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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World (HuffPo)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-camp-of-the-saints-immigration_us_58b75206e4b0284854b3dc03Its been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe, he said in October 2015.
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Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart which he called a platform for the alt-right, the online movement of white nationalists he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.
But the top Trump aides repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet its never found a wider audience. Theres a good reason for that: Its breathtakingly racist.
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Upon the novels release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.
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The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named the turd-eater because he literally eats shit, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an armada of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing in the books vision by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.
The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere and overthrow white Western society.
The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspails rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.
Calgues, the obvious Raspail stand-in, is one of those taking up arms against the migrants and their culturally cuckolded white supporters. Just before killing a radical hippie, Calgues compares his own actions to past heroic, sometimes mythical defenses of European Christendom. He harkens back to famous battles that fit the clash-of-civilizations narrative the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Constantinople to the same and glorifies colonial wars of conquest and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings thousands of wretched creatures whose very bodies arouse disgust: Scraggy branches, brown and black All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms. Poor brown children are spoiled fruit starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you cant see the mold.
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The white Christian world is on the brink of destruction, the novel suggests, because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost that necessary belief in its own cultural and racial superiority. As he talks to the hippie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that ones own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanitys finest none of that had ever filled these youngsters addled brains.
The Camp of the Saints which draws its title from Revelation 20: 9 is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novels last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. The Fall of Constantinople, Raspails unnamed narrator says, is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.
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Bannons alt-right-loving Breitbart has run multiple articles over the past three years referencing the novel. When Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in September 2015, Breitbarts Julia Hahn, now an aide to Bannon in the White House, compared his admonition to Raspails liberal Latin American pontiff. And the novels thesis that migration is invasion in disguise is often reflected in Bannons public comments.
The refugee crisis didnt just happen by happenstance, Bannon said in an April 2016 radio interview with Sebastian Gorka, who now works for the National Security Council. These are not war refugees. Its something much more insidious going on.
Bannon has also echoed the novels theory that secular liberals who favor immigration and diversity weaken the West.
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What's really "all wormy inside" is the brain of anyone who'd take that vile racist book seriously, let alone promote it.
Steve Bannon is a very sick, evil man, and his influence over Donald Trump, and his control of that RW propaganda swamp Breitbart, make him extremely dangerous.
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)highplainsdem
(48,975 posts)Bannon is a failed human.
Ilsa
(61,695 posts)Initech
(100,068 posts)Archae
(46,327 posts)The novel that inspired Tim McVeigh to commit his atrocity.
I wonder what atrocity this book will inspire?
Hekate
(90,673 posts)no_hypocrisy
(46,088 posts)Shit . . . . .
yurbud
(39,405 posts)The irony is, if someone really was worried about waves of immigrants swamping white utopia, there's a cheap, easy, non-violent way to stop it: make life better for people in their own countries with fair trade deals, and not backing right wing coups whenever people in other countries elect someone who tries to raise the minimum wage or drive a harder bargain for their natural resources with transnational corporations.
It would also help if we didn't create terrorists then use their presence in secular Middle Eastern countries as an excuse to bomb the crap out of them. People try to get out of the way when you drop bombs on them or send crazy beheaders to their neighborhood.