2,295 words
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.
25 comments
Insert fed post.
I hope I’m not glowing too much!
I came across a tidbit noting that Israel throws a wrench into the geopolitical machinations which turn one of Egypt, Turkey, or Iran into a power great enough to challenge Europe. Yet if Islam can conquer Europe by boat and bennie, we can’t justify any need for Israel.
The Israelis are playing both halves against the middle – as usual.
Good article, but there is a correction to be made. Referring to Jews as “neurotic Zionists” is misleading. Judah-ism itself over-arches Zionist Jews, socialist Jews and liberal Jews. Placing blame on Zionism provides a convenient escape for other Jews who are hyper tribal and extremely anti-white. The problem is Judah-ism and the people who practice it. Even a cursory examination of the books that make up the Torah and the Talmud show very clearly that this is a very dangerous, supremacist terrorist cult.
I have a somewhat broader definition of Zionism. In the beginning, it was the movement to establish the state of Israel, but they’ve moved the goalposts long ago. By now it’s effectively become a transnational mafia. Therefore, Zionism means the harmful and destructive characteristics that you mentioned, including by those calling themselves liberals and socialists.
Well done, I seem to recall a character in the book (it has been almost thirty years), a submarine commander who failed to torpedo the incoming flotilla—do I remember right? 🙃
More or less, though it was a destroyer rather than a submarine. The debriefing is in chapter 27. Basically, the crew got a good look at them and lost their nerve.
Yes, they saw all those sexy brown women showing their vaginas. 🙃
I’ve been fighting nonwhite immigration my whole life, sometimes professionally, always at least informally. Tolerating what I’ve been calling since the 1970s “the immigration invasion” is insanity. That insanity has revealed the fatal weakness of the white man: genetic recessiveness combined with a biological tendency towards moral universalism (reinforced by shallow versions of Christian theology, and now also secular liberalism).
I keep offering what I’m convinced is the only answer: territorial ingathering of prowhites into one or a handful of existing sovereign states that we can reasonably hope to electorally conquer, and then transform via Greg Johnson’s “slow cleanse” into future ethnostates.
Without racial separation, state sovereignty, and military power under our exclusive control, our race is doomed to ever worsening exploitation, alien predation, and eventual extinction.
{PS – Beau, any idea how to obtain an original French language copy of Camp? Or is that just prohibitively expensive?}
I don’t think the problem is genes, but rather faulty ideology, extreme pressure to conform, and treasonous “elites”.
To get a copy of the French version, I’d recommend the used book market. If it’s unavailable, you might be able to smurf an electronic copy still.
Sorry, Beau, that’s too easy. How do you explain white self-defeatism everywhere, even in countries with no traditions of colonialism (which was generally a good thing), slavery, or “racism”? Why don’t other races behave as whites do? Why do only whites practice suicidal racial self-abnegation? Don’t blame Christianity, either: most of the worst race traitors are seculars and atheists, and as the West has become more secular and less Christian, it has become racially yet more douchebaggy.
Genetic influences on temperament and behavior is a bedrock principle of the Biological Right. White racial hysteria over whether we are treating usually ungrateful nonwhites with appropriate respect and tender concern is found all over the world, suggesting some genetic component, imo, a substantial one. And even if our “elites” are treasonous, that doesn’t account for why whites are so susceptible to moral panics and brainwashing.
Secular liberal atheists take Christian egalitarianism and altruism very seriously.
Genes don’t dramatically change in a few generations. Ideas, however, do.
There’s the theory that the major combatant countries of the two world wars – Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the USA and Italy became genetically enfeebled due to the casualties they suffered, which thereby assisted the takeover of race-blind universalism in those countries. What about those White countries that had little if any involvement in those conflicts – Sweden, Norway, The Netherlands etc; the first of these countries was neutral during the Second World War with the latter two militarily involved for only an extremely brief period suffering limited casualties.
Yes, that theory doesn’t hold up.
And why did WWI lead to cuckery in some countries and fascism in others? All of them lost a lot of good men. Obviously, ideological factors made all the difference.
To put it very briefly, it’s about ideology. The fact is that decades of high intensity, full-spectrum indoctrination is going to have an effect. The crazy stuff is a very new phenomenon which didn’t reach critical mass until the 1960s. That’s pretty much an eyeblink compared to the long stretch of history prior to all that.
But there must be something about whites that makes them more susceptible to race-denialist brainwashing than other races. Why did this new religion of Diversity take such firm root in the West and nowhere else? It’s because whites are better on average than other races. We are more ethically universalist. That is a higher status than being ethically tribalist, even though, paradoxically, the latter leads to preservation, and the former extinction.
I agree with ethical universalism – to an extent. I would aid a morally good nonwhite over a morally sketchy white. But I would aid a normal white over a normal nonwhite, in part for tribal reasons, but also because I believe whites are, as entire races go, superior, and therefore that preserving the white race (which is also the only race under threat of extinction) is itself a profound act of morality.
I have a few white friends who are literally passionate about anti-racism. These are not ghetto savages, or antifa terrorists. They’re good people, the kind who would rush to help a man if he fell down clutching his heart. Yet, they still insist that America is “racist” (against nonwhites; I agree otherwise, but it’s target is us); that George Floyd was “murdered”; that it’s a terrible thing to be prowhite, etc. There are no nonwhites, including nonwhite conservatives, who possess this self-abnegational passion for advancing the interests of other races at the expense of their own. That is a white thing; I’ve seen it too many times across my nearly 64 years, most of it spent in very diverse cities (LA, NY, DC, Bay Area) that afforded innumerable opportunities for interracial observations.
Whites are genetically predisposed to individualism and universalism, which is a great strength under racial homogeneity, but a horrific weakness under diversity.
To go into proper depth on all of that would require an entire article. Want me to write it up?
It’s become hard to find English version copies today, and used copies are very expensive. A new English edition is needed. Fortunately, one can still get a relatively inexpensive Kindle version of it — for now.
I’d love to read a book about how this invasion was finally defeated – cutting the heads off snakes, hanging the traitors, ejecting the invaders, and get to work rebuilding and protecting the West for future generations of white people.
I did write something like that as science fiction:
Where No Übermensch Has Gone Before: Rainbow Albrecht’s Space Vixen Trek Episode 17 (counter-currents.com)
I was hoping to see the Gustave Moreau Museum before it got trashed. They will trash everything.
Top-notch writing, Beau.
Aw, thanks! You’re too kind 🙂
There is a vendor on EBAY who has five, hardback, reprint, copies available for just under $40.00! There is one listing of over $800.00 for a copy of my paperback version—who would have thought! 🙃
I have a few white friends who are literally passionate about anti-racism.
It just may be that the decline of religion in the Western world has led to liberals adopting “Wokeness” as a substitute into which they channel their passions. The self-abnegation, the acts of faith, the messianic goal of a utopian world, the witch hunts against heretics, the iconoclasm…these are all elements of a War of Religion.
It’s a very strange war insofar as only one side is actually fighting…at least until recently.
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