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June 4, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:10:08
Prophetic Dystopia
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Hello, everyone.
It's this week's Left, Right, and White.
I'm Chris Roberts, and I'm here, of course, with Gregory Hood.
Today, we are going to be talking about The Camp of the Saints, the novel by Jean Raspal, a name that we will surely mispronounce and pronounce in different ways several different times.
Oh yeah, I'm totally going to say his name completely differently.
But as I was joking with Greg before we started recording, we're Americans, so we are allowed to mispronounce French words with no consequences whatsoever.
One housekeeping note, it is Memorial Day, and we believe that we are recording before the fireworks will get started.
But we might have gotten that wrong, so we're very sorry if you suddenly hear a pop.
It's not because we're coming at you from the ghetto.
It might also just be people shooting firearms into the sky, but that's our constitutional right, and we're going to own it.
Correct.
Because we're Americans.
Yeah, even if we do love this French novel, we still fundamentally are Americans.
And, oh, one other thing.
A good friend of American Renaissance was recently giving me some feedback on this podcast, and he said that what was really needed was some more conflict, some more argument between Greg and I that really highlight our different worldviews.
So if you hear me flip over the table and punch him in the face, he'll know.
Well, then you'll know you're not listening to this particular episode, because Greg and I both really, really love this novel, and think it has a lot of really important things to say, and that everybody should read it.
In the future, we'll talk about something that really gets us at each other's throats, and then, yeah, Greg will flip over the table, probably beat me up, he's much larger than I am.
And a final housekeeping note is this wonderful, wonderful novel in English is now out of print, which is perfectly criminal.
I'm really sorry to readers who want to run out and buy it now.
It's hard to be sure if now is a good time to buy it, because even though it's $250 now, hard to say if it'll be $1,000 in a year or if somebody else will start printing it.
That being said, If you can read French at all, you can actually still get reasonably priced French copies.
I would recommend you go to ABE Books, sometimes referred to as ABE Books.
I've actually never figured out which one it is.
You can search there for French language copies, and they're still only like 20, 25 bucks.
One additional thing to that, I believe, and I cleared this beforehand, VDare actually does still have a stock of English language copies, so I would encourage you to contact them directly if you were really needed an English language copy.
Because that's the last game in town for this, unfortunately.
The copy I'm holding in my hand, I mean, my, you know, people talk about, like, stocks and cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
Right-wing books, y'all.
I mean, like, my thousands of dollars, like, sitting in this bookcase here, just from, like, stuff I picked up for free years ago.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and all of James Burnham's old books now are worth, like, hundreds of dollars.
I bought one for hundreds of dollars, yeah.
I can't even afford my own books.
It's like trying to buy it on Amazon.
It's like more than my mortgage payment.
Last week we were talking about monarchy, obviously it's a taking off point to anarcho-capitalism, but we were talking about the costs and benefits of monarchy.
And so I want to begin today with what Louis de Bourbon, the Duke of Anjou, who under the legitimist line for the French monarchy would be Louis XX, King of France.
This is what he said when Jean Raspel died.
This was back June 13, 2020, not that long ago.
And he said, quote, It is with great emotion that I learn of Jean Raspel's call to God, faithful to the end, to the Church, and to France.
His personality and panache will be missed.
Vive le Roi!
That's what I said.
This shows Raspail was not a marginal figure.
I mean, he's really a giant of French literature.
And one thing to decry us being Americans is that he really should be known for far more than just this book.
This was just the one that was the most sensational, I guess.
In France, he is known for a number of books.
It is not by any means that this is the only book of his that broke through.
Absolutely not.
He wrote tons of novels, a lot of adventure novels, a lot of traveling novels.
There's a lot of common elements in all of these books.
Almost like the pursuit of the knightly, the noble, the...
The person trying to overcome himself and go to the edges of the world and have adventures.
Let Faustian drive.
Right, right.
And it's interesting, when he died, the flags that were being waved at his funeral were of Patagonia, because he had written quite a bit about that area of the world, and that became sort of associated with him, sort of like the way the, uh, what is it?
That the Vinland flag got associated with Type O Negative that they came up with.
It was almost like his kind of, like, brand, you know?
So I do encourage you all, and hopefully some of his other works are available in English, don't think of this as, oh this is some political polemicist writing a book about mass immigration and it's just cheerleading rah-rah.
This is a serious author taking a hard look at the most compelling issue of our time.
And clearly this is the most prophetic book of the last century.
Yeah.
I mean, this is the crisis.
This is what we face.
And it's rather amusing reading people talking about it.
Now it's seen as, if you know about the book, if you know of this forbidden tome, they talk about it like it's necromancy or something.
But the fact is, when it came out, It got rave reviews from quite a few people.
William F. Buckley called it a great novel.
Jeffrey Hart, who was once a big conservative, then he endorsed, I think, Kerry and Obama in 2004 and 2008, respectively, gave it a positive review.
National Review quite recently has also given it some Good comments, but they've said it's off-putting.
Basically that he's right, but we don't want to deal with getting our hands dirty about the possible implications.
Which is fitting, because that's really what the book is about.
We see the consequences of what's happening, but we aren't willing to do what is needed to prevent this terrible fate from befalling us.
And of course, The Atlantic Monthly, back when it was called The Atlantic Monthly and not just The Atlantic, had a cover story about it.
With Paul Kennedy, who was, of course, the rise and fall of the great powers, and Matthew Connolly, who has since renounced it, and, you know, probably under career pressure, has now written all this stuff about, oh, you know, controlling global population is impossible, blah blah blah blah blah.
They knew the score.
There's nothing that can be done about population fluctuation.
It's just mysterious.
We don't have the technology.
We have to do everything we can to control the weather itself, but we can't do anything about global population flows or enforcing border control.
That's impossible.
But we can blow up clouds if we all use solar power.
If only somebody had just invented some way of manipulating women's hormones to affect their fertility.
It just seems so straightforward.
It feels like that could be a pill.
Well, that actually is a good segue into this because he was faithful son of the Church, and there's quite a lot about the Catholic Church specifically in this book, but he seems to have kind of a love-hate relationship with it, as expressed here, because in the beginning it's actually... Which is the sign of a good Catholic.
Any Catholic who does not have a love-hate relationship with the Church overall and has a pure love-based relationship.
Is it faithful as far as I'm concerned?
Yeah, you have to go back and forth.
And one of the lines in this book that I thought was great was, I'm not a Christian, I'm a Catholic, and I insist upon the distinction.
Because what he's really talking about, obviously the title is an allusion to Revelation, where Gog and Magog surround the camp of the saints, and the idea of Europe being the cradle of the faith, something sacred, something holy.
And there was this faith that sustained us, that made us, this institution that sustained us and made us, especially France, the first daughter of the church, as they used to call it.
And now, of course, it's on the other side.
Because if you look at who's pushing mass immigration, who's getting money from pushing mass immigration, Catholic charities and things like that, U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, of course, Pope Francis is always out there talking about how we need more immigration and everything else.
And so there's this sense of being abandoned by the people who you once looked to protect you, not just physically, but more important, spiritually.
