I read Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints in the late 1970s. It is the type of book that excites vigorous emotional opposition from liberal and leftist Westerners because it posits the idea that excessive immigration from the Third World could lead to the destruction of the West. The bookseller in the store where I ordered it was a weasel faced – not that I held that against him – self-appointed intellectual who didn’t want to sell me the book: he thought it would corrupt me. Alas, his fatherly concern came too late. It did lead me to ponder the truism that today’s book burners tend to be on the political left; that is only fitting, I suppose, since they think they know what is best for the rest of us.
Modern Britain is a testament to Raspail’s warnings; we in North America, as yet lacking much of the UK’s immigration nightmare, are probably going to do the job ourselves by aborting ourselves into extinction. The unfortunates that do survive will be secularised into despair over the meaninglessness of their existence, leading them to voluntarily hasten their departure from this vale of tears through euthanasia or suicide.
To my surprise, the book is seeing something of a revival. Here is a recent review of it:
All those engaged in the debate over illegal immigration should find Jean Raispail’s 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.
The Camp of the Saints was published first in 1973 in France as 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.”
[….]
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.
[….]
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.”
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.”
