The Notorious Book that Ties the Right to the Far Right (New Republic)

[eppur_se_muova]

The enduring popularity of the racial-dystopian novel "The Camp of the Saints" sheds light on nativists' historical opposition to immigration.

By Sarah Jones
February 2, 2018

Midway through Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, the French president asks his army to consider shooting refugees on sight: “I am asking every soldier and officer, every member of our police—asking them from the depths of my conscience and my soul—to weigh this monstrous mission for themselves, and to feel free either to accept or reject it.” Raspail makes clear that the president, bowing to liberal sentiment, should have never allowed the army a chance to object. As a result of its left-wing decadence and self-hatred, Europe fails to realize the threat it faces until the refugee hordes land and pillage.

Raspail’s enemy is the entire non-white world. It tramples monks and white saviors alike in its invasion of France. His refugees are nameless caricatures, with no inner lives. He ascribes to them an almost supernatural combination of obstinance and depravity. The smell of death is the first sign their rickety ships are about to land, because they dump their corpses in the sea. They are savages, led by a literal shit-eater, and they foist their poison dead upon the shores of Europe before their feet touch earth. It is allegedly one of Steve Bannon’s favorite books—and on the right, he is not alone.

“Raspail was ahead of his time in demonstrating that Western civilization had lost its sense of purpose and history—its ‘exceptionalism,’” Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote in a 2014 piece for National Review. A decade earlier, William F. Buckley Jr. called the book “a great novel” in the same publication and added, while musing over the plight of refugees, “What to do? Starve them? Shoot them? We don’t do that kind of thing—but what do we do when we run out of airplanes in which to send them back home?” There, he ended the column.

White nationalists have answered Buckley’s question. The Camp of the Saints is a veritable fixture on alt-right forums across the internet. It stars in Stormfront threads and appears on reading lists disseminated on 8chan’s /pol/ board. At VDARE, white nationalist writer Chris Roberts compared it to George Orwell’s 1984. The Camp of the Saints appears frequently on Reddit, in r/Europe and r/New_Right and r/DarkEnlightenment and r/The_Donald, where eager Trump fans even launched a live reading series. Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Worker’s Party, recommends the novel to his followers; so does Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, which bills itself as “the internet’s premier race-realist site.” “The Camp of the Saints has never gone out of print, and has been translated into all major European languages—and yet the coverage of the European ‘migrant’ crisis goes on as if it had never been written,” Taylor complained in one piece.
***
Culture also appears frequently in Bannon’s rhetoric—he often speaks of the U.S. as a “civic society” whose identity would be diluted by immigration. Iowa Representative Steve King (R) has recommended the book in between rants about the decline of “Western civilization.” Admiration, or at least cautious respect, for The Camp of the Saints seems to be where conservative commentators and politicians align with white nationalists. It offers insight into the true nature of the right’s fear of immigration, and shows the extent to which that fear has been normalized.
***
https://newrepublic.com/article/146925/notorious-book-ties-right-far-right

[safeinOhio]

1. Is it on tape?

Most of them don’t read.

[AJT]

2. Probably on the home school reading list.