SUMMER READING: "THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS" BY JEAN RASPAIL
By Robert Klein Engler (06/29/07)
All those engaged in the debate over illegal immigration should find The Camp of the Saints a challenging summer read. Otto Scott calls it "one of the most famous of the underground books." Lionel Shriver believes it is a "novel both prescient and appalling." The book became so notorious that the December 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly investigated many of the questions it raised.
This novel by Jean Raspail was published first in France with the 1973 title, Le Camp des Saints. An English translation by Norman Shapiro was published by Scribner in 1975. Since then, the book has been republished and described as a "controversial and politically incorrect novel," and "a Fascist fantasy."
No review of this book should ignore Samuel Jared Taylor's comments. Taylor writes, "In The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail goes further and declares his allegiance to his race--though it is an allegiance tinged with bitterness at the weakness of the White man. It is the story of the final, tragic end of European civilization which falls...by its own hand."
I suspect this assessment by Taylor is not actual racism, but a metaphorical way of describing how certain groups are carriers of ideas. Among others, the sociologist Max Weber, who fought a lifelong battle against Marxism, would agree with the thesis that ideas move through history embodied in groups and living human beings. A similar sentiment is echoed by Professor Jeffrey Hart of Dartmouth, who claims, ''Raspail is not writing about race, he is writing about civilization...''
THE FRENCH CONNECTION
It is not unusual that The Camp of the Saints would originate in France. Much of what we experience today in the United States in regard to the political justification for illegal immigration also originated there. In fact, waves from the French Revolution are still washing up on shores all around the world. Blood from the Reign of Terror's guillotine has simply turned into the red flag of Communism.
Jean Raspail was born in France in 1925. He is a traveler, explorer and prize winning author. He has been described as "a tall man of soldierly bearing and...a traditionalist. While he is courtesy and gentleness itself in his manner...he dislikes the incursions that Anglo-Americanisms have made into the French culture.''
The Camp of the Saints presents a reader with an alternate apocalypse from the one found in the Biblical book of Revelation. Even though Raspail's title is taken from Revelation 20:9, "And they came up on the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints," the book has very little to do with a biblical interpretation of events.
Instead, the title is a sarcastic reference that shows to the Western reader the end of the world in secular terms. In Raspail's book, liberalism marches steadfastly to its demographic doom. How can that be?
It can be because we are facing a cultural crisis brought on by uncontrolled immigration both in the United States and in Europe. Writing in V-Dare, Paul Craig Roberts argues, "To reach France, Third World invaders must cross seas. To reach the U. S., Mexicans only have to walk across the border."
"Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, says, 'Mexican immigration is a unique, disturbing, and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country.'"
"'If over one million Mexican soldiers crossed the border," Huntington argues, "Americans would treat it as a major threat to their national security and react accordingly. Why then do we not react as vigorously to the invasion of one million Mexican civilians?"
When Katharine Betts asked Jean Raspail in an interview about where his vision of the West and its future had come, he said this was a difficult question. "In one sense the West is more than ever triumphant, but it has a conception of the rights of man. In its original form this was an excellent idea, but it has now been misapplied and it is being used against France, the very country that had first conceived it."
The country that supposedly values clear thinking, is now undermined by its own theories. So, in the novel, old professor Clagues, who confronts with his shotgun one of the invaders says, " I too have stopped thinking and just want to tell you where I stand." The professor fires, and then turns his back on the corpse and goes inside.
END TIME
There are at least two visions of the end time emerging in the West: The secular and the religious. Perhaps this is what the poet T. S. Eliot meant when he said the world will end with a whimper, not a bang. Perhaps there are only two philosophies of life in the West, as well: The Aristotelian and the Platonist. Today, Marxism is the new Platonism.
In the secular vision of the end, The Camp of the Saints shows us how the West could descend into a multicultural swamp. By imposing a theory from above, liberalism attempts to transform Western society with the result that multiculturalism is to society what schizophrenia is to a personality: a named in sanity.
Standing against The Camp of the Saints is another text, the book of Revelation. Here, too, we see how forces work toward an end. Yet this end does not limit us to only this world. The telos that emerges at the end of the Bible is a New Heaven and a New Earth. In a very Classical Greek way, the Bible tells us that life begins in a garden but ends in a city, the New Jerusalem.
A CITY TRANSFORMED
Near the end of your life, the only future you may see is one based upon your experience of what has passed as you lived. I suppose this is one explanation for Jean Raspail's book, written more than thirty years ago.
I have seen in my lifetime the Chicago neighborhood and community college I hoped to preserve transformed first into an African-American ghetto and then into a colony of Mexico. Many shortsighted politicians wanted that to happen so that they could remain in power.
Some say this transformation was the result of impersonal forces at work, market forces and population shifts, and not the decisions of selfish men looking after their own interest. Does it make any difference? What Jean Raspail imagined has happened already, just a bit more slowly.
In Chicago, so many left and so many came and so many will leave again. Their efforts are consumed by fire and bulldozers. Civilization remembers, barbarism destroys. Welcome to the globalization of America!
When I attended Harper High School it was one of the best schools in Chicago. Now, it is one of the worst and soon will be closed and torn down. Another graduate of that very school serves in the Illinois state senate as a Democrat.
Today, what does all that happened before he attended Harper High School matter to an Illinois state senator? He offers no explanation for the change from good to bad beyond the obvious supplanting of traditional America with a multicultural nightmare. There are barbarians who do not know they are barbarians.
