“I would recommend a book to your listeners, and the title of it is The Camp of the Saints. It’s written by a Frenchman, Jean — J-E-A-N Raspail — R-A-S-P-A-I-L” — U.S. Representative Steve King, Monday, 13, 2017 interview on Des Moines AM radio station 1040 WHO.
“The Camp of the Saints... is revered by American white supremacists” — Southern Poverty Law Center, 2001
While U.S. Representative Steve King has just predicted (or fantasized about) a coming race war between American minority groups during a CNN interview, he’s actually done even worse — and whatever thin cover of deniability Rep. King once had, that he is not a white supremacist, lies in shreds.
During an extended Monday interview on an Iowa AM radio show, concerning Rep. King’s recent controversial tweet that, “culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies”, King effectively clarified the ambiguity of his tweet — did “somebody’s else’s babies” refer to babies that were not white ?
King clarified the matter by recommending, at the end of the interview with WHO’s Jan Mickelson, that his listeners read the wildly and viciously racist 1973 anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail (here’s the audio of King’s recommendation, in last minute of the interview segment.)
King’s plug for Raspail’s novel fully contextualizes King’s tweet. He appears to believe that only white babies can restore “our civilization” and that, by extension, “our civilization” is exclusively white. Of course, that means the “we” King refers to are his (presumed) white audience.
In 1975 when the first original English language edition of The Camp of the Saints, subtitled “A Chilling Novel About the End of the White World”, came out, Kirkus Reviews wrote,
“The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”
White House strategist and top Trump adviser Steve Bannon has repeatedly cited The Camp of The Saints in conjunction with the influx of Muslim refugees into Europe — as exposed in an important Huffington Post investigation.
In This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World Huffpo authors Paul Blumenthal and JM Rieger describe,
The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named “the turd-eater” because he literally eats shit, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they 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.
The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight… Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.
As the Southern Poverty Law Center put it in back in 2001, in a review of the book published in the SPLC’s Spring 2001 Intelligence Report,
A French novel, The Camp of the Saints, has become the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US. Published by The Social Contract Press, the book is revered by American white supremacists.
(...)
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.
(...)
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." Today, The Camp of the Saints is widely revered by American white supremacists and is a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries, the race war novel written by William Pierce, head of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. In fact, Pierce's publishing arm, National Vanguard Books, describes Raspail's book as "one of the most famous, popular, and important racialist novels."
For a more graphic take on the novel, let’s turn to libertarian Shikha Dalmia, writing in March 2016 for The Week,
The central plot line of the book involves an armada of "kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised" Indians who, exhorted by a "turd eating" god-man to get a piece of the "white man's comfort," board a fleet of rickety ships to France, the land of "milk and honey," to escape poverty and illness.
The sojourners are hungry and diseased. But that evidently does nothing to dull their satyr-like sexual appetite since these are people who, in Raspail's telling, "never found sex to be a sin." So their journey becomes one long orgiastic ride as they hump everything in sight.
Dalmia then quotes Raspail’s description of the swarming, diseased but somehow also hypersexual mass of immigrants who copulate on the decks of the boats in the invading armada,
“Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers… [E]verywhere, a mass of hands and mounts, of phalluses and rumps....Young boys, passed from hand to hand. Young girls, barely ripe… walking to the silent play of eager lips…Men with women, men with men, women with women, men with children, children with each other…”
Unable to resist the immigrant hordes because of collective societal guilt, France and white Western civilization are overwhelmed. Whites are slaughtered or turned into sex slaves.
Rep. Steve King’s plug and Steve Bannon’s repeated citation of the book (plus, I’ve counted eleven different Breitbart articles pushing The Camp of the Saints) represent the latest high water marks in a ongoing campaign to mainstream the book that’s noted by Shikha Dalmia in her The Week article,
“In the last few years, this vile tract has slowly risen out of the white supremacist ghetto into conservative gutter sites such as American Thinker and Breitbart (which has been running long features every few months drawing ominous parallels between the book and the Western response to the Syrian refugee crisis) — and then to more respectable and mainstream outfits such as the thoughtful, if quirky, American Conservative and the lively and ecumenical The Federalist.”
The takeaway here is that nationally recognized Republican political figures are now openly promoting the sort of white supremacist propaganda that was once relegated to the gutters and the margins.
This is not normal. We must not let it become normal. This cannot pass.