Camp of the Saints revisited

BBC:

Italy is to start joint sea patrols in May with Libya, aimed at stopping the heavy influx of illegal migrants.

According to IOM figures, more than 31,000 people crossed from North Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2008 alone.

The UN's refugee agency reports that two boats, carrying more than 450 people, have arrived in Italy in the past week.

Hundreds of migrants have died in the last few months crossing the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa to Europe, and the Gulf of Aden from Somalia to Yemen.

They are at the mercy of unscrupulous smugglers, unseaworthy vessels and the elements but many take these risks for the lure of a better life.

The smuggling season normally stops in October, and resumes again in April.

But the IOM says there has been no lull this year and the smuggling boats have been sailing right through the winter.

The Camp of the Saints
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Camp of the Saints (Le Camp des saints) is a 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail.

In 2001 the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the novel had been published five times in the US and was "widely revered by American white supremacists and is a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries."

The story begins in Bombay, India, where the Dutch government has announced a policy that Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is reversed when the Dutch consulate is inundated with parents eager to give up their infant children as it would be one less mouth to feed.

An Indian "wise man" then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast.

The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India.

Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia.

In 1975 Time Magazine panned the novel as a "bilious tirade" that only required a response because it "arrives trailing clouds of praise from French savants, including dramatist Jean Anouilh ('A haunting book of irresistible force and calm logic'), with the imprint of a respected U.S. publisher and a teasing pre-publication ad campaign ('The end of the white world is near')". ´

In 2002 Lionel Shriver described the novel as "both prescient and appalling," unquestionably racist but "written with tremendous verbal energy and passion."

Shriver writes that the book "gives bilious voice to an emotion whose expression is increasingly taboo in the West, but that can grow only more virulent when suppressed: the fierce resentment felt by majority populations when that status seems threatened."

William F. Buckley Jr. praised the book as "a great novel" which raised questions on how to respond to massive illegal immigration in 2004. In 2005 the paleoconservative Chilton Williamson praised the book as "one of the most uncompromising works of literary reaction in the 20th century."

Camp of the Saints revisited

Then there was the remarkable use of The Camp of the Saints in the cover article of the December 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, "Must It Be the Rest Against the West?" by historians Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy.

The Atlantic Monthly has the record for the longest continuous publication of any magazine in the United States, and is arguably one of the most prestigious. This article has done much to renew interest in Raspail's book and legitimize the consideration of its thesis; fortuitously, this article appeared just as the book was going to press.

The recent arrival on our shores of boatloads of people whose stories and conditions evoke Raspail's theme has taken it out of a theorist's realm and transposed it into real life.

The Camp of the Saints has been a controversial book in the United States since Norman Shapiro's translation was first released in 1975 by the respected publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. The novel alternately has been praised as a clear minded view of the future or, contrarily, vilified as "racist." Individuals have even been attacked for merely being familiar with it.

Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience. It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes. The Camp of the Saints takes the world population explosion and the immigration debate in a new direction. Indeed, it may become the 1984 of the twenty-first century.

Immigration: The Perpetual Controversy

The inscription on New York's Statue of Liberty (written by Emma Lazarus in 1883) invites the rest of the world to "give us your tired, your poor...the wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Europe, the invitation implied, was old, tired, and crowded. By contrast, America was youthful, energetic, and expansive. Whereas a European in Europe might amount to little more than a surplus body, a European in America would find room and opportunity in which to make something more of himself. For immigrants, the statue's offer meant a chance for a better life; for the United States, it meant a fresh influx of participants in the work of building and developing the nation. Theoretically, at least, immigration was a beneficial arrangement all around.

America has outgrown its youthful days of seemingly infinite spaces and opportunities. Today, people are more preoccupied with such problems as job insecurity, diminishing resources, and mounting social tensions--concerns that suggest a growing sensitivity to limits and to the idea that there may now be simply too many people vying for too little.