If I were to draw a line from my life to the year 2050, based on what I have seen so far, the human tsunami of uncontrolled immigration to the United States will wash away the timber and toothpicks of many lives in Chicago just as it did in The Camp of the Saints. The white working class of Chicago ends up wandering from city to suburb, only to lose the war against oblivion.
By 2050 Chicago may have its first Muslim mayor. To echo a sentiment from Raspail, many of the cab drivers of the city are beside themselves with joy. When he turns over the gavel that opens a session of the new city council, it may read on the bottom, "Hecho en China."
What will all that came before, from the Fort Dearborn Massacre to the demolition of Harper High School matter to the new mayor? Very little, I suspect. The citizens of a new Chicago imagine Wells Street to be where those who came earlier watered their camels.
Then, Chicago will have emerged from being an American city, if it ever was one, to a global city, if it ever could be one. The persistent reality here is that the barons who build skyscrapers benefit at the expense of beggars in their bungalows.
This may be why Pauline Lipman writes with the plodding prose of sociology in her article "Chicago School Reform," "Although racial inequality and segregation have been persistent realities throughout Chicago's history, the city's school policies are unfolding in a context in which the processes of globalization...intersect with historical patterns of structural racism to produce new forms of social isolation and racial exclusion." In other words, things go from bad to worse in the city's schools.
Who brings us these new forms of isolation and exclusion in Chicago? Certainly the Immigration Act of 1965 and the amnesty of 1985 contributed to this isolation and racial exclusion. Furthermore, it is the very same Democrats who bring us third world immigrants, low wage workers and segregation, while at the same time decrying the plight of these victims.
If "comprehensive immigration reform" passes the U. S. Senate and House of Representatives and is signed into law, such an urban transformation probably will come to your neighborhood, too. The Camp of the Saints might be your secular future. It might be good to spend part of your summer reading about that future.
KILLED BY OUR OWN
Few people get up in the morning and wonder if what they do during the day may advance or destroy Western Civilization. They simply have private concerns and interests. Likewise, politicians want to satisfy those who contribute to their campaigns: the unions, the business executives, and the transnational corporations.
Nevertheless, the world assembles our collective actions and makes a whole out of various parts. That is why we need to consider the possible future imagined in The Camp of the Saints.
I have sympathy for one of the characters in the novel, even though his ultimate values are not mine. Colonel Dragases sets out with a band of like-minded French patriots to stop the Third World invaders. Regrettably, these patriots are killed by the French air force on a bombing run.
"I'd rather be killed by our own. It's much cleaner that way. There's something more final," are the last words of Colonel Dragases as he waits for the planes on a terrace where he stands with his friends. Then, the bombs fall and the villa is a heap of rubble. This is how the world ends, with a bang and the stench of latrines.
The Camp of the Saints will remain a controversial book for sometime to come. This book reminds us that there are forces at work in history we may not control, but do not expect this book to be required reading in Chicago's public high schools any time soon. Multiculturalism erases the past for the sake of a gray conformity.
A VISION FROM LEFT AND RIGHT
Conversion was needed to maintain the Church in the West, and its secular equivalent, assimilation is needed to maintain the nation state, today. In The Camp of the Saints, the shear number of invaders made assimilation to French culture impossible. In the end, France disappears. And what was France in the grand scheme of things, anyway? Nothing but a moment between Rome and Eurabia.
Assimilation is not happening nor is it needed in a world that is globalized. The global city with its need for a disciplined and low paid workforce functions best as a segregated city. Thus it is possible for uncontrolled immigration to make a nation that was once a river of hope into a sewer of despair.
The Camp of the Saints helps us understand, too, how over time the meaning of a culture is lost. This is how we go from Patrick Henry saying, "Give me liberty or give me death," to Senator Harry Reid saying 12 million illegal aliens are really "undocumented Americans."
In the two hundred years that span the death of Patrick Henry and the life of Senator Harry Reid, the darkness of forgetting grows deep. Nevertheless, a person of faith believes there is a moral purpose to events. He sees this purpose, however, through a glass darkly. If the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 is part of God's plan, then it is difficult to reason out the details of that plan. We wait on the fullness of time.
The secular apocalypse Jean Raspail imagines includes the futility of moral action. For the person of faith, such futility is itself immoral. The person of faith is expected to do what is right, even if he does not grasp the complete implications of his actions. At the very least, he bears witness.
To that end, a person of faith recognizes that nations are an essential part of organized, human life. Nations play a role in making us fully human and are therefore defensible. This being the case, a person of faith has a moral duty to oppose illegal immigration that threatens the life of a nation and undermines the meaning of life for its citizens.
Jean Raspail's vision in The Camp of the Saints is an imaginary one of how the secular order in the West may end. It is a vision seen through the right eye. According to Raspail, the West "has no soul left" and "it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles."
Today, a vision from the left eye, the one of Global Warming, carries a similar warning of doom. Al Gore's politically correct apocalypse ends with an equivalent whimper. Both visions agree human activity created a world that seems now to be beyond the control of human activity.
The secular world truly is in need of salvation, a salvation Jean Raspail believes Christian charity will prove itself powerless to effect. So, he warns us during our summer of immigration discontent, "The times will be cruel."
Robert Klein Engler
(Printer friendly version) Email: Robert Klein Engler
