, the wretched refuse from teeming Third World shores moves onto greener pastures further north with more generous benefits, seeking sweeter and more plentiful fountains of white milk flowing everlastingly from the public teet.

Notably, in The Camp Of the Saints, the arrival of the invasion fleet from India represents a rapid dam-bursting event, the first move that unleashed a global Zerg Rush. The way history actually unfolded, the gradualist “boil the frog slowly” strategy continued without major publicity that could alarm the public. This wasn’t just France; nearly every other Western country was subjected to the death of a thousand cuts. It wasn’t until the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe, and the Bidet junta in America, that our betters opened the floodgates fully. (According to one analysis I’ve heard, the globalists were so near the population replacement finish line that they got impatient and overconfident.) Other than that, the Endless Night hasn’t fallen upon us all at once, but we certainly see it taking shape in “no-go zones” in major cities from Los Angeles to Malmö.

Another notable difference is that in the novel, the European leaders know very well that the Pajeethad will become a disaster. They wring their hands in indecision, unable to summon the necessary resolve, and waiting for someone else to do something about it. They want nothing to do with this invasion, and hope that the fleet will land in some other country. In modern history, the Eurocrats – as well as other treasonous politicians elsewhere – instead have been quite happy to open the door to the hordes.

Colonizing our countries with unassimilable Third World populations is justified as high-minded humanitarianism, though the real reasons are usually less noble than simply congratulating themselves on their high-mindedness. One agenda is about cheap labor. Another is a classic anarcho-tyranny strategy, to prevent a united public from getting wise and knocking the exploiter class off of the gravy train. The worst are the neurotic Zionists who hate and fear their host populations. This even applies to the French, British, and Americans who unwisely came to their rescue a few generations back.

Of course, if the so-called elites think their imported underclass will be easier to govern, they’ve got another thing coming. These unruly masses are loyal to their own religions (Islam in particular) and ethnic groups. They aren’t going to buy into squishy CivNat pieties, no matter who signs the front of their welfare checks. As soon as they get numerous and bold enough, they’ll try to take over. Besides that, for the globalists to run subversion strategies in countries they already control is a remarkably bad idea. Their answer to the tremendous problems they’re invited, and the massive unpopularity they’ve incurred doing so, always has been to double down on the strategy. Not even Jean Raspail foresaw anything so stupid and evil.

https://www.unz.com/article/when-reality-is-worse-than-fiction