While this shift to a less hopeful national mood may account in part for recent high levels of contentiousness surrounding the immigration issue, articles on immigration appearing in The Atlantic over the course of this century demonstrate that immigration has always been an incendiary issue, even during bygone eras of expansion and optimism.

In "Must It Be the Rest Against the West?" (December, 1994) Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy characterized the immigration issue as a problem of global inequalities which -- in order to forestall destructive mass migrations from impoverished to wealthy regions -- must be addressed through development and family-planning aid to the Third World.

Virginia Abernethy, in "Optimism and Overpopulation", takes issue with Connelly's and Kennedy's assertations and questions the conventional wisdom which holds that economic aid from the West is the key to curbing population growth in poor nations.

Optimism and Overpopulation

Well, yes, the West must pay attention to the population problems of the Third World. But what sort of attention? The conventional wisdom holds that economic development -- and thus economic aid from the West -- is the key to curbing population growth in poor nations. Not true, says the author

by Virginia Abernethy

Econonomic expansion, especially if it is introduced from outside the society and is also broad-based, encourages the belief that formerly recognized limits can be discounted, that everyone can look forward to prosperity, and, as in recent instances, that the West can be counted upon to provide assistance, rescue, and an escape valve for excess population.

Among African Sahel pastoralists, deep-water wells drilled by donor countries in the 1950s and 1960s prompted larger herds of cattle and goats, earlier marriage (because bride-prices are paid in animals and the required number became easier to accumulate), and higher fertility.

Because of their effect on family size, development programs entailing large transfers of technology and funds to the Third World have been especially pernicious. This kind of aid is inappropriate because it sends the signal that wealth and opportunity can grow without effort and without limit. That rapid population growth ensues should surprise no one. Africa, which in recent decades has received three times as much foreign aid per capita as any other continent, now also has the highest fertility rates. During the 1950s and 1960s the African fertility rate rose -- to almost seven children per woman -- at the same time that infant mortality was dramatically reduced, health-care availability grew, literacy for women and men became more widespread, and economic optimism pervaded more and more sectors of society.

Even immigration can affect total world population. Studies of nineteenth-century England and Wales and modern Caribbean societies show that in communities already in the throes of rapid population growth, fertility stays high as long as the option to emigrate exists, whereas fertility falls rapidly in communities that lack such an escape valve. And while fertility rates are falling in most African countries, the rate remains high in Ghana (6.2 births per woman in 1993), perhaps because an established pattern of emigration (one per 1,000 in the population) provides a safety valve for excess numbers. This effect on fertility is consistent with independent reports that emigration raises incomes both among emigrants and among those they leave behind.

In sum, it is true, if awkward, that efforts to alleviate poverty often spur population growth, as does leaving open the door to immigration.

Miscalculation about the cause of the population explosion has led to irrelevant and even counterproductive strategies for helping the Third World to balance its population size and its resources.

Now it is a step forward for industrial nations, their wealth much diminished, to be retrenching and targeting aid more narrowly. Their remaining wealth must not be squandered on arming opposing factions, reckless foreign assistance, or support for international migrations that rob and ultimately enrage -- to the point of violence and possibly civil war -- resident populations.

A French novel has become the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement

Le Camp des Saints, a 1973 novel by Frenchman Jean Raspail, was first translated into English as The Camp of the Saints in 1975. It has been published a total of five times in the United States, most recently by The Social Contract Press (TSCP), an outfit that specializes in hard-line anti-immigration propaganda. The book is a racist fantasy about an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees, "a haunting and prophetic vision," TSCP says, "of Western Civilization overrun by a burgeoning Third World population."

The book characterizes non-whites as horrific and uncivilized "monsters" who will stop at nothing to greedily and violently seize what rightfully belongs to the white man.

Incredibly, although the book was widely reviled in Europe, its translation in English was greeted with excited reviews like the one in The Wall Street Journal that said the book had moments "of appalling power and occasionally a terrible beauty."

In 1982, Raspail boasted of the novel's foresight and explained his view that "the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles."