And really what this book is about, in terms of its most fundamental theme, is it's the loss of the Western soul, which for so long was dominated by... Christianity is too broad, a very specific form of Christianity, a civilization-sustaining form of Christianity.
And particularly in France, that would be traditionalist Catholicism.
And unfortunately, that's just not there anymore.
At least not the way it once was.
Yeah.
These two things really weren't separable.
That's Bell Lock for those of you guys looking up stuff.
One interesting cope that you actually see a lot of religious conservatives do in regards to what Steve Saylor calls the world's most important graph is this idea that the people replacing Native Europeans are going to all be these conservative Catholic black Africans and that it is These immigrants who will save the church and who will save Christianity and will end the secular malaise that's going all over the West.
In the U.S., you see the same thing with certain Republican commentators who are like, oh, well, if anything, a lot of these Hispanic immigrants are superior to our own people because they're religious and they're hardworking.
What they don't tell you about is the catechism.
There's a quite a quismic decline of Catholicism in Latin America.
Bolsonaro in Brazil, for example, I mean, he wasn't backed so much by the Catholics, but by Pentecostals, I believe.
Which in a lot of ways is the same thing as, like, evangelicals down there.
Right, right.
It is something distinct.
And this idea that the West needs to be saved from itself, I think, is a theme that's very common in, certainly among liberals, certainly among leftists, certainly among those who openly favor the Great Replacement.
But also I think among a lot of conservatives too, where they sort of say like, we have failed to do this, we don't have the right to preserve what we have, therefore we need to be replaced by a more virtuous people.
Yeah, that's right.
But what they fail to recognize is that there's not going to be, it's not going to be people moving into our traditions or our institutions to prop them up, it's just going to be sweeping them away.
And this is like, Essentially how the book ends where people are reading all these meanings onto this group of refugees is coming There's oh, it's the the last chance armada.
It's gonna remake the West.
It's gonna remake us it's gonna turn us into a universal brotherhood and it's no they're just gonna sweep you aside and Everything that you once held to be meaningful is just gonna be consumed and that's it One of the things I love the most about The Camp of the Saints is how many characters it has.
It manages to have one representative character of almost every facet of society, so we get to see what's going on from the perspective of so many different people.
And one of the biggest characters is Clement Dio, who is a citizen of France, North African by blood, who's this really important pundit.
May Allah forgive me for saying this name, he is a journalist.
Something, you know, right in the beginning of the novel when suddenly there's news that there's this mass flotilla of ships from the Indian subcontinent that's headed for Europe and that Europe is about to be inundated by all of them, you know, suddenly everybody in Europe learns about this and everybody's got to have a reaction.
Everybody's got to have a hot take.
And Clement Dio, who is I mean, in many ways just sort of an amalgamation of every New York Times op-ed writer that you can imagine rolled into one guy.
He, the first column he writes about it reads, Considering all the wonders that the Genghis had bestowed on us already, sacred music, theater, dance, yoga, mysticism, arts and crafts, jewelry, new styles and dress, the burning question was how we could manage to do without these folks any longer.
It actually sounds like libertarians talking about the GDP.
But again, it's talking about so many different people who look outside the West for its salvation.
Like, oh, some other group of people is going to come in here and just magically make everything better.
And there's also the powerful Search for self-annihilation to achieve some greater humanity.
Now quite early on one thing we should mention is that, and this I guess is something that he got wrong at least to some extent, in this book Short version of the book's plot.
Essentially, there's a mass flotilla of refugees that comes from India and swamps the West and this serves as sort of the signal for mass migration of the Global South into the Global North and also China into Russia, which at this time was still the Soviet Union.
This book was written in the 70s and that's the end of Western civilization and I guess Orthodox civilization too.
And One of the things that he talks about is you still have these remnants of these sort of colonial regimes in some of these places, but they're so weakened and so lacking in moral self-confidence that they don't know whether they have the right to prevent what they clearly see as a disaster.
And he says, in this case, there's a consul who's trying to prevent this migration, and of course the bishop and all the do-gooders and all these people are saying, you have no right to stop these people from coming.
And the consul says, and I quote, page 28, you know, the consul went on, there's a very old word that describes the kind of men you are.
It's traitor.
That's all you are.
You're nothing new.
There's been all kinds.
We've had bishop traders, knight traders, general traders, statesman traders, scholar traders, and just plain traders.
It's a species the west abounds in, and it seems to get richer and richer the smaller it grows.
Funny, you would think it should be the other way around.
But the mind decays, the spirit warps, and the traders keep coming.
At which point one of the other people responds, passports, countries, religions, ideals, races, borders, oceans, what bloody rubbish.
I think this idea, as you alluded to, the Faustian drive of Western civilization, I mean, a heresy becomes a heresy because it has a grain of truth.
And the drive for unlimited frontiers, for unlimited space, for universalism, for overcoming of everything, that can also lead to self-annihilation, where we think like, oh, we've got this thing and it could be extended to everyone equally.
And the idea of having some sort of border or restricting people or limiting ourselves to this little corner of the world and saying that this is us and outside is the other, that actually gnaws at a lot of Westerners.
And I don't think it's totally irrational.
I don't think it's just totally media propaganda.
I think it's something sort of deep-seated within us.
I mean, Raspel is essentially warning us of the logical consequences of this.
But again, he doesn't really seem to provide many answers.
I mean, everybody, it should be clear, sees what's happening, but they just don't know how to respond to it.
Yeah, he provides absolutely no answers whatsoever.
This is a... Deeply depressing book.
Yeah, I mean, it's... I mean, in a lot of ways, You know, the book reminds me of 1984 in that it just depicts this really bad future that's all too easy to envision.
And Orwell in 1984 also doesn't say, like, oh, well, and this is the way out, you know, this is the solution.
Yeah, he essentially concludes that the human spirit can be broken.
I mean, right, there's that great encounter where Smith says, you know, he doesn't believe in God, but he says, oh, something will defeat you, the spirit of man.
And he's shown his own broken, destroyed body and said, like, if you are a man, you are the last man.
And, you know, he's just this wreck.
And of course, by the end, he does love Big Brother.
Right.
And this is what happens in the end of The Camp of the Saints, where basically the entire world is consumed except for Switzerland.
Which closes its borders.
Funny.
I guess we were talking about last week how Switzerland is an example in many ways.
Switzerland closes its borders, kicks out all the international organizations, but he says the rot had taken in there too.
Yeah.
And so eventually they throw their borders- It appears to be just a matter of time.
Right.
And the narrator is writing from the perspective of somebody who fled to Switzerland to basically experience the last hours of the Western world, the white world, and knows the end is coming.
Yeah, and for those of you who are angry that we might have just spoiled it for you, we really haven't, actually.
No, I mean, you know it's coming from page four.
Yeah, and you can know what Greg just said, and you should still read it.
I mean, we're not, you know, what's that old joke of like, you know, No review can properly capture, you know, anything.
Right.
Well, one of the things that kept getting brought home to me over and over again is if Raphael was not a man of the right, if he had been a leftist, This would have gotten the Nobel Prize and everybody would be calling it the greatest thing ever.
