When Reality Is Worse Than Fiction
A Review of The Camp of the Saints – Part 1

2,770 words

Jean Raspail
Le Camp des Saints
Editions Robert Laffont, 1973

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.