← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · seq
Thread ID: 5113 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2003-02-19
2003-02-19 23:59 | User Profile
From Author's Introduction to the 1985 French Edition:
At page 15, for instance, appear the thoughts of a "wise" professor who somehow manages to equate mail-solicitation charities with an invasion of faceless people into private homes:
...[U]nbridled charity is, after all, a sin against oneself. ...after a while, there were too many poor. Altogether too many. Folk you didn't even know. Not even from here. Just nameless people. Swarming all over. And so terribly clever! Spreading through cities, and houses, and homes. Working their way by the thousands, in thousands of foolproof ways. Through the slits in your mail boxes, begging for help, with their frightful pictures bursting from envelopes day after day, claiming their due in the name of some organization or other. Slithering in. Through newspapers, radio, churches, through this faction or that, until they were all around you, wherever you looked...
Race surfaces throughout the book, as this quote from page 18 illustrates:
The proof was there, in his lucid reports, ignored one and all. There was really no solution. Black would be black, and white would be white. There was no changing either, except by a total mix, a blend into tan. They would be enemies on sight, and their hatred and scorn only grew as they came to know each other better.
Page 43 gives us Mr. Raspail's perspective on the way people in developing nations view the west -- as if their fertility rates were a form of calculated revenge for colonialism and the debt burden:
There's no Third World. No, not anymore. That's only a phrase you coined to keep us in our place. There's one world, only one, and itââ¬â¢s going to be flooded with life, submerged. This country of mine is a roaring river. A river of sperm. Now, all of a sudden, it's shifting course, my friend, and heading west...
The author attacks the political left with particular vengeance, as on page 53:
Already they saw it their mission to guide the block's first steps on Western soil. One would empty out all our hospital beds so that cholera- ridden and leprous wretches could sprawl between their clean white sheets. Another would cram our brightest, cheeriest nurseries full of monster children... Still another would turn our supermarkets over to the barefoot, swarthy horde.
Another section of dialogue (page 93) involves a debate over solutions to the problems of "over-population" and unwanted immigration. Says one participant:
Indeed, have we time for a choice? But through it all, one thing appalls me: the fact that nobody yet has pointed to the danger, the risk inherent in the white man's meager numbers, and his utter vulnerability as a result. I'm white. White and Western. So are you. But what do we amount to in the aggregate? Some seven hundred million souls, most of us packed into Europe, as against the billions and billions of nonwhites, so many we can't even keep up the count.
As the book nears its conclusion, Raspail makes it clear that the arrival of dark-skinned aliens in France is not the "peaceful invasion" he describes in his introduction, but rather a form of war, Here (at page 211) the words are those of an ambivalent president:
At the first signs of flight, my duty demanded that I order the army to take up positions along the coast. The result is that now, Past wars have abounded in just such crimes, but conscience back then hadn't yet learned to waver. Survival was all, and it condoned the carnage. Besides, those were wars of rich against rich. Today, it's the poor who are on the attack, with their ultimate weapon. Lest anyone be left in suspense as to what happened, the president ordered the massacre of the immigrants -- but left a loophole which assured the soldiers themselves would be blamed, and not the nation (pages 211-212):
Certain forces abroad in the world today know ... only too well [the condemnation that would be heaped upon France ]; those dark forces bent on destroying our Western society... My friends and fellow countrymen, I have, therefore, ordered the army to open fire, if need be, to prevent the refugees from effecting a landing.... And so, 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. To kill is hard. Even harder to know why.... My friends, whatever happens, may God help us .. or forgive us.
[url=http://www.africa2000.com/XNDX/xraspail.htm]http://www.africa2000.com/XNDX/xraspail.htm[/url]
2003-02-21 20:01 | User Profile
Years ago I read Camp of the Saints. I was so impressed I bought 5 copies and gave them away. Mr. Raspail was much ahead of the curve - as is said today. When first reading his work, I had an idea he may be proven correct to a certain extent. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe he could have understated what would happen.
2003-02-21 21:25 | User Profile
Camp of the Saints was published in ââ¬Ë73! Raspailââ¬â¢s prescience was extraordinary. Tragically, the book was, and still is, viewed as mere fiction.
2003-02-21 21:26 | User Profile
Just curious- what happened afterwards? Did they read them? If so, did they take the story seriously?
I'd like to point out also that Raspail published his work in the early 70s, when the warning would have done the most good and made the least money.
Buchanan waited until the 21st century to put out 'Death of the West', when it could do the least good and make the most money.
2003-02-21 23:12 | User Profile
Originally posted by naBaron@Feb 21 2003, 21:26 ** I'd like to point out also that Raspail published his work in the early 70s, when the warning would have done the most good and made the least money.
**
Very few people knew about it.
It got the hardcover-major publisher treatment, but there was almost a blackout on it in the popular press. I was fairly well-read but never actually heard of the book till 1978. By this time, even National Review was backing away from some of Raspail's implications -- you know why. This is when the drumbeats from Corporate America started pounding out Mexicans-do-the-work-Americans-won't-do...doo...dah...
Likewise a former writer for National Review has become the First Known Conservative to roll into the memory hole because he took Raspail's cause a bit too close to heart. This was the anthropologist John Greenway.
If you want to know what "paleocons" sounded like before there was supposed to be such a thing, see if you can locate The American Tradition: A Gallery of Rogues which was Greenway's gift to the American Bicentennial. Buckley even reviewed it, but Greenway was gone by the 80s, to my mind the last writer for NR who tried to be honest about race. The happy-talk Reagan years were what killed real conservatism in this country.
Greenway wrote as an anthropologist and a Colorado cop, and The American Tradition was as close as you'll get to a valedictory on the Old America. Raspail and Greenway make good comparison reading: The first was fiction and the second was fact.
2003-02-27 01:40 | User Profile
John Greenway taught at the University of Colorado and was not kind to those less gifted. He had a particular contempt for those who glorified the red man.> **According to John Greenway, historians "write about the Indian because the Indian in the American mind is as imaginary as Sandburg's Lincoln, a creation of fantasy, guilt and ignorance, on which everyone is his own authority." Such is the altogether sad and dangerous situation in which we presently find ourselves. Bare with me, dear reader, as I once more attempt to expose a few more myths about the red man.
One of the more enduring fantasies of "native American" culture is that it was an egalitarian paradise. Women were respected as equals; male chauvinism was nonexistent; children were adored; all dwelt together with mutual respect and unfailing love. This, of all the dreamy dreams of the left, is perhaps the most mystifying to explain. Whereas, one can understand why the radical environmentalists think they have historical allies in the Indians; how feminists and their fellow egalitarians can interpret native American society as an Egalitarian Nirvana is beyond me. We once again have an illustration either of utter ignorance of the facts or a brazen dishonesty in the use of them.**
[url=http://www.gbt.org/wilkins/indian_as_egalitarian.htm]http://www.gbt.org/wilkins/indian_as_egalitarian.htm[/url]
2003-02-28 01:02 | User Profile
"The modern view of the Indian as the Great Pacifist is pure moonshine. Royal makes this observation, "We grow apprehensive over the violence between gangs in our inner cities today. But for centuries raids of one group on another were part of everyday life in most of pre-Columbian America." (Columbus On Trial, p. 35) John Greenway points out how integral warfare was to native American life, "they [the Indians] fought for the fighting. Without war and raiding and scalping and rape and pillage and slavetaking, the Indian was as aimless as a chiropractor without a spine."
So nothing much has ever really changed on this continent. The Whiteââ¬â¢s man civilization was just a moment in time. "Fairest things have fleetest endings." Raspail