Must It Be the Rest Against the West?

Tuesday, August 18th, 2015

A couple decades ago, Matthew Connelly (who went on to write Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population) and Paul Kennedy (who had already written The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) discussed Jean Raspail’s controversial The Camp of the Saints — which was itself already more than a couple decades old. Must it be the Rest against the West?, they asked:

Moved by accounts of widespread famine across an Indian subcontinent collapsing under the sheer weight of its fast-growing population, the Belgian government has decided to admit and adopt a number of young children; but the policy is reversed when tens of thousands of mothers begin to push their babies against the Belgian consul general’s gates in Calcutta. After mobbing the building in disgust at Belgium’s change of mind, the crowd is further inflamed by a messianic speech from one of their number, an untouchable, a gaunt, eye-catching “turd eater,” who calls for the poor and wretched of the world to advance upon the Western paradise: “The nations are rising from the four corners of the earth,” Raspail has the man say, “and their number is like the sand of the sea. They will march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city. . . .” Storming on board every ship within range, the crowds force the crews to take them on a lengthy, horrific voyage, around Africa and through the Strait of Gibraltar to the southern shores of France.

But it is not the huddled mass of Indians, with their “fleshless Gandhi-arms,” that is the focus of Raspail’s attention so much as the varied responses of the French and the other privileged members of “the camp of the saints” as they debate how to deal with the inexorably advancing multitude. Raspail is particularly effective here in capturing the platitudes of official announcements, the voices of ordinary people, the tone of statements by concerned bishops, and so on. The book also seems realistic in its recounting of the crumbling away of resolve by French sailors and soldiers when they are given the order to repel physically — to shoot or torpedo — this armada of helpless yet menacing people. It would be much easier, clearly, to confront a military foe, such as a Warsaw Pact nation.

It’s not a perfect prediction, Steve Sailer points out:

My view in 2015 is that the Global Poor today aren’t all that badly off relative to famine-haunted 1973. You’ll notice that the establishment press feels compelled much of the time to mislead readers about who the Mediterranean crossers are, portraying them as “refugees” rather than as people investing in a higher paid career. And if Africans can get their birthrates under control, things will get even better for them in Africa in the future due to technological progress and the accumulation of generations of literacy.

The danger is simply that in the meantime Europe will let itself be saddled with a vast number of Africans and their descendants, turning Florence into Ferguson and Barcelona into Baltimore. That’s not a particularly apocalyptic future, just a stupid one to allow to happen.

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