The Camp of the Living Dead

The zombie horde of Calcutta comes for the undead husk of the West

The Great Day of His Wrath, John Martin, 1851

And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the Earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the seas. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.

Revelation 20:9

Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is one of those literary works, like Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, that has gained meme status within the online right without actually having been all that widely read. In consequence, most of you will have at least heard of The Camp of the Saints, and will probably have some idea of its significance. For those who are hearing about this book for the first time, it describes the annihilation of the West by a mass movement of migrants from the third world who advance under the banner of their own wretchedness to disarm the West via its own bad conscience. If that sounds like it could have been lifted from the headlines of the last decade, congratulations, you can now see why the work is regarded as prophetic.

One of the reasons that The Camp of the Saints is not actually all that widely read is that the book has been suppressed in the English-speaking world. The book was a bestseller when the first translation was published in 1975, after which there were a few reprintings, but it has been effectively out of print since the mid-90s. This meant that if you wanted to read it, you either had to track down a bootleg pdf (and who wants to read an entire novel in pdf), or pay extortionate prices on Amazon’s secondary market. You’d think that the publisher would see the insane prices used editions were going for and conclude that there was money to be made from unmet demand but, you see, The Camp of the Saints is a xenophobic, racist, sexist diatribe that good people need to protect impressionable minds from reading lest they acquire bad opinions and become bad people. This kind of copyright-squatting is how books are actually de facto banned in the Western world, by the way; those prominent displays of ‘banned books’ assembled by your local libtard bookseller more or less uniformly consist of softcore porn that some school board in the Bible Belt decided were a bit much for the resource library in the elementary school. When the cathedral wants to ban a book, it simply buys up the rights to it, refuses to publish it, and then buries it in obscurity by refusing to talk about it.

Fortunately for all of us, the small publisher Vauban Books has recently released a new translation, which you can pick up in any format of your choice for a very reasonable price. The edition comes with two introductions: a new introduction by Nathan Pinkoski (whose further reflections can be found in his recent essay The Scandal of the Saints), which places the work in its historical context and provides fascinating biographical detail on Raspail’s remarkable and adventurous career, and Raspail’s introduction to the French 2011 edition (which reached bestseller status in France), an essay titled Big Other. The French publisher initially didn’t want to include Raspail’s essay, for fear of being prosecuted for racism.

To call The Camp of the Saints prescient undersells it. At times, Raspail seems to be downright prophetic. Pope Benedict XVI plays a prominent role (albeit this is a character who could not be more different from Cardinal Ratzinger). Raspail also correctly predicted that Rhodesia would become Zimbabwe, which may have been easily foreseeable when Raspail was composing the work but still did not formally happen until 1980, seven years after the novel’s publication; while Raspail was writing, the Rhodesian Bush War was still in full swing. The Rhodies fought until the bitter end to prevent the breadbasket of Africa from being turned into Africa’s basketcase.

The Camp of the Saints is sometimes described as a dystopian novel, which should be read alongside 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5, and C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. There’s something to be said for this interpretation. You get a pretty good description of the modern world with the Venn diagram overlap of the total state’s panoptic tyranny, the flattening of the human spirit into a mass-produced Last Man via the endless consumption of mass-produced trivial amusements, the death of literary curiosity, the imposition of forced egalitarianism, demon-worshipping transhumanist technocracy, and Raspail’s civilizational collapse via obsequious moral inversion.

Like every good dystopia, however, The Camp of the Saints is first and foremost a satire of the modern world, a warning about where things will head if certain sociopolitical trends are taken to their natural conclusion. Raspail’s work does not take place in some science-fictional near future, as the majority of other dystopias do: it’s world is technologically and politically indistinguishable from the world Raspail lived in, and still all too recognizable to us. It has been derided as a far-right racist tract, and Raspail’s depiction of the third world horde that subsumes the West is far from flattering, but his venom is directed primarily at the West’s own spineless cultural thought-leaders and political elites, who he identifies as the true and only possible architects of the world-historic catastrophe that he predicts.

Jekowekow

The Camp of the Saints also has all the key tropes of a zombie apocalypse story.

The third world horde is depicted as a vast, ravenous, mindless beast comprised of individual members who are not at all fearsome or intimidating, but which triumphs through sheer numbers and slow but relentless advance, and which is defended by its revolting appearance and overpowering, nauseating stench. The migrants are the most wretched products of the slums of Calcutta, malnourished and sickly, afflicted by every kind of congenital defect, infectious disease, infirmity, and skin infection. Their leader is a monstrous, drooling idiot dwarf with lidless eyes, a toothless sphincter for a mouth, and stumps for limbs, who rides about on the shoulders of a giant coprophage. They make their way from India packed like human sardines in a fleet of rusting, dilapidated plague ships, wallowing their way towards Europe through the nauseating miasma that arises from the swamp of corpse-littered shit that they leave in their wake, spending their days listlessly staring out to sea and mindlessly copulating amidst their own putrifying filth. Merely to look upon the migrant horde is to be transfixed with a kind of a religious terror, overcome by its ugliness, paralyzed by pity. Soldiers forced to take even the smallest of aggressive actions against the horde, with only a few exceptions, throw down their weapons and run, not because they are terrified of the horde itself, but because they are terrified of their own conscience should they strike down a defenseless, pitiable wretch. In a few cases, soldiers take their own lives after being made to shoot. The horde’s primary weapon is the crushing psychological pressure that slams down on the souls all who behold it; better to give up and accept the inevitable than suffer the torment of fighting against it.

When the horde encounters a westerner, one of two things happens. Either the westerner is immediately killed by being trampled underfoot or torn limb from limb, or he is smoothly assimilated into the horde, becoming by and by indistinguishable from the innumerable wretches that comprise it. The zombies either eat you, or turn you into a zombie. Women of course are assimilated by rape.

Not everyone succumbs right away, of course. At the end of the novel a small group of psychologically resilient Frenchmen led by an army colonel and a right-wing government minister fall back to an abandoned mountain village. Inside the village’s borders they establish a micocosm of the old, pre-invasion French civilization. They defend their redoubt simply by shooting any migrants or white ‘assimilates’ (as they immediately take to calling them) who get too close. The migrants and assimilates are easily seen, a constant presence shambling in the distance; they are just as easily picked off, being slow and unarmed, and the village’s inhabitants soon take to treating the hunt as a sport. Of course this refuge does not last long: the French air force, in what is implied to be its last act (for the new world will not be able to maintain airplanes) wipes the last surviving Frenchmen out in an airstrike. Racism can’t be tolerated, you see.

Finally, there are the delusional lunatics who imagine that they can befriend or master the horde, turning it to their own purposes or making common cause with it, and who are therefore instrumental in opening the gates to their and everyone else’s doom. Upon actually encountering the horde the madmen find only death or assimilation; the horde is utterly indifferent to any expression of friendship.

I can’t prove that The Camp of the Saints was inspired by the zombie apocalypse genre, or still more interestingly, that it provides the prototype for it. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, but doesn’t really flesh out the themes of the zombie apocalypse the way that Romero’s 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead does. The first movie in Romero’s oeuvre is really just a straight-up horror movie, with the sociopolitical commentary being emphasized much more directly in the sequel and subsequent instalments. Nevertheless, the publication date of the novel, several years before the characteristics of the zombie apocalypse genre began to stabilize, suggests that it may have played an inspirational role. Certainly, left-wing commentators have been known to connect the dehumanized zombie horde with racist narratives playing on fears of biocontamination and castigating the extreme violence that typifies the genre as a right-wing power fantasy in which all moral constraints on violence against black bodies are removed.

The violence that zombie apocalypse survivors must necessarily engage is leads to another zombie apocalypse trope, that ‘the humans are the real monsters’. In The Camp of the Saints, the real zombies are not the desperate effluvia coughed up by the third world’s miserable slums, but the disenchanted, demoralized inhabitants of Europe, who have forgotten how to aspire to anything higher than their own comforts. Raspail’s Western civilization is an undead husk that merely resembles itself on the outside, but which has been utterly hollowed out from within. It has lost touch with God, and become utterly soulless: unable to believe in the divine, unable to really believe in the saccharine humanitarianism which it holds up as a substitute for the divine, unable to believe in itself, ultimately unable to believe even in its own right to exist. It has been reduced to nothing more than appetite; inevitably, inexorably, it finds itself pulled down into the mire of the third world, which is likewise nothing more than appetite. Unlike the West, however, the third world is without shame; it does not find the carnal state of man reduced to a walking stomach to be something unworthy; it believes in itself. The West aspires to something higher, to something more noble, something befitting its blessings. Deprived of this by the dissolute faithlessness brought about by its own decadent prosperity, it grows nauseated by its own existence. The third world proclaims that its wretchedness is a source of righteousness, and the first world agrees; thus, the only righteousness the West can aspire to is wretchedness, and first world and third are conjoined. The first world becomes the third world, but the third world does not become like the first; like sewage being poured into wine, the only possible result is sewage.

