France's Agony

Race riots drive the country to the brink

From the Guardian, on France’s L’Été de Nahel (Source)

Have you been following the news from France? The country is convulsed now by rioting from black African and Arabic men triggered by the police shooting of a young Arab in a traffic stop. From the Guardian this morning:

Nearly 1,000 people in France were arrested and 80 police injured during a fourth night of unrest triggered by the fatal police shooting of a teenager, but officials claimed the situation was calmer than on the previous night.

Forty-five thousand police officers, including special forces, were deployed to respond to rioting across the country on Friday night, with the situation in two major cities – Marseille and Lyon – highlighted as particular chaotic, with buildings and vehicles torched and stores looted.

The ministry of the interior reported 994 were arrests made throughout France overnight, while 79 police and gendarmes were injured and 2,560 fires on public roads recorded. Despite this, the ministry said the protests were “of a lower intensity compared to the previous night”.

As one of you readers pointed out earlier, a few nights ago, the mobs of black and brown men burned the main library in Marseille. If that’s not symbolic, nothing is. (Link to the tweet below is here):

Seems clear that France is undergoing its own Summer Of Floyd … but it also appears that the stakes are far higher. Here is a public statement by the main police union (translation courtesy of Arnaud Bertrand, from whose tweet I got this):

Now that's enough...

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give. In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together. Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities. The time is not for union action, but for combat against these "pests". Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation.

All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible.

Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades. For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given.

Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.

What this means is that the French police now see themselves as resisting a government they regard as do-nothing about the longstanding immigration and youth violence problem.

Do you see what this means for the maintenance of civil order? The police now think of the government as their enemy, because it continues to tolerate, as all governments before it, the problems. There has also been a new letter from members of the military, this time not retired generals, but active-duty officers.

This is the fruit of mass Third World migration. Do you know where scenes like the rioting, the fires, the looting and so forth that are sweeping France today do not happen? In Poland and Hungary. Visit Warsaw, visit Krakow, visit Budapest and Szeged, and you will be at peace — a peace you cannot find today in many of France’s main cities. But the EU is trying to punish both Poland and Hungary severely for refusing to accept a quota of Third World migrants.

This is insane! People of Europe can turn on their TVs and see the agony in France, and know where the policies of Brussels eurocrats leads. The French are struggling to deal with these problems because they began importing Third Worlders decades ago. I suspect many, perhaps most, of those rioting now were born in France, and are legally French. Poland and Hungary do not want to import these problems — and yet, the elites who run Europe are trying to force the Poles and the Hungarians to swallow the poison. I hope that France’s catastrophe wakes up the peoples across Europe, and that they stand up to their own governments over this existential crisis.

Since I read the 1973 French novel The Camp Of The Saints in 2015, in the wake of the migrant crisis, I have warned that it is both a bad book (it’s openly racist) but one that you need to read, because it is prophetic. It’s set in the future, in a France about to be overwhelmed by a million-man horde of poor Third Worlders, who are about to land on the Mediterranean coast. The drama of the novel takes place in the time between the flotilla of migrants setting out from India, and their landing. The villains of the book are not the migrants, not really, but rather French elites: governmental, media, academic, church, and so forth. Jean Raspail, the author, saw them as treasonous, as a class so consumed with self-hatred that it looked for redemption by surrendering the country to the Other.

I read it during the 2015 migrant surge into Europe, because I wanted to see why it was controversial. I was not surprised by the book’s racism, and indeed felt stained by having read it. But it was worth reading, because it so accurately captured the moral and intellectual cowardice, and self-hatred, of European elites in the face of migration. It is important to point out that Raspail was not some mouth-breathing bigot living in a survivalist bunker, but was a well-respected author who had a respected literary career after publishing this book. He died in 2020.

Recently in First Things, the scholar Nathan Pinkoski gave the novel serious consideration. Excerpts:

The most important dystopian novels of the first half of the twentieth century are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley and Orwell captured the two sides of modern despotism, one soft and seductive, the other hard and punitive. The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the century is Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It’s an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies.

Yet The Camp of the Saints is not a disaster novel. The book’s significance does not hinge on whether Raspail was correct to predict mass immigration or describe it in catastrophic terms. Rather, the novel’s genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term. Properly translated, apocalypse is rendered as revelation, disclosure, literally an “uncovering.” The Camp of the Saints unveils the perverse logic that pervades late Western civilization, and throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt whereby the West welcomes its own destruction.

More:

In Raspail’s novel, the migrants represent an almost metaphysical menace, a collage of ­real cultures. It is not that Raspail was incapable of describing non-Western societies accurately. He had made his reputation with travel books that are rich in detail about foreign cultures. And his other novels give the lie to the insinuation that he was a white supremacist, for he recounts the plight of aboriginal tribes in the New World, lamenting their destruction and the loss of their cultural particularities. But this is not his subject matter in The Camp of the Saints. Here he concentrates on the nihilism that Sartre’s self-loathing worldview brings.

Indeed, the first shots fired are white-on-white violence. As the novel begins, the armada of migrants arrives on the French shore. A retired professor in his seaside cottage looks on. He is accosted by a young white miscreant who mouths a version of Sartre’s declaration. The other villagers have fled, but the professor, a representative of high culture who is determined to defend his home and his way of life, stands his ground. The youth vows to lead a band of migrants to pillage the professor’s home. The professor collects his rifle, never before used in anger, and shoots him.

From this startling beginning, the novel jumps back in time to recount the armada’s origins and its embarkment from India, then presents a series of snapshots of the confusion and strife that reigned in the West before the migrants’ arrival. Westerners are fascinated by the incoming hordes. They are encouraged by churchmen and left-wing intelligentsia to see the influx as the Second Coming, a final triumph of the weak over the strong that will atone for the West’s sins. It will be a blessing. Raspail repeats this interpretation of the threat in various forms, to show how it paralyzes civil authorities and prevents them from addressing the crisis.

You see the French police unions identifying THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT as the enemy here? Straight outta Raspail.

Pinkoski’s essay explores and defends the point that Raspail’s novel is not really about racial genocide, but about the West’s sickness unto death. Pinkoski points out that on the American Right, if people write about it at all, it’s to condemn anyone who cites it favorably. I got that treatment back in 2015 when I said it was both a bad book and important to read to understand the times. Pinkoski just got it from neocon Linda Chavez. She writes with understandable outrage about the revolting aspects of the novel, concluding:

No amount of whitewash can scrub the obscenity from this novel or hide its message: Let in brown-skinned people, even those who share our faith and ways, and they will wipe us from the earth—unless we kill them first.

If that is not racism in its most naked form, what is?

Once again: Raspail’s artlessness and moral vulgarity is inexcusable, and I wish Pinkoski had been more explicit about it. Nevertheless, if you want to understand what’s happening in France today, and why it’s happening, you would do far better to read the revolting novel of Jean Raspail, keeping his deep moral flaws in mind, than read Linda Chavez. I feel strongly that one reason so many of us in the West — including many conservatives — cannot bring ourselves to deal with realities like those posed by mass migration is because the things we would have to face in order to deal effectively with the situation make us sick, or at the very least confused. We thought the world was one way, but it’s not. There is a direct line between the hubristic, cruel, catastrophic US invasion of Iraq to make it a liberal democratic bastion, and the disaster France (and Europe more broadly) has brought onto itself, and continues to bring onto itself, