Paul Blumenthal and JM Rieger, in HuffPo today:
This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World—
Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a "platform for the alt-right," the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.
But the top Trump aide's repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There's a good reason for that: It's breathtakingly racist.
"[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters," said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. "It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague."
The book, she said, "reframes everything as the fight to death between races."
Um, somehow it seems familiar, this "fight to the death" against "plague" caused by foreign defilers ("The plot... follows a poor Indian demagogue, named 'the turd-eater' because he literally eats shit..."). True to previous models, the "invaders" are more fertile than the endangered species that is white Europe. Moreover, they are (natch) sexual deviants, engaging in orgies which the author seems rather
impelled to dwell upon. These perverted foreigners
... lead an "armada" of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.
IOW: turncoat liberals will be the death of white culture.
The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel's last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. "The Fall of Constantinople," Raspail's unnamed narrator says, "is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week."
Tellingly, the HuffPo piece notes the book's lack of any real audience, when first published in the early '70s (a US translation appeared in 1975). But then—
The book received a second life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon fortune and sister to right-wing benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, funded its republication and distribution. This time it gained a cult following among immigration opponents.
The authors add valuable background about May's endowing this propaganda, in particular, through her funding of
John Tanton. "The godfather of the anti-immigration movement in the U.S.," Tanton started under the guise of environmentalism. His work and May's money laid the foundation for what expanded to become today's anti-immigration infrastructure.
A period connection the article doesn't make: by 1978
this kindred oeuvre had first appeared.
At the time, it was another book that few people would have heard of—until
April 19, 1995. Some of us remember the immediate aftermath—when national media ran with the unfounded assumption, "Muslim terror attack strikes Heartland!" Even if learning about fringe groups was harder in those pre-Internet days, it was blindingly obvious that plenty of government hating white men dwelt in The Heartland.
Since then, what once seemed a lunatic fringe has done nothing but
re-brand, and extend its influence. That it's now represented at the highest level of government will not end well.