The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea, William Blake, 1805

Raspail holds up a mirror to the West, and it is this, and not his unflattering portrayal of the third world, that arouses hatred in his critics. In that there’s nothing new: baizuo are accustomed to hiding behind their clients, accusing their critics of racism for critiquing the white left. His primary dramatis personae are the journalists, politicians, priests, academics, military officers, revolutionaries, and ordinary citizens of France. The journalists and academics care nothing for truth, but only the attention that moral posturing provides. The politicians triangulate inside the nihilistic void of a culture that believes in nothing, and so perfectly capable of seeing what needs to be done are perfectly unable to do it. The priests are apostates and atheists, substituting political activism for faith. The military officers command a hollow war machine manned by soldiers armed with the deadliest weaponry industrial technology can devise and wholly unwilling to use it. The revolutionaries are either useful idiots or common criminals. The ordinary citizens are livestock, bien pensants whose thoughts extend no further than whatever the latest radio broadcast told them was good to think.

The living death of a civilization that is merely going through the mechanical motions of cultural forms it no longer believes in is easy meat for opportunistic moral warfare, and Raspail is explicit about this. The Last Chance Armada that launches from Calcutta is described in exactly these terms, as an invading army wielding its heartwrenching poverty as a deadly weapon aimed straight at the soft and vulnerable conscience of the West. The fleet is given its name by a diabolic journalist animated by a malicious ethnic resentment as deep as his marrow. This figure, Clement Dio, plays a central role. By agitating his audience’s conscience, he has monetized his racial identity, establishing his paper La pensee nouvelle as a major left-wing publication, by means of which he simultaneously enriches himself and injects poison into the bloodstream of the West. Dio knows exactly what he’s doing. His aim is to turn the West against itself by morally disarming it, with the goal of leading it to its destruction.

Dio’s nemesis, and probably the only man in France who understands Dio’s game, is Marchant, a rightist Cassandra who publishes a rag called La pensee nationale. In case this juxtaposition of mastheads was not clear enough, Marchant is shown as Dio’s opposite in every way: where Dio is wealthy, with a fast sports car and a beautiful wife, Marchant is impoverished and single; where Dio’s paper enjoys wide circulation, Marchant struggles to even get printed (at one point, he tried to put out a special edition, and the union who runs the printing shop goes on strike to block publication); where Dio is fêted as a beloved celebrity, Marchant is despised as a racist crank. Globally, the first world enjoys riches and cultural domination, while the third world languishes in poverty and cultural irrelevance, but when it comes to who the West should listen to, who should receive the rewards of its attention, the circumstances are reversed: the third worlder who tells the West to hate itself and die is celebrated, while the Frenchman who tells the West to love itself and live is spat upon.

As a result of this self-loathing ennui, the only Westerners who can arouse any sense of moral fervour are those bent upon its destruction. Thus, early in the novel we have its most most quoted passage, words which Raspail places into the mouth of a young revolutionary come to torment an emeritus professor of French literature on the eve of the fleet’s landing:

Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door.

This quote is always presented without context, and I’d always taken it to be a warning, but the revolutionary who utters it means it as a taunt. He glories in the fact that the horde will erase every trace of Western civilization. The cultural wealth accumulated over thousands of years of history and tradition will be broken down and burned, leaving nothing behind but rubble and ashes, to be gawped at by historyless fellaheen who comprehend nothing of the ruins they inhabit, and do not care that they do not comprehend. To the broken mind of this revolutionary, such an annihilation is liberation. He is unable to see his own culture as anything but a biological crime.

The aged professor shoots the young man in the chest with a shotgun, so that he may enjoy his last preapocalyptic repast in peace.

The murder that Raspail opens with is in many ways the novel’s spiritual key. The old man is steeped in French culture, in its literature, its architecture, its cuisine, its music, its traditions, its virtues, and its vices. He loves it, all of it, not only because of its venerable glory, but simply because it is his. Therefore he cares for it, cultivates it, protects it. This emeritus professor of literature is France, the real France. The young revolutionary is the conscience of France turned against itself, which rejects everything that France is, and seeks the destruction of France as a positive good. The old man murders him without a second thought, and without shedding a tear, because to kill that which threatens everything that you love and everything that you are is simply the most natural and obvious thing in the world. His conscience does not trouble him in the slightest; indeed, he is so blasé about the execution that he promptly forgets that the corpse is even there. This is the soul of the West murdering its treacherous pity as an act of self-preservation. If the West was still capable of this instinctive ruthlessness, the entire apocalypse could have been prevented. A single airstrike launched from an aircraft carrier could have sunk the Last Chance Armada the moment it left port. Instead, France uses its air power only once: to destroy the last little oasis of French civilization that held out for a few days against the rising tide of colour.

The professor’s interaction with the youthful revolutionary is illustrative of the novel’s nuanced views on race and culture, which go well beyond the charges of crude racism that are leveled against the author. Both characters are French, and therefore necessarily biologically and culturally akin to one another. They speak the same language, have the same childhood faith, descend from the same tribes, share the same history, and were formed by the same land. However, the professor does not see the young man as being of his kind at all, and tells him as much just before shooting him. Whatever their other similarities, the young man is animated by a fundamentally different and alien spirit. He is ‘French’ in every way that counts, and therefore he is not French at all.

The young revolutionary whose pity has killed the Frenchman inside of him is later contrasted with an Indian man who has been adopted into the French family, whom we first meet when he calls into a radio show to warn against letting in a million Indians (they accuse him of false consciousness, and cut him off), and who is later seen heading towards the coast with two high-powered rifles. This character is almost uniquely sympathetic, because he places a higher value on European culture than even the Europeans do. Knowing the contrast between his homeland and his adopted country, and having nothing but gratitude in his heart for having been given the great gift of escape from the former, he wants nothing more in the world than to protect it. Despite being biologically Indian, and no doubt speaking French with a thick accent, it’s implied that this man is more French in the ways that count than most natural citizens of France. Lest the author be accused of civic nationalism (and perhaps Raspail would not find this such a slander), it’s important to emphasize that this is not a matter of paperwork: the malevolent Clement Dio is sufficient demonstration that this is not the case. The point is simply that it is possible, though perhaps it is rare, for those not born in the West to become of the West at least in a spiritual sense, and that a foreigner who has become spiritually Western is more meaningfully Western than a Westerner whose spirit has been poisoned. The friend is always better than the traitor, wherever the friend was born. Certainly the novel’s most racist characters - which is to say, its heroes - would agree with this, for they accept him as one of their own without hesitation.

The small band of heroes who gather at the doomed village – the only men in France who have the strength of spirit to kill their pity – have no illusions about their prospects. They know that their fates are sealed, and hope only to go out swinging, to take for themselves some small portion of glory, not because anyone who follows will care, not even out of some grim and dutiful northern courage, but as a man clinging to a vine on a cliffside enjoys the last sweet taste of a strawberry, indulging themselves in a kind of private joke. As Raspail puts it in one of the book’s numerous quotable passages:

The true Right is not serious. This is why the Left hates it, rather like a hangman must hate a victim who laughs and jokes on his way to the gallows. The Left is a conflagration that devours and consumes in deadly earnest. All appearances notwithstanding, its parties are as grim as one of those parades of puppets in Nuremberg or Beijing. The Right is a flickering flame that gaily dances, a jack-o’-lantern in the gloomy forest reduced to ashes.

It is no accident the true Right began to coalesce, a decade or so ago, only when it rediscovered the irreverent joi de vivre that Raspail identifies as its true nature, nor is it accidental that it was only at this point that the right began to claw its way to cultural influence. The joyless sermonizing of the moral majority and the passionless bloviating of respectable conservative movement think tank intellectuals were utterly ineffectual at preventing the West’s spiritual decline and demographic invasion. The cultural circumstances that Raspail illustrates are still painfully familiar; the trends he predicted have only accelerated; the suicidal left remains firmly in charge of the West’s institutions, and much of our population are still cordycepted by its psychic poison. The third world invasion that Raspail predicted is well under way, aided and abetted by the grandstanding sociopaths of Big Other who insist that we have a ‘duty to care’ for anyone and everyone but our own. The demographic trends point towards destruction: our fertility has collapsed; white majorities are propped up by childless boomers; in many of our countries, Mohammed is the most common name written down by nurses in maternity wards. You can either cry, or you can laugh, but laughter reignites that dancing fire which burns away the choking fog of pity; if enough of us laugh at the absurdity of our situation, we just might have a chance to overcome the Left’s devouring sanctimony.

The Camp of Saints is available on Amazon in audible, Kindle, paperback, or hardcover editions. The prices are very reasonable. You should read it. You should talk about it. You should give it to a friend to read. It may well be the most important novel of the last century.

I hope very much that you found this a worthy investment of the irreplaceable moments of your life, and would like to thank you for taking the time to read this. I’d especially like to thank my supporters, who make it possible for me to make a modest living by writing about books that I enjoyed, amongst other topics, and without whose generosity I should be forced to try to get a job building machine gods or something. No machine god was involved in writing this, by the way (aside of course from a bit of research); the entire thing was slapped together by one human, me, over the course of the last several hours. Anyhow, if you’d like to count yourself amongst the small, elite group who keep Postcards From Barsoom coming, you know what to do: