Genocide as “Sanity and Cultural Health”: National Review on India

I’m working on an article about Dinesh D’Souza, during which I came across an old article from National Review that I thought are worth quoting. Here are some excerpts from Jeffrey Hart’s review of Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of Saints, from National Review, September 26, 1975:

In this novel Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health. Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex. His plot is both simple and brilliant. The time is the not-so-distant future, and the long-anticipated has come to pass. The so-called Third World is an overpopulated, disease ridden outdoor slum. In Calcutta, as if seized by a last spasm, a million starving Indians take over whatever ships are at the docks and launch forth on the high seas. It is a wretched amorphous mass, a hundred dilapidated vessels inching around the Cape at ten knots, the mob cooking rice on briquettes of human feces, copulating in all possible combinations like a Hindu frieze come to life, stinking and undlfferentiated. Gradually it becomes clear that the destination of the armada is Europe, France in fact, the Cote d’Azur. It is a “floating slum,” the “vanguard of an anti-world bent on coming in the flesh to knock, at long last, at the gates of abundance.” Other such armadas are being prepared in Asia and Africa, awaiting the French response.

***

But what is racism? Most people do not now and have not in the past subscribed to esoteric theories regarding the superiority of this or that race. Most people, however, are able to perceive that the “other group” looks rather different and lives rather differently from their own. Such ‘racist” or “ethnocentric” feelings are undoubtedly healthy, and involve merely a preference for one’s own culture and kind. Indeed — and Raspail hammers away at this point throughout his novel—no group can long survive unless it does “prefer itself.” One further point is implicit. The liberal rote anathema on “racism” is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.

***

That Ganges anti-world slowly approaches by sea, like some viper sliding toward a bemused rodent, but the antiworld has long been at work in the bloodstream of the West. Raspail is a tremendous rhetorician, his disdain boiling from the page in a torrent reminiscent of Celine.

***

Two despised reactionary outposts close their gates to the Ganges horde. Australia tersely notes that the Immigration Act will be enforced. South Africa continues deflant: Q: “Are you suggesting, Mr. President, that you won’t hesitate to open fire on defenseless women and children?” A: “1 expected that question. No, of course we won’t hesitate. We’ll shoot without giving it a second thought. In this highminded raciai war, all the rage these days, nonviolence is the weapon of the masses. Violence is all the attacked minority has to flght back with. Yes, we’ll defend ourselves. And yes, we’ll use violence.” But, in Provence, only a few resist. Beau Geste-like, as the Ganges horde swarms up the beaches and takes over southern France.

nrhartraspail

24 thoughts on “Genocide as “Sanity and Cultural Health”: National Review on India

  1. Only problem is now the Chinese hordes are coming…these are not from the slum and they are billionaires buying up places such as Vancouver, British Columbia Canada…something neither Hart nor Raspail would have imagined. What a couple of idiots.

  2. The book is available online

    https://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

    Illuminating extracts

    For the rice, no problem, no need to be told. There was only one solution. Every Indian knew it well. With no cow droppings at
    hand, our seagoing horde would have to burn its own, prepared by a tried and true peasant technique known for three thousand years.
    And so, the decks became weird workshops, where hands deft at molding this curious coal — children, for the most part, down on their
    haunches — took each new batch of turds, kneaded and shaped them, pressing out the liquid, and rolling them out into little round
    briquettes, like the kind we used to burn in our stoves not very long ago. The tropical sun did the rest, heating the sheet-metal decks,
    where the crowd had left great spaces, like giant drying racks, with thousands of the putrid mounds spread out to bake and harden into
    fuel. Other children, quick and clever, kept them supplied, eyes peeled for anyone, man or woman, poised in the humanoid fecal
    position. Zip! zip! There they were, hands flashing between two outspread thighs, grabbing the precious substance and trotting it off to
    the dung rollers while it was hot … All of which explains how the fleet kept cooking its rice, and why it spread the horrible stench our
    reporter friend mentioned (and which, by the way, caused many a head to be scratched on certain foreign vessels miles downwind).

    Life on board had turned vegetal, at best. They ate, they slept, they saved their strength. They pondered their hopes for the future,
    and their paradise of milk and honey, with its gentle rivers thick with fish, whose waters washed fields fairly bursting with crops,
    growing wild for the taking … Only the children, the turd runners — darting, dashing, hands cupped, in and out — gave any signs of life in
    that stagnant throng, lying on deck like battlefield corpses laid out at day’s end. But in time, very slowly, the flesh began to seethe.
    Perhaps it was the heat, the inertia. Perhaps the sun, pouring druglike against the skin and into the brain, or that tide of mystical fervor it
    swam in. Most of all, the natural drive of a people who never found sex to be sin. And little by little, the mass began to move.
    Imperceptibly at first. Then more and more, in every direction … Soon the decks came to look like those temple friezes so highly prized
    by tourists, prurient or prudish, but rarely touched by the beauty of the sculpture and the grace of the pose. And everywhere, a mass of
    hands and mouths, of phalluses and rumps. White tunics billowing over fondling, exploring fingers. Young boys, passed from hand to
    hand. Young girls, barely ripe, lying together cheek to thigh, asleep in a languid maze of arms, and legs, and flowing hair, waking to the
    silent play of eager lips. Male organs mouthed to the hilt, tongues pointing their way into scabbards of flesh, men shooting their sperm
    into women’s nimble hands. Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and
    lips, and fingers. Bodies together, not in twos, but in threes, in fours, whole families of flesh gripped in gentle frenzies and subtle
    raptures. Men with women, men with men, women with women, men with children, children with each other, their slender fingers
    playing the eternal games of carnal pleasure. Fleshless old men reliving their long-lost vigor. And on every face, eyes closed, the same
    smile, calm and blissful. No sounds but the ocean breezes, the panting breaths, and, from time to time, a cry, a groan, a call to waken
    other sprawling figures and bring them into the communion of the flesh . . .

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