Because they would be saying, oh, this shows how Western beliefs are so perverted and how this is this righteous overcoming.
Because you do have characters in this book who say, like, well, why don't we just stop them with force?
And other people say, well, no, we can't do that.
And then to which the first guy will say something along the lines of, well, then what do you propose?
And the other guy essentially has nothing, or he runs away.
And there's sort of this doomed last stand, complete with, I guess you would call it a traitor from the other side, who aligns with Western civilization and tries to stop this flood of people coming in, and eventually they get bombed by That's right.
Jared Taylor thought this was really noteworthy in his review of Camp of the Saints back in the 90s.
He wrote about it.
So right at the end of the novel, a handful of citizens drive south with their hunting rifles on suicide missions to do the job their government is unable to do.
One of these, ironically, is an assimilated Indian.
As he explains to another band of citizens, this is a quote from the novel, Every white supremacist cause, no matter where or when, has had blacks on its side, and they didn't mind fighting for the enemy either.
Today, with so many whites turning black, why can't a few darkies decide to be white, like me?
Yeah, actually, and this is from Ross Bell himself, where he's talking about, and this is an idea I want to get into in a bit, the fatherland betrayed by the Republic, which I think is one of the most profound concepts that we need to get into here.
But he's, this is the author himself taking a political stance, At the same time, let us not despair.
He's talking about, you know, generally how bad things are, and how Christian charity is destroying itself, how the bishops are essentially destroying their own faith, handing over first order of the church to Islam.
But he says, without doubt there will remain what is called in ethnology some isolates, powerful minorities, perhaps about 15 million French, and not necessarily all of the white race.
"...who will speak our language more or less unbroken and will insist on remaining impregnated with our culture and our history such as was transmitted to us from generation to generation.
It will not be easy for them."
So, we cannot say.
He's clearly aware of race.
He's clearly aware that numbers matter.
I mean, that's stated pretty explicitly in the book several times.
It is a question of numbers.
You know, it's one thing if you have a single hapless refugee and like, do you want to kill this guy?
Well, no.
You know, if you're saying, like, 40 million people are coming, well, okay, that's an invasion.
I don't care what you call it, it's an invasion.
And he, Raspel, is not what you would call a white nationalist or even, I don't know, a racial essentialist.
You know, to him, being French doesn't just mean being white.
And there are non-whites can be French, I think he would say.
And so that, you know, leads to other debates.
Well, I know a number of years ago, Jared Taylor, who's fluent in French and periodically goes to France.
He was fluent in everything.
He tried to contact Jean Raspail, potentially interviewing him or talking to him about Camp of the Saints and all of these things.
And Mr. Taylor told me that Raspel made it very clear that he didn't know who Jared Taylor was and wasn't really interested in talking to this American that he was unfamiliar with.
Fundamentally, he was an artist and not a political activist.
The first thing he writes, he says, you know, I was going to write a preface with my ideas and everything else, but what would be the point?
I mean, that's essentially what he says.
And at the time, again, this is this Atlantic Monthly cover story, so all of you who write for The Atlantic, you are tied to this notorious novel and you've given it a cover story, so you should all cancel yourselves.
Yeah, resign.
Resign immediately to POCs.
He says, you know, when I was writing this book, Respel, it was sort of like an emotional outletting.
He was clearly getting something out of his system.
And I think to some extent once he got it out of his system, except for this last sort of despairing essay, it was out of his system.
And there is something to that.
I mean, even those of us who are identitarians, if I can, you know, claim that word for us, You know, it's not like you just go around thinking about race all day.
I mean, there are questions of religion and spirituality and economy and art and everything else.
I mean, you'd be a very boring person.
It's like, this is all you talk about and all you thought about.
And this is why I think it's such a crime that he's remembered, at least in the Anglosphere, for just this one book.
And it's especially ironic because We've now reached a point in the West where ignorance is actually a kind of proof of virtue.
I'm referring to not only recent movements to get rid of standardized testing and get rid of AP classes, but even in classics departments they're saying we're not going to teach Greek and Latin anymore because we don't want to perpetuate this tradition and everything else.
That's how it is with this book.
I mean, this is something that if you know it exists, you're already doomed.
And if you go searching for all the positive write-ups of it in mainstream media, they're still there.
But it's going to take a bit of doing to pull them off.
You know, and this is something Rod Dreher periodically is critiqued for by a whole litany of leftist writers.
Dreher has read Camp of the Saints, and periodically for his blog on the American Conservative, he'll reference it, generally in the context of, man, it's so crazy how you can You know, turn on the TV and watch the news and it's like
this novel, The Camp of the Saints just came alive.
Like it is so dead on.
Is there any other, you know, novel like as prophetic as this that was written over 50
years ago?
The only thing he got wrong, and I meant to say this earlier, the only thing he got wrong
is that this mass migration isn't from India.
I mean it's more of a, it's really from Africa and it's more a generalized migration of the
global south.
I mean, and when you see, and this was in 2015 when you had what Merkel unleashed and
everything else, I mean you would just see these moms breaking through fences, these
kind of hapless border police or military stepping aside.
They could stop them, but they Didn't have the moral fortitude or the orders to stop them, and you would just see these guys celebrating as they broke into the country and just ran in.
Went somewhere, disappeared into the ghettos or whatever it is.
And what's so tragic about it is when he was writing in 1973, you know, as Enoch Powell said in his Rivers of Blood speech, The racial problem in America is tied up with the history of the states itself.
I mean, we've always had this problem.
There's no way you can separate this problem from the American experience.
But Europe didn't have to do this.
It was inflicted on itself.
Yeah, completely self-inflicted.
Well, whether it was either self-inflicted or imposed on it by a hostile elite.
But the point is, it wasn't necessary.
And nothing was gained from it.
We are now in a situation where you have Black Lives Matter protests in London and all these other European capitals.
We're saying we need to get rid of this.
We need to get rid of this.
We need to get rid of this.
And the question is, well, why are you even here?
What are we getting out of this?
At this point, no one is even pretending, as far as I can see, that this is a benefit.
It's just a kind of revenge.
Like, we're going to destroy your civilization because you have a comment.
Well, it's both.
It's that the revenge is considered a benefit.
You know, that it's great.
that non-whites are having this revenge and that ultimately this revenge will benefit whites in this weird backhanded
way.
Yeah, capitalism will be overcome somehow even though it's like the big corporations who are supporting this.
We're going to oppose capitalism even though we're on the same side as all the corporations.
We're going to oppose established religion even though we're on the same side as the Catholic Church and the Pope.
And we're going to oppose the system and the media even though every single media outlet is on their side.
None of these people have ever experienced opposition in their entire lives.
And as to Roswell getting it wrong in terms of the fact that the mass migration really came out of Syria and now is coming out of various parts of Africa.
You know, that's technically true, but it's not really the point.
I mean, you could rewrite this novel and just flip out India for Syria and nothing else about it would change.
Yeah, it's not essential.
