Alex Bronzini-Vender at Public Books:
The epigraph of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is a quote from the British expatriate novelist and travel writer Lawrence Durrell: “My spirit turns more and more toward the West, toward the old heritage. There are, perhaps, some treasures to retrieve among its ruins … I don’t know.”
Raspail, a lifelong anti-immigration activist, was never assured of the white West’s innate virtue. It was “civilized,” yes, but the true judge of a civilization’s right to exist was whether it could defend itself. In our obsession with “rights” and “international law,” we’d lost sight of the world’s real moral logic: kill or be killed. In doing so, we’d consigned ourselves to the latter fate—to be killed—and worse, we would deserve it.
This is the logic of The Camp of the Saints, published fifty years ago in France.
More here.