Raspail – The Camp of the Saints (1973)

Here’s an old SPLC memo warning about Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints. Was this book, written 42 years ago, prescient or farcical? You decide:

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.”

Again: This book, and this book’s scenario, was written 42 years ago.

Similarly, Enoch Powell’s River of Blood speech was written 47 years ago.

You decide.

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