Here are some excerpts:

[As the refugee fleet arrives on French shores, a noble old professor kills a fellow white who is depicted as having sold out his race and civilization. Afterwards, as he celebrates the killing, the professor reflects on the loss of white pride.] The old professor understood. That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one's own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity's finest — none of that had ever filled these [white] youngsters' brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer [of compassion for other races] implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all.

[At one point, a French town, faced with the threat of diseased foreigners, issues an edict requiring Arabs to get a certificate of health before using its public swimming pools.] Retaliation took many forms. ... A hundred nice French girls, teaching school in Algeria, were suddenly hauled into the hospital and spread on the stirrups to be plumbed and explored by a squad of medical student commandos, whipped up to a frenzy. Two of them died as a result...

[The book repeatedly characterizes non-whites as sexual carnivores, as in this scene aboard the refugee fleet that is heading for Europe.] But in time, very slowly, the flesh [aboard the ships] began to seethe. ... Perhaps it was the heat... . Most of all, the natural drive of a people who never found sex to be sin. ... Everywhere, a mass of hands and mouths, of phalluses and rumps. ... Young boys, passed from hand to hand. Young girls, barely ripe ... waking to the silent play of eager lips. ... Men with women, men with men, women with women, men with children... . And so, in a welter of dung and debauch — and hope as well — the Last Chance Armada pushed on toward the West.

[As the Third World slaughter of whites picks up speed, the book describes a scene in a pig-processing plant in which a black man slaughters his white boss after being asked to kill pigs more quickly.] "Sure 'nough boss," one red-spattered black said, "we can sure 'nough do one more at least..." The white man felt no more pain than any of the other pigs on the line. Stunned, hoisted, slaughtered. ...

[Hung from a hook, the murdered boss's body] caused ... no special disgust [among the black workers]. They had seen such things before, after all. At market, in the Congo.

[As the novel nears its end, Lydie, depicted as a traitor to her white race, becomes a sexual plaything for the dark-skinned refugees who have now seized power.] Lydie ... died in Nice, in a whorehouse for Hindus... At the time, each refugee quarter had its stock of white women, all free for the taking. (One of the new regime's laws, in fact. In order to "demythify" white women, as they put it.) ...

[In the end, Lydie, along with other white female sex slaves, is confined by the "Hindus" to their] "White Female Practice and Experimentation Center."

[The novel ends where it began, with the arrival of the refugee fleet in France.] First to land were the monsters, the grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta. As they groveled through the wet sand like a pack of basset hounds, or a herd of clumsy seals exploring an unfamiliar shore, with their snorts and grunts of joy, they looked like an army of little green men from some remote planet. ... Yes, the country would suit them fine. No question.

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Finnjet
21.9.2008 20.59 Jarkko Sandell

Viikonlopun iltapäivälehdessä oli artikkeli entisestä Itämeren ylpeydestä, Finnjetistä. Nyt tämä aikoinaan maailman suurin ja nopein matkustajalautta seisoo Intian valtameren rannalla purkamista vailla. Aika aikaansa kutakin, kyseessähän on vain laiva.

Suomi ei ole laiva. Se on silti kovaa vauhtia menossa kohti romuttamoa. Konehuoneessa on kaikki vielä iskussa, vaikka turbiineihin on ilmastojeesuksien mukaan viritettävä niin tiukka katalysaattori, ettei piipuista höyryä kuin kauniita ajatuksia. Mutta vielä kilpailukykyä riittää. Ainakin tilastojen mukaan.

Kaikki muu onkin sitten hukassa. Kurssi on kohti jäävuorta. Kapteenilla tai päällystöllä ole mitään käsitystä ketä laivassa matkustaa ja miten alakansilla voidaan. Miehistökin on kohta tuotu ulkomailta ja on uskollinen vain sille, joka maksaa eniten.

Entä matkustajat?

Ne, joilla vielä on mielekästä tekemistä, roikkuvat reelingeissä vanhasta tottumuksesta. Mukana laivassa on noin 700 000 työtöntä, tukityöllistettyä tai osa-aikaista turistia. Samalla laivaan on tunkemassa yhä lisää ja lisää Finnjetin purkajia kolmansista maista.

Tietyt maahanmuuttajaryhmät ovat jo nyt yliedustettuina rikos- ja työttömyystilastoissa puhumattakaan islamin aiheuttamasta uhasta. Vallitsevan monikultturismin nimissä jokaiselle ryhmälle on tarjottava oikeus omaan kulttuuriin aina kielenopetuksesta ja asunnoista lähtien. Mitä sitten kun varastot ovat syöty? Tulevaisuudessa tiedossa on jokaisen kapteenin painajainen: Kapina laivalla.

Täällä Etelä-Savossa myydään innokkaasti isänmaata ulkomaalaisille. Sulkavan kunta myi edustusmökkinsä venäläisille. Rantasalmen kunta yritti myydä palan Saimaata kuudelle islamilaiselle valtiolle ”leirikeskukseksi” kuudellakymmenellä tuhannella eurolla. Siis mummonmökin hinnalla. Arkkujen natina kuului kunnantalolle asti, kun 2. divisioonan miehet alkoivat kääntyilemään Rantasalmen kirkkomaalla.

Lama on tullut. Ei päivää ilman irtisanomisia, silti vasemmisto ja oikeisto tarjoaa samaa kylmää puuroa vähän erivärisestä muovikupista. Keskusta, kokoomus, demarit, vihreät – kaikki ovat myyneet alkuperäisen aatteensa. RKP on aina ollut pikku lakeija.

Saman viikonlopun lehdessä oli artikkeli vanhusten ruokahuollosta. Vanhuksille syötetään moninpaikoin vauvojen ruokaa, koska ei ole varaa tai aikaa muuhun. Rikolliset ja maahanmuuttajat saavat paremman ylläpidon kuin ihmiset, jotka ovat verellä ja hiellä tätä maata rakentaneet. Ja tämä on ollut koko ajan kapteenin käsky.

Ei se mitään.

Yläkannella on käynnissä hyvät bileet. Naminamia ja värikästä sambaa tiedossa, muista ottaa passi ja hammasharja mukaan! Ehkä joku onnekas saa kutsun kapteenin illallispöytään.

Voimmeko me tehdä muuta, kuin laittaa silmät kauhuissamme kiinni ja ajatella isänmaata?

Jari Leino kommentoi:

Intialaisella rannalla makaavasta Finnjetistä tuli mieleen Jean Raspailin kirja The Camp of the Saints (Le Camp des saints) vuodelta 1973.

Se kertoo Intiasta Ranskaan suuntautuvasta laivaliikenteestä. Kuvitteellisesta tilanteesta, jossa miljoonat köyhät intialaiset nousevat kaikenlaisiin romulaivoihin ja suuntaavat kohti Eurooppaa.

Kirja on tietenkin tarkoituksella symbolinen, koska eihän sieltä Intiasta ole tänne mitään ihmisvyöryä tulossa. Laivoilla ainakaan. Mutta kuvaa hyvin päättäjien avuttomuutta, päättämättömyyttä ja moraalis-eettisiin pohdintoihin vajoamista tilanteessa, jossa pitäisi pystyä tekemään päätöksiä.

Kirjassa on myös monia muitakin asioita, jotka ovat tuttuja nykypäivän Suomesta: yhdelle ainoalle Oikealle Totuudelle omistautunut propagandistinen ja tiukasti itseään ja muita sensuroiva media, loputonta kulttuurisotaansa käyvät marxilaiset, hyödylliset idootit ja kaasuputkikonsultti.

Ja tämä kaikki oli siis tiedossa Ranskassa jo vuonna 1973. Eli jo 35 vuotta sitten. Jo kauan ennen kuin sana monikulttuuri edes ilmestyi suomen kieleen.

Hyvin masentava kirja.