The fact that the mass of migration comes from the Indian subcontinent as opposed to Sub-Saharan Africa isn't super relevant because ultimately the book is a lot more about the people in Europe waiting for this to happen.
Yeah.
It's not really about the immigrants themselves.
One pushback on this, and this is going to be unprecedented, but I'm actually going to push back against you from the left a little bit, which is there is almost this, you know, people joke about like H.P.
Lovecraft stories where he's like, ah, I've seen an Italian, it's cosmic horror and my brain is melting because of his take on mass immigration and what he saw as the horrors of major cities.
There is something with that with India here because, you know, the author does talk about, you know, these people are deformed.
I think one of the leaders of this mob is, like, called the turd eater or something along these lines.
I mean, there is this sort of, like, weird Mutated thing that's coming up from, like, the disease-ridden hovels of the Ganges.
And I think that is actually mistaken, because if we look at who is actually doing the migrating, it's generally young, healthy men.
And they're not coming because they're desperate.
They're coming because they know the score, they know they can get money.
A lot of them have cell phones, a lot of them have apps that allow them to navigate around this stuff, and a lot of them are being ferried in by refugee resettlement groups.
Sure, but however deformed or unhealthy the immigrants in Camp of the Saints are, they also are fundamentally showing up at Europe because they know they can.
That's something that becomes more and more clear as the book progresses of like, They just know that they can get away with this.
They just know that nobody is going to stop them.
It's just a matter of arriving.
They just have to make sure that the boats don't sink.
Right.
The only thing that I guess would be relevant to the story is here it makes them more sympathetic because it's emphasized again and again and again.
Like, yes, they're coming for the stuff and they're aware of it.
They know what they're doing.
They do have agency.
But it's also emphasized over and over again just how wretched these people are.
You know, they're all dying in huge masses on the Armada.
They're just throwing the bodies overboard or leaving them there.
Nobody seems to care.
Whereas now, it's far more cynical because the people who are breaking in now, at least that first wave, are not helpless refugees.
They're not coming with hands outstretched.
It's generally people who have a bit of initiative and know exactly what they're doing.
If anything, I think Camp of the Saints is too sympathetic.
Man, I didn't think I'd ever meet somebody who'd read Camp of the Saints and their takeaway was that the immigrants were portrayed in a sympathetic way.
Really?
Well, put it this way.
It's an offensive way, but it is a sympathetic way.
Like, if you see someone who has a deformity, You may say, well, this is a bad thing, you know, we don't want these things to happen, but the feeling is pity.
And pity isn't necessarily a good thing.
I mean, because you're, the sick thing about pity is you're putting yourself in the superior position.
You're saying, oh, this poor person, I can give you stuff, but I'm also elevated.
And I think that's a lot of the white savior complex.
But I would argue that a lot of the people who are breaking into Europe now, they're not pitiable.
They're just straight up invaders.
So no, I think the reason Raspel portrays them that way is he's tapping in to that very Darwinian response that human beings have when they see diseased or deformed or malnourished people, which sure, on an intellectual level, there's some kind of abstract pity of like, man, it would be better if they were not like this.
It's a shame that they ended up like this.
But there's still that immediate sort of, you know, you do a double take, take a step backwards when you're walking down the street and you see somebody with like a gratuitous facial, you know, deformation of some kind.
You know that subconsciously you know that this person might be sick, they might get you sick, that they're not healthy and that absence of health might be passed along to you.
I pause here that any journos, may your name be forever cursed, who are listening to this, who are going to take those quotes out of context, are probably doing this while wearing like six face masks and injecting themselves with every vaccine at once.
This is what you are saying is true.
I think what Raspal is trying to show us is that Europe is so sick and so ethno-masochistic, that they're so pathologically altruistic, that even though this boat is filled with people who are so obviously unhealthy and have been unhealthy their whole lives, Even, like, the Europeans' self-preservation instinct is so dead, it's so completely gone, that even the arrival of sick people isn't enough to make you think, like, oh no, we should we should get these people out of here, we shouldn't let them in.
And in regards to, you know, the real-life Camp of the Saints that really kicked into high gear in 2015, you know, it's perpetually debatable as to what You know, to what extent these people were refugees, were really fleeing something that was genuinely bad or not, because what makes a good life and what constitutes, you know, basic human needs varies immensely from place to place.
And if you've lived your whole life in Syria, no matter how well Syria is doing on any given month, like, yeah, you don't have basic fundamental needs from a European perspective.
Right.
There's no level of that.
And sure, like the people who are coming are often like young, healthy men, but again, Health is also relative and also depends on context.
I mean, even when Obama started bringing in lots of refugees at the end of a second term, like, a lot, it, um, oh god, I think it wasn't, um...
It wasn't polio, but it was some other disease that had been otherwise eradicated, just started coming back because all of these people were bringing it in.
And sure, they were healthy enough to make it to the U.S., but they were also carriers of this thing.
You see this in, there are all these mass migrations happening within Latin America and within the Caribbean right now.
You see the same thing there.
Haitians that managed to make it all the way to Santiago, Chile are clearly healthy on some level.
You can't be retarded and make that journey okay.
But still, you see it, especially with sexually transmitted diseases that have just started
skyrocketing in Chile, you know, not just AIDS, but gonorrhea as well.
So health, not healthy, refugee, not refugee.
I mean, on some level, if you're just living in the Middle East, you know, you're always
just one coup away from being a refugee.
I mean, obviously their lives would be better in a profound material sense if they made it into Europe.
And in that sense, for a lot of leftists, that's enough to make them a refugee.
Like, oh, well, you know, they'll have running water.
They just want a better life right and that's and of course, you know, the question is well who wants a worse life now?
Ironically the answer is probably maybe some white leftists about how many of them like I wouldn't probably not the leaders the journalists in this Story, of course, does not meet with a good fate in the end.
Yeah, that's right.
For all his generosity.
Right, and this is also true of the bishop who goes to the shores to bless them as they, you know, come across the shores and they just trample him because what do they care about his church and what he believes and everything else?
And the same with all the rest of them.
Ethnomassacism is never rewarded in any way.
That's the most perverse thing about it, is that the people who are most pro-immigrant, the people who are most anti-white, don't actually gain much.
I mean, in the short run they might get a good media career or something, but there was that famous case in 2015-2016 of that girl who was raped and murdered by a Syrian immigrant, her parents.
Yeah, Molly Tibbetts, and her murderer was just convicted.
Yeah.
But of course, you know, first thing her father did was run to the press and be like, well, you know, tacos are great, so therefore I can't be too mad about this.
As far as I'm concerned, Hispanics are just like Iowans, but with better food.
Right.
You say that after your daughter is raped and killed.
I mean, like, you're allowed to be... but this...
Metaphor of health.
And this is obvious, you know, we've both been through college and graduate school and the usual stuff.
And of course, in all the classes you're forced to sit through, they talk about this.
Not grad school in my case.
Your pedigree is more impressive than mine.
It wasn't much to speak of in terms of like what I actually learned.
But the I do pause here to note that some of the people who are leading the efforts of trying to get us deplatformed and everything else, it's like, yeah, I went to your school and graduated there, so you're tied to me too.
There's always this thing when you sit through these trainings where they say, oh, fear of the other and the disease metaphor.
This is like one of the favorite things.
You know, it's a trope, I always say.
Now, the fact that it's a trope, in some cases, doesn't mean that it's necessarily untrue.
And we're seeing this now, obviously, with COVID and everything else.
In fact, if something is a trope, it suggests that it is true.
It generally is true.
Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason, but there's also a deeper sickness here, and that's what I think the book is really about.
It's fundamentally not about them.
It's fundamentally about us, and it's fundamentally not even really a book.
It's not really a book about race, truly.
It's not even really a book about culture, to me.
It's a book about religion, and it's a book about spirituality, because The sheer facts are known to everybody, at least the people in leadership.
The President of the Republic, the Army soldiers, the people who are fleeing.
Remember, as the ships are coming, they flee their homes and just try to get away from it and flee from it.
Of course, we're reminded of every white family that fled the cities after the riots in the 60s and 70s and who are moving to red states now to complain about it when they get here.
But Just knowing that, just seeing that something bad is coming doesn't mean that you're going to act against it.
You have to have some sort of moral righteousness that you yourself acknowledge in order to use force.
And that has been completely stripped away from Western man.
And I think that's what he's truly writing about.
I want to quote again from The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic.
And what he means by this phrase is the fatherland Your country, blood and soil, the things that make you what you are, you know, eternal France, as de Gaulle would say.
Betrayed by the Republic.
The Republic is liberty, equality, fraternity, universal ideas, the proposition nation.
President Biden just said, oh, America is unique among nations because of our founded By an idea.
We're defined by an idea.
Now, of course, anyone in the conservative movement, the mainstream conservative movement, will tell you the same thing.
And the other thing that's sick about this is that that's not really true.
Paul Ryan used to say that on the campaign trail in 2012 all the time.
But it's not even true, because practically every Western country at this point is defined by these stupid ideas.
Practically every Western country is just, you know, some vague notions of democracy and you're a passport and you're in.
America's not special in that regard.
And certainly France, if we're talking about a more radical version of equality, I would say the French Revolution was far more Reaching then the American Revolution, which basically you had the same domestic elite in charge at the beginning and the end.
But I want to return to what Raspel writes here, quote, What I cannot understand, what plunges me into an abyss of sorry perplexity, is why and how so many informed Frenchmen and so many French politicians contribute knowingly, methodically, dare I say cynically, to the inevitable sacrifice of a certain France, let us avoid the qualifier of eternal, which repels certain Which repels sensitive consciences on the altar of an exacerbated utopian humanism.
This is fundamentally why I believe the West faces a common struggle and all of us whether you're listening to me in America and Canada and Australia and France and Germany.
We're all in the same boat because the people who run our societies all say that we're defined by these certain ideas and we have an obligation to destroy ourself because of these ideas.
And at some point we have to say, no, we don't have to destroy ourselves.
And more importantly, these ideas are stupid and wrong.
And what, you know, what he suggests here, what Roussel says, the people who are saying it know they're stupid and wrong.
They certainly don't believe in it themselves when it comes to how they live.
Yeah, well, in the perpetual debate that identitarians have as to whether or not our elites truly believe these stupid things, or if they're just cynically employing them, by and large, Ross Ball comes down on the side of, oh, it's... Oh, they know!
Yeah, it's cynical.
It's funny, it reminds me, I remember I had this conversation with this sort of hippie Gen X-er way back in the day who was involved in all kinds of left-wing causes about, you know, environmentalism and homelessness and stuff, and he grew up super privileged in one of the major cities in California, I forget which one, but he grew up, you know, filthy rich, like his dad was a shipping magnate of some kind.
And something he talked to me about was that when he first got into all of his activist stuff as a teenager, he had really truly believed that the world at large just didn't know about all of these societal problems.
And he thought, you know, as like a precocious 15, 16 year old, he really thought that, oh man, Well, I know about it, and now it's just my job, like, I just gotta tell all of these other people, and then they'll know about it, and then we will all come together, and we will do something about it.
Right.
And how he had this big revelation at some point after college, where he realized, like, oh man, lots of people do know about these problems.
In fact, basically everybody with the power to do something about the problems are extremely aware of the problems.
That's not the issue.
Right.
The issue is not spreading the word.
The issue is Yeah.
How do you solve the problem, or can these problems even be solved?
Right.
And I really, really sympathize with that perspective.
I mean, I kind of went through a similar thing in college where I thought I was going to be able to tell all of my peers about all of these facts about IQ and crime and all of this stuff that they just didn't know about.
And once they learned about these very relevant facts and what an impact they have on society and social planning and policy and all of these things, like, oh!
Boom!
They'll get on the same wavelength as me.
Our boss is one of the very few people who has been, who has converted fairly late in
life by facts and evidence.
Yeah, that's true.
And the amount of people who are truly persuaded by facts and evidence as opposed to certain
narratives repeated over and over again, which, you know, this book calls The Rot, and you
know, the slogans repeated a million times, a million times, and it's just hammered into
people's heads.
And he asked, could that be one reason why the West falls this way?
That's the way most people operate sure and if the last couple years have shown us anything with the great awoken and everything else I mean, I'm firmly persuaded that You can convince, if not a majority, at least a significant minority of people to do literally anything and consider anything to be immoral.
I mean, think of something as simple as, I love my children.
We can no longer take that for granted.
I mean, how many times have we seen people say, like, oh, this is less important to me than this vague universal idea, which I don't even really understand.
And this is why, fundamentally, I think this is a spiritual book.
This is a religious book.
And I quote from the beginning, there's a professor who's basically, I think he's essentially meant to represent France itself.
And he sort of lives in the same place for centuries and he knows everything about it.
I think he's meant to represent the old France.
Yeah.
Certainly not the current France.
Not the Republic.
Well, he's meant to represent the fatherland, right.
There we go.
And so he's met at the front door by, I guess what you would call like a hippie or progressive, you know, this is again 70s, so what's left over of like the leftist.
This scene is so spectacular, yeah.
And he says, You know, what are you doing here, the old man says.
The old man is living on a beach on southern France, so basically right where the flotilla is going to hit.
And he says, well why are you here?
And the leftist basically says that he's here to welcome this new world, that he and his father had parted terms by like spitting at each other.
I've got it here.
Don't summarize it, read it, it's really good.
And so the professor says, and what brings you here?
Why this village?
Why my house?
The leftist, quote.
I'm looting, that's why.
I sponged off society while it was alive, so now that it's dead I'm gonna pick its bones.
It's change.
I like it.
Because everything's dead.
Except for the army and you and a few of my friends, there's no one around for miles.
So I'm looting, man.
But don't worry, I'm not hungry.
I've already stuffed myself.
And anyway, I don't need much.
Besides, everything's mine now.
And tomorrow I'm gonna stand here and let them have it all.
I'm like a king, man, and I'm gonna give away my kingdom.
Today's Easter, right?
Well, this is the last time your Christ is going to rise.
And it won't do you any good this time either, just like all the rest.
I'm afraid I don't follow, says the professor.
Leftist, quote, there's a million Christs on those boats out there and the first thing in the morning they're all going to rise.
The million of them.
So you're Christ all by himself.
Well, he's had it, see?
Do you believe in God as a professor?
Of course not.
And those million Christs, is that your own idea?
No, but I thought it was kind of cool.
For Padre talk I mean.
I got it from this priest, one of those worker types from the wrong side of town.
I ran into him an hour ago.
I was on my way up here and he was running like crazy down the hill.
Not in rags or anything, but kind of weird.
He kept stopping and lifting his arms in the air like the ones down there and he'd yell out, thank you God, thank you.
And then he'd take off again down to the beach.
They say there's more on the way.
More what?
More priests just like him.
They go back and forth before a certain conclusion.
I'll leave it to you if you want to read that part.
But I think this is important when we talk about the spiritual crisis.
And certainly there's no greater division within the movement than when we get to talking about religion.
But the fact that we even have to talk about it shows the problem.
Western man used to be able to count on some sort of spiritual foundation.
He was part of a great chain of being.
The professor in this book, he talks about this house being in his family for hundreds of years, to which the leftist says, man, that's sick.
I mean, that's the word he uses, sick.
Because they're all so sure of themselves, passing down a tradition from generation to generation.
And this is precisely what he wants to destroy.
If we don't have that foundation, then you don't have an answer of, why are we allowed to resist?
I mean, it's like that scene in Red Dawn where, you know, what separates us from them?
Because we live here.
And okay, that's based, but you do also need something a bit more.
I don't know.
Sometimes it really is that simple.
Yeah.
Because we live here.
I mean, that should be all it takes, but when you're talking about something Like this, we're talking about a massive population transfer.
We should point out that this was used successfully last century as a military tactic, the famous Green March, where essentially they sent in basically waves upon waves of people to claim a certain part of Morocco, Spanish Morocco.
This is the Algerian government, yeah?
No, I think it was the Tunisian government.
No, no, no, no, no.
I think this is in Spanish Morocco.
They were trying to get a certain part of the territory and it was called the Green March because they all went in with this flag and everything else.
But it's the idea is basically that you can use population transfers as a weapon.
We can also talk about Turkey.
Turkey has repeatedly said, we are going to unleash these people against you.
Which kind of implies that they know it's a bad thing.
They know that they're not going to do the West any good.
Unless you view your own population as a biological weapon.
Well, these actually, yeah.
They actually are, they tend to be Syrian.
It's not actual Turks.
Oh really?
Under international law, technically, I mean not that it matters anymore, but technically if you If you say you're a refugee, that's like a specific thing under international law.
And when you go to the first safe country, that's where you're supposed to stop.
So, if you're fleeing from Syria, you end up in Turkey a lot of times.
Now, the reason we ended up with the crisis we had, apparently Angela Merkel was going to say, well, according to the EU's own laws, the border states are supposed to stop this migration.
Like, that's in the rules and the charter and everything else.
But then you had the picture of that child who drowned and of course every newspaper in the world blared that everywhere.
It was only much later that we found out that the reason that poor kid had been put in that situation is because they were in his family was in Turkey they were in a safe location but they said no we're gonna go for the brass ring the welfare programs in Europe and they went And catastrophe ensued. And this is the exact same thing we're
seeing on the southern border now, where there is a human cost. Like, people are being killed,
people are dying in the desert unnecessarily. But why is this happening? It's happening
because the minute Biden got in office, he essentially said, come one, come all. And now you even
have people crossing the ocean to get here, you know, the gypsies and everything else.
I think we're supposed to call them the Roma now, but I don't know any Europeans who actually call them that.
They consider them far more impolite names than we Americans do, but the whole idea of... Or maybe the idea of calling them Roma as if they're from Rome or something?
Right, it's stupid.
I mean, the whole premise is that these are people who have no other choice, and that's just wrong.
That's also communicated here, but again, what justification do we have to stop them?
In the past, we would have said, well, we have the true faith, or we have a certain identity, we have a certain sense of racial identity, we have a certain sense of national identity, we have a certain sense of this belongs to us in a way that it can never belong to you.
Or we had leaders, if you want to go further back, who said, no, this is my territory, and I'm not going to have a bunch of random people coming into what is my territory.
But all those things are gone now, and instead we have a class Of, you know, journalists who I would consider to be like the real spiritual leaders of the age, the priests of weakness and egalitarianism, but also a good chunk of the clergy and a lot of the other shapers of opinion who see their role as to destroy the West so they can achieve, I don't know, some kind of individual transcendence.
I think they really do get something spiritual out of this.
And I think they also do get off on the idea of destroying that which exists.
Yeah.
I mean, if you look at, I mean, Think of everything that's been unleashed over the last couple years since George Floyd.
If you look at these cities where these people used to live, I mean, they've all been annihilated in terms of crime, in terms of the way they look, in terms of the homeless encampments, in terms of property destruction.
It's very hard to say, like, no, this is good.
The only way you can say, yes, I support this, is because you see it as a moral calling to bring down a society that's so vicious and privileged that it needs to be destroyed by any means possible.
And that, but that, it's a perverse moral calling, but at least it's a morality.
What does the typical conservative have to that?
Is this, you're basically quoting from the Big Lebowski?
Yeah!
Say what you will about the tenants of National Socialism, at least it's the ethos, Donnie.
These men are nihilists, Donnie.
I'm not sure I would grant them that much.
I mean, I think they're a lot more similar to the young kid in the first chapter that you were just reading aloud from, of like, oh, well, Come what will, this is going to be great.
And something he says slightly before the passage you read from is that although his family has fled, he says, oh yeah, my mom and sister were afraid they were going to get raped, so they just got out of here.
Yeah, I think he even mocks them as being prudes all of a sudden.
Yeah, I don't care.
I'm hanging out because this is going to be just a wild ride, don't you think?
There's certainly an element to that too, sort of a thrill-seeking element.
I think that's kind of common to people on both the, I guess the extreme right and the extreme left, people who are attracted to extremism as such.
I mean, you definitely see people switching sides from like, You know, one side or the other at the margins, but I think most of the people who seek thrills and entropy and destruction for its own sake, by nature, go to the left.
A, because you don't face any meaningful pushback from the system, and B, At the end of the day, I would say the left is defined, ultimately, by entropy.
Yeah.
I mean, it's chaos versus order.
Right.
Yeah, by breaking down hierarchies, all of these things.
Right.
Simply inverting hierarchies.
Right.
And we have to ask ourselves, There's an implied question here of, is Europe still the camp of the saints?
Is there still kind of this sacred idea of us?
I mean, there once was the idea of the Roman Empire, which was sacred.
There was Christendom, which was sacred.
There was the Holy Roman Empire, which was sacred.
Interestingly enough, I was reading a relatively recently published book on the Holy Roman Empire, And they talked about, you know, because of course, obviously, you had these feuds and dynasts were switching sides and people were betraying and killing each other all the time.
But there was something about the empire itself, like the land itself, which was seen as sacred.
And that was even more important than who ruled it.
And sort of since, I guess, the French Revolution, we've all been kind of looking for something to hold on to.
And now that even nationalism has been driven away, Ross Powell is basically asking us, what's left?
And again, he doesn't truly provide an answer.
He kind of gives us a despairing answer that says, look, If we don't have... Well, he just gives us despair.
It's not a despairing answer, I wouldn't say.
I mean, he essentially tells us that unless we have something, that's going to be the end of it.
Now, of course, there are some people at the end who do make a stand.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one of them is named after the last Byzantine emperor who I just wrote about in the last article about the fall of Constantinople on May 29th.
And he kind of does this trick with a few other characters, naming them after people from history and everything else, and he refers to the great battles of the West, you know, Lepanto and things like that.
But again, we have to ask, what are most Western battles about?
It's usually about France versus England or Germany versus Italy or whatever it is.
We've fought each other far more than we fought outsiders.
The battles against outsiders were ultimately more important and more meaningful, and that's why their names speak to us still.
But you can respond with what those officials say at the beginning, you know, nations, borders, passports, what rubbish.
We're all from the Ganges now, as the media slogan goes in the book.
I would ultimately say that It is fundamental.
What we're doing can't just be on self-interest.
That's part of it, where we say, like, look, the hard reality is that unless we talk seriously like adults about immigration and about race and about intelligence and about how we're going to handle these population transfers, specifically the population boom in the global South for these people who claim to care about the environment and everything else, unless we can talk about these things seriously, there's going to be catastrophe.
But I also think that a lot of people aren't moved by rationality.
They're moved by myth.
And we're going to have to provide that kind of, I don't know, saving myth.
Cyrellian myth.
Well, something Raspel said, and it says in the book, is in this curious war taking shape, those who loved themselves best were the ones who would triumph.
I think that there is an optimistic reading, maybe it's a cope, but there's an optimistic reading that what is happening now is sort of a crucible for our people, and that the people who will come out on the other side of this will be harder, tougher, stronger, because we've been through it and weathered it.
And there are certain people who simply have a kind of nihilistic death wish, but if they don't want to save themselves, let them be cut off, but they don't have the right to drag the rest of us down with them.
Especially considering that the West and only the West is capable of meeting the challenges that are going to
confront the globe in the next century.
I think that Raspel, I mean he writes almost like a French aristocrat bemoaning like what's happened to the monasteries
and the castles after the revolution.
All his stuff has been looted, everything's been sacked and destroyed and defiled, but he still has his pride.
And he goes out, he goes to the guillotine, but he doesn't bow his head.
It reminds me of the aristocrat who they executed and his last words when they showed him the warrant for his death, he said something like, I see you've made four spelling mistakes or something like that.
And that, I mean, he was an aristocrat writing for aristocrats.
And the idea that this is just some alarmist tract put out by the far right to inspire terrorism or militant resistance or something like that.
That's just not the case.
If anything, it's sort of a call to become introspective and ask yourself what...
is really meaningful.
What are you willing to sacrifice for?
What are you willing to fight for, more importantly?
Because ultimately the question is, is there anything to fight for, right?
And it's especially difficult, and I think this is where, you know, what, let's just call him His Majesty Louis XX said there, that as a faithful son of the church, I mean, he had to be mourning the fact That the people he was counting on to sustain France, to sustain his people, were on the other side.
Yeah.
And you have these, and he writes about in the book, and certainly we can give countless examples now, God knows in mainline Protestantism too, of all these priests and pastors and clerics wearing jeans and waving pride flags telling us that mass immigration is the greatest thing that God ever intended and opposing it is the only sin and everything else is great.
I mean, what can you do but laugh?
I mean, I have a few ideas, but that's a topic for another day as far as, like, religion and stuff.
Well, and the scene towards the end of the book, I don't want to give too much of it away, but the scene where they end up at this old cathedral really is the last stand.
It's just so moving and surreal isn't quite the right word, but it really, for me, it was a big example of literature really being able to just Take your mind just completely somewhere else.
Your earlier comment about it being fundamentally a spiritual book, when they make it to that cathedral right at the end, it's just overwhelmingly powerful.
Yeah.
I think it's significant that, I'll give some of it away, you have some remnants of the French military.
A few other people, the aforementioned Indian, who I think comes along with them to defend.
The base Sikh.
Yeah, the base Sikh.
Ultimately, they are destroyed by the Republic's Air Force, and the same people who were not willing to fire on the invaders are more than willing to fire on these other people who are just as helpless against, like, an air attack.
I mean, they're as helpless as children against such a weapon, but those who have power have no compunction about killing them, and certainly we see that now.
I mean, the fact that I, we know that there are things that have happened in the last couple years.
If we, if right-wingers had done anything close to the autonomous zone in Seattle or any of the other stunts, the drones would have been flying in and every paper in the country would have been screaming for more.
I mean, look at what they're still doing to people who like blundered into the Capitol, half of them not even knowing what they're doing.
Well, you see this dichotomy all the time of people who are like, well, we should abolish the death penalty, but we should lynch Derek Chauvin.
Everybody has a right to health care, which includes gender transition surgery, but racists shouldn't be able to have even minimum wage jobs.
Right, make racists afraid again.
Yeah, all of this stuff.
I mean, who's afraid if all you've got left is physical force, and even that physical force is usually not, oh, we're going to do the physical force.
It's you, government, you've got to do the physical force.
That's right, yeah.
You know, abolish the police, but make hate speech illegal.
Right.
You know, there's always this transparent double standard, but as I've said before, I mean, the double standard is the standard.
Yeah.
The point is that it's a double standard.
That's the idea.
It's not that they haven't thought this through.
It's not that they're aware that this is unbalanced.
That's why I become so impatient with guys like Dreher who, like, I mean, and his commenters say this.
He clearly sees it, and he really represents exactly what Roosevelt's talking about, and especially because he converted, I think, to Catholicism first and then to Orthodoxy, so he's searching for a beast religion that will give him license to be a traditionalist or something.
But then when it's like, okay, Here's the issue.
What are we going to do about it?
It's like, oh, well, this is bad.
We can't do anything.
The Benedict option of like hiding the hills and someday... Well, and even when he writes about the Camp of the Saints, he does always add these caveats that it's, I think one time he called it alt-right pornography or something.
He does have all of these, he does pouches, you know, when he admits that he's read it and that it's interesting, he does add all of this stuff like, oh, but it is bad.
The idea that this is like a fantasy.
The idea that like, I mean this is the most depressing, soul-crushing, you don't even have like, I mean you do have a last stand, but you don't exactly have a glorious last stand.
You have 20 guys getting bombed from the air by their own government.
The idea that this is somehow like, Wish fulfillment or something that we want or something that, yeah, like guys, it's really important.
This will inspire you to actions.
Like this is very much the opposite.
This is a book you read by yourself and think about for a very long time.
And I'm not here to give you answers.
I can try and in future I'll say, okay, this is what I think we should do.
This is the path I should think we should take, but God knows I've made plenty of mistakes in my day.
And Ultimately, people are going to have to work out their own answers because when you talk about something like what is truly important to you, what are you willing to give everything for, or even your soul?
I mean, that seems to be what he's almost hinting at in this book.
That's an answer you can really only come up with to yourself.
Unless you're just going to take whatever the narrative of the day is from the media, which unfortunately I think many people do.
But I do like the way he kind of talks about it as the rot.
He almost talks about it as this mysterious force.
There are certain people who push it forward, the aforementioned Dio, who actually has a different name.
I think Dio is the name he adopts, right?
Clement Dio or something like that?
I'm not sure.
Yeah, he has a different name before that.
It's pushed by certain people, but in some ways it's also an independent force.
It's something that moves of its own volition.
It's a spirit.
Yeah, this is perhaps the best thing about the novel, actually, is there's no elaborate conspiracy and there's no... If anything, people are trying to stop it.
They just want somebody else to take the responsibility.
Right.
It captures that, just the sort of...
This kind of like uniformly accepted malaise just really, really perfectly.
Yeah.
You know, it's the same way like the, you know, the villains in the story aren't, aren't just like these goofy caricatures.
You know, it's not, it's not Darth Vader.
Clement Dio isn't just like this evil, this evil, evil man.
Right.
You know, there is this, there is this nuance and there is, he does capture that, that strange universality of like, oh, well, If we're just sort of erased or subsumed by some other society, I mean, well, it probably won't make too big a difference.
And if anything, if it does make a difference, it'll be good.
Just the way that like everybody, every level of society seems to just sort of be like, well, just that shoulder shrug.
Right.
And again, this goes back to my point that if he was a leftist and you make a couple of changes here and there, this would be held as like a progressive classic.
I mean, where it's sort of like, this is the wave of history, this is the way things have to be, and it's one of these things about mass immigration and replacement immigration, I should say, where if you notice it and you oppose it, it's a conspiracy theory.
If you notice it and you celebrate it, obviously it's real.
We talk about it all the time.
Here's 607 articles about it, and it's a good thing.
You know, we can replace them.
How dare you say we're trying to replace you?
that kind of thing. Yeah, well I mean it's funny you bring that up because there is,
there was this left-wing philosophy book called Hegemon by like, it's by two guys I want to say
by two guys, I want to say like Hart and Negri, something like that. But they tried to basically,
like Hart and Negri, something like that, but they tried to basically, you know,
you know, made this big splash in the leftmost end of the academy when it came out and a
made this big splash in like, you know, the leftmost end of the academy when it came out,
and a lot of people considered it to be kind of an update of the communist manifesto,
lot of people considered it to be kind of an update of the Communist Manifesto or just
sort of trying to bring Marxism into the post-Cold War world.
It was fundamentally talking about finance capital.
Yeah, and something they bring up at the end of the book without naming the Camp of the
Saints is that like, well, maybe what will bring down the sort of, you know, corporate
globalism, global capitalism, yada, yada, yada, whatever you want to call it, will be
just like this mass movement of people from the global south.
And they'll just overturn it.
Yeah, and then everything will just change so dramatically.
This is sort of where you get into, and I know Mr. Taylor hates this phrase, and others may like it, the whole cultural Marxism thing.
Yeah.
And to be fair, I don't think that's necessarily the correct term.
There are some ways you see it with, on Twitter, where they, oh, critical race theory is just Marxism.
And it's like, well, not really.
Alright, there's something to this idea that, okay, we tried to have a revolution and the working classes in the West didn't rally to it because, fundamentally, they were nationalists.
And the people who were voting for communists in the 1930s, like those districts, they're voting for Le Pen now.
Right.
And you also see this in the latest wave of elections in England, where, you know, you had these labor strongholds that, like, have existed forever.
And, you know, Boris Johnson has not exactly had the most glorious administration, but he's still managed to win a pretty crushing victory, at least in England itself.
And so I think there is, especially for progressives who feel alienated from the society that they grew up in, There is sort of this, they are the ones who have this kind of revenge fantasy, like, oh, you won't listen to what I say?
Well, guess what?
These people from outside are going to tear you down, man.
And maybe they'll listen to me.
Yeah, maybe they'll listen to me.
But of course, this implies that these people don't have agency themselves.
Right.
And this is also what's interesting is that throughout the book, the refugees, the migrants, whatever you want, the invaders, whatever you want to call them, They are portrayed in almost animalistic terms, like this amorphous blob and this idea that they're like sort of many heads but like one being, right?
But at the end, when he kind of gets into like the changes in government and everything else, they have agency.
They make decisions.
There are certain people who do certain things.
And all these leftists who thought, like, oh, I'm going to lead the revolution, they just get pushed to the side.
They don't matter anymore.
That's right.
And this is one of the problems also with the white savior complex.
And ironically, one of the ways that we see race realism means that you see other human beings as other human beings and that they're capable of, like, interests.
And they're not just saints or martyrs or Yeah.
Fundamentally, this is a problem that I think will define the next century because you referred before to Steve Saylor's most important graph of the world.
Yeah, fundamentally this is a problem that I think will define the next century because
you referred before to Steve Saylor's most important graph of the world.
The population boom in the global south is ultimately going to overwhelm every other
issue.
If you're taught all these fools talking about like, oh, climate change and everything else, you want to talk about like carbon impacts.
Just look at what happens when refugees come from the global south and go into the first world.
Everything these people claim to talk about is going to be destroyed.
And I've observed before that everything progressives claim to care about, workers' wages, the environment, you know, don't pay Paradise to put up a parking lot, all this, it just goes right out the window when it's something like, oh, we got to bring in all these people as much as possible because I hate myself and my country.
And I want to return to what The Atlantic said when they ran their cover story about why this book needs to be taken seriously.
And keep in mind, this was written 20 years after it had been published.
They were returning to it because you saw the first stirrings of this great population transfer.
And again, you know, what do you do about this problem of overpopulation in the Global South?
I quote, and this is the conclusion, For the remainder of this century, we suspect, the debate will rage over what and how much should be done to improve the condition of humankind in the face of mounting pressures described here and in other analyses.
One thing seems to us fairly certain.
However the debate unfolds, it is, alas, likely that a large part of it, on issues of population, migration, rich versus poor, race against race, will have advanced little beyond the considerations and themes that are at the heart of one of the most disturbing novels Well, we should close with that, honestly, because, you know, as much as I want to talk about how this book is secretly just like a sequel to the Turner Diaries or something, it's really easy to check the headlines and see, like, oh, wow.
This is happening, and the questions he asked are as relevant as ever.
And he lived to see it, and to comment on it.
So, a couple things.
Read this book, guys, but it is not wish fulfillment.
It is not a revenge fantasy.
All these people, you know, right-wingers are getting off to this thing.
No, this is a dark night of the soul book.
This is a book where you sit down and really do question whether this is something you're going to take on with your life.
Also, you should not be reduced to just this one book.
There's, I mean, his other work would be another podcast in itself, probably sustained in its own podcast.
Yeah.
And the themes he talks about, I think, are very important and very noble.
And lastly, read The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic, because as much as we want to say that it's just, and I used to believe this and I was wrong.
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