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| French Author Jean Raspail |
It is a matter for debate whether this is an inexorable torrent that dooms Western Civilization, or merely a drip, drip, drip that we as a rich and humane collection of northern nations can and must welcome and assimilate.
I want to stipulate a few points:
* An idea or philosophy is not discredited simply because evil people grasp them for their own nefarious motives. Grotesque monsters have killed over 100 million people in the name of Karl Marx, but that does not discredit Marx's keen social observations or make him complicit in communist mass murder. Hitler appropriated Nietzche and Wagner, but neither man would have countenanced Hitler's horrible weltanschauung.
* We have a moral imperative to help those less fortunate than us. How we do that is the thorny question.
Please pause here and read Jean Raspail's Introduction to 1985 French Edition of Camp of the Saints.
For the impatient, I post the salient points from the author's essay.
* We are enduring a "peaceful invasion."
"What’s to be done, since no one would wish to renounce his own human dignity by acquiescing to racism? What’s to be done since, simultaneously, all persons and all nations have the sacred right to preserve their differences and identities, in the name of their own future and their own past?"
* The author's comment on the broad sweep of human history:
"The confrontations that flow (and have always flowed) from this, are not racist, nor even racial. They are simply part of the permanent flow of opposing forces that shape the history of the world. The weak fade and disappear, the strong multiply and triumph."
* The West accomplished much, through science, inventions, literature and arts, and yes, military conquest, but the tide has turned:
"Now that the relationship between the forces has been diametrically reversed, and our ancient West — tragically now in a minority status on this earth — retreats behind its dismantled fortifications while it already loses the battles on its own soil, it begins to behold, in astonishment, the dull roar of the huge tide that threatens to engulf it. One must remember the saying on ancient solar calendars: ‘It is later than you think…’"
* Raspail catalogs the factors and players in this drama of global demography's shifting tectonic plates: The stream of immigrants jumping multiple centuries, radicalized immigrant communities, the "strong psychological impact of human rights organizations, the inflamed evangelism of the religious leadership, a hypocritical purity of consciences, refusal to look the truth in the face."
Demographics is Destiny
"It’s enough to go back to the scary demographic predictions for the next thirty years, and those I will cite are the most favorable ones: encircled by seven billion people, only seven hundred million of them white, hardly a third of them in our little Europe, and those no longer in bloom but quite old. They face a vanguard of four hundred million North Africans and Muslims, fifty percent of them less than twenty years old, those on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean arriving ahead of the rest of the world! Can one imagine for a second, in the name of whatever ostrich-like blindness, that such a disequilibrium can endure?"
"The West is Empty"
Raspail has been unfairly damned as a racist. He is not. Rather he is a Frenchman who wants France to endure as his forefathers passed it on to him, but he senses that it is too late, and he damns his fellow westerners:
For the West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left.
"At every level — nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. I can hardly discern any soul in us. […] They are content to just endure. Mechanically, they ensure their survival from week to week, ever more feebly. Under the flag of an illusory internal solidarity and security, they are no longer in solidarity with anything, or even cognizant of anything that would constitute the essential commonalities of a people. In the area of the practical and materialistic, which alone can still light a spark of interest in their eyes, they form a nation of petty bourgeois which, in the name of the riches it inherited and is less and less deserving of, rewards itself — and continues to reward itself in the middle of crisis — with millions of domestic servants: immigrants. Ah! How they will shudder! The domestics have innumerable relatives on this side and beyond the seas, a single starving family that populates all the earth. […]
But the petty bourgeois, deaf and blind, continues to play the buffoon without knowing it. Still miraculously comfortable in his lush fields, he cries out while glancing toward his nearest neighbor ‘Make the rich pay!’ Does he know, does he finally know that it is he who is the rich guy, and that the cry for justice, that cry of all revolutions, projected by millions of voices, is rising soon against him, and only against him. That’s the whole theme of Camp of the Saints."
What Say You?
Related: Radish - The Camp of the Saints
I want to stipulate a few points:
* An idea or philosophy is not discredited simply because evil people grasp them for their own nefarious motives. Grotesque monsters have killed over 100 million people in the name of Karl Marx, but that does not discredit Marx's keen social observations or make him complicit in communist mass murder. Hitler appropriated Nietzche and Wagner, but neither man would have countenanced Hitler's horrible weltanschauung.
* We have a moral imperative to help those less fortunate than us. How we do that is the thorny question.
Please pause here and read Jean Raspail's Introduction to 1985 French Edition of Camp of the Saints.
For the impatient, I post the salient points from the author's essay.
* We are enduring a "peaceful invasion."
"What’s to be done, since no one would wish to renounce his own human dignity by acquiescing to racism? What’s to be done since, simultaneously, all persons and all nations have the sacred right to preserve their differences and identities, in the name of their own future and their own past?"
* The author's comment on the broad sweep of human history:
"The confrontations that flow (and have always flowed) from this, are not racist, nor even racial. They are simply part of the permanent flow of opposing forces that shape the history of the world. The weak fade and disappear, the strong multiply and triumph."
* The West accomplished much, through science, inventions, literature and arts, and yes, military conquest, but the tide has turned:
"Now that the relationship between the forces has been diametrically reversed, and our ancient West — tragically now in a minority status on this earth — retreats behind its dismantled fortifications while it already loses the battles on its own soil, it begins to behold, in astonishment, the dull roar of the huge tide that threatens to engulf it. One must remember the saying on ancient solar calendars: ‘It is later than you think…’"
* Raspail catalogs the factors and players in this drama of global demography's shifting tectonic plates: The stream of immigrants jumping multiple centuries, radicalized immigrant communities, the "strong psychological impact of human rights organizations, the inflamed evangelism of the religious leadership, a hypocritical purity of consciences, refusal to look the truth in the face."
Demographics is Destiny
"It’s enough to go back to the scary demographic predictions for the next thirty years, and those I will cite are the most favorable ones: encircled by seven billion people, only seven hundred million of them white, hardly a third of them in our little Europe, and those no longer in bloom but quite old. They face a vanguard of four hundred million North Africans and Muslims, fifty percent of them less than twenty years old, those on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean arriving ahead of the rest of the world! Can one imagine for a second, in the name of whatever ostrich-like blindness, that such a disequilibrium can endure?"
"The West is Empty"
Raspail has been unfairly damned as a racist. He is not. Rather he is a Frenchman who wants France to endure as his forefathers passed it on to him, but he senses that it is too late, and he damns his fellow westerners:
For the West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left.
"At every level — nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. I can hardly discern any soul in us. […] They are content to just endure. Mechanically, they ensure their survival from week to week, ever more feebly. Under the flag of an illusory internal solidarity and security, they are no longer in solidarity with anything, or even cognizant of anything that would constitute the essential commonalities of a people. In the area of the practical and materialistic, which alone can still light a spark of interest in their eyes, they form a nation of petty bourgeois which, in the name of the riches it inherited and is less and less deserving of, rewards itself — and continues to reward itself in the middle of crisis — with millions of domestic servants: immigrants. Ah! How they will shudder! The domestics have innumerable relatives on this side and beyond the seas, a single starving family that populates all the earth. […]
But the petty bourgeois, deaf and blind, continues to play the buffoon without knowing it. Still miraculously comfortable in his lush fields, he cries out while glancing toward his nearest neighbor ‘Make the rich pay!’ Does he know, does he finally know that it is he who is the rich guy, and that the cry for justice, that cry of all revolutions, projected by millions of voices, is rising soon against him, and only against him. That’s the whole theme of Camp of the Saints."
What Say You?
Related: Radish - The Camp of the Saints
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