"The Camp of the Saints", by Jean Raspail.

If you read enough essays about immigration and culture wars, you will
eventually encounter references to this controversial novel, first
published in France in 1973. When I found a translated edition in a used
book store, I snapped it up to see what all the fuss was about.

In a spontaneous uprising, the wretched Third World poor commandeer
cargo boats and set sail for Europe, which they view as an earthly
paradise. Immigrant and minority populations already in the West make
common cause with them in a gathering insurrection of the oppressed.
The Western powers dither about how to respond to the flotilla, which
eventually comes aground in France, largely unopposed. It and all other
Western nations are flooded with refugees, their governments collapse,
and the "have-nots" take over everywhere. Heroes who we have followed
throughout the book make a last stand against the invasion and are all
killed. The Third World extends to every spot on the globe, and Western
Civilization ends.

This is an intensely racist book, both in the sense that the author
proposes: that people of different races are unable to get along
together, as well as in a more common sense of white people loathing
dark-skinned people. All non-whites are constantly associated with
poverty and a degraded condition, with filth and ignorance and
brutality, and with indiscriminate sexual appetites. And with
unremitting hatred of whites, racism of their own. There are also hints
of a Satanic alignment. (Raspail believes his own efforts are
supernaturally inspired. Presumably from "above", not "below").

One of the martyred heroes is a black-skinned Indian who makes common
cause with the whites. Being "white" is a state of mind, he says, not a
physical condition. Does the author believe that? If so, why the
continual revulsion directed toward all people who are black and brown?
This is a confusion never clarified in the book: is Western Civilization
a tradition that anyone can join, or is it an exclusive patrimony of
European whites?

Is this a "good" book, by the standards of the ideological novel? The
characters speak in page-long polemics, although these are not as
lengthy as those Rand puts us through. Many of the villains suffer
strangely appropriate fates, but the author winks while putting them to
it. And, curiously, he satirizes all aspects of the decadent West with a
wry, self-deprecating humor. There are many striking images, as:

    The West doesn't like to burn its dead. It tucks away its
    cremation urns, hides them out in the hinterlands of its
    cemeteries. The Seine, the Rhine, the Loire, the Rhone, the
    Thames are no Ganges or Indus. Not even the Guadalquivir and the
    Tiber. Their shores never stank with the stench of rotting
    corpses. Yes, they have flowed with blood, their waters have run
    red, and many a peasant has crossed himself as he used his
    pitchfork to push aside the human carcasses floating downstream.
    But in Western times, on their bridges and banks, people danced
    and drank their wine and beer, men tickled the fresh, young,
    laughing lasses, and everyone laughed at the wretch on the rack,
    laughed in his face, and the wretch on the gallows, tongue
    dangling, and the wretch on the block, neck severed--because,
    indeed, the Western World, staid as it was, knew how to laugh as
    well as cry--and then, as their belfries called them to prayer,
    they would all go partake of their fleshly god, secure in the
    knowledge that their dead were there, protecting them, safe as
    could be, laid out in rows beneath their timeless slabs and
    crosses, in graveyards nestled against the hills, since burning,
    after all, was only for devilish fiends, or wizards, or poor
    souls with the plague...

As to whether it is a "good" political book, I must say "yes", in the
sense that the story, simply as a disaster novel, is captivating and
excruciatingly thorough in pursuing its message. Unforgettable. But I
would say "no", in the sense that persistent revulsion directed toward
non-Western dark-skinned people and their allies does not convince us to
agree with the author and adopt his prejudices. Three hundred pages of
disgust may engender a sympathetic disgust within us, but that is
insufficient reason for identifying his heroes and villains as such.

The author directs heavy fire at anti-Western "fellow-travelers" in
France, which, like most countries, seems to have all the usual
suspects: intellectuals, clergy, teachers, journalists and politicians
eaten up by, and glorying in, guilt and hatred of their own culture.
This is extremely important to his thesis: the West would not have
fallen if it had not been rotten within, if its will to resist had not
been sapped by moral traitors.

The book is valuable in another sense. It illuminates a problem that all
Liberal (in the largest sense in which almost everyone is the West is
Liberal) regimes face: can a Liberal society survive assault? This is a
variation on a common dilemma: can pacifists resist storm-troopers? Can
the decent compete with the indecent? How do those playing by the rules
deal with those who cheat?

If invaders arrive with guns, most people have no compunction about
resisting in kind. The invader's violence justifies our own and gives us
an excuse to resist. But what if, as in this book, the invaders come
with only their overwhelming numbers and poverty? In both cases, the
defending culture is threatened with destruction. But can decent people
fire on pathetic, unarmed refugees? Most of the fictional French
soldiers cannot, and the West is lost. Some of Raspail's heroes are not
so fastidious: one, a ship's captain, steams through a mass of people in
the water, slaughtering many. Another soldier machine-guns crippled
children struggling toward the beach. 

At one time Western men could do such things and still be called
"civilized". No longer. Liberalism allows resistance to change only by
nonviolent means: by discussion and argument. (The more radical
egalitarianism does not even allow a preference for one way of life over
another: no judgments are allowed). If the allowed Liberal means will
not save us, are we doomed to destruction?

Inevitably, I have made the equation: "decent" equals "Liberal". That
is, that it is immoral to use violence against those who do not threaten
us with violence. If we did not believe that, where would we be? But: if
everything I knew and loved was threatened, could I employ whatever
degree of savagery required to save my world, when my world is nothing
more than what I have, and what I am used to? I might not do it for
myself, but what of my children?

This is the problem Raspail poses for us, and like all "lifeboat"
scenarios, it is a very bleak one. He thinks the West has reached the
stage where it will die rather than resist with effective means. My only
solution to the problem he poses is a prudential dodge: stay out of that 
last resort, head it off. Don't be weak, turn the ships around and send 
them home. But this puts me in his book anyway. Who or what am I resisting? 
And am I willing to lose?

Of course, we are not required to sit in Raspail's lifeboat. We might
hold that a specific culture persists and evolves by non-political
and non-violent means. Are there any novels that describe that?

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