THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS

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. It takes important and chilling facts that very few people are willing to face, and digs into them like a hyena into carrion. Raspail's basic premise is irrefutable: in a few decades the non-white population of the world will outnumber the white by more than seven to one, essential resources will be scarcer than ever, and a lot of familiar issues will suddenly be perceived in racial terms. His fictional translation of this postulate is a model of vicious exploitation. At some point in the near future, the many-headed beast of the Apocalypse descends on the West in the form of huge boatloads of starving Indians, spontaneously impelled by a sort of cockroach instinct to infest whatever can be infested. The brainless radic-lib cabal that controls Western opinion responds with noises of love and brotherhood, to the horror of the courageous few who see that the very existence of the white race and European civilization is at stake. Too late; by the time the lily-livered do-gooders wake up to their mortal danger, the non-white minorities in the West have made common cause with the other heads of the beast and only a handful of white defenders are left to make a glorious but doomed Masada stand in the south of France. Lurid manipulation of sexual overtones, sneers at the knee-jerk liberalism of the mass media, fulminations against the U.N. and progressive Catholicism--Raspail covers all bases of hatred. The Camp of the Saints can be said to make you think. So did the My Lai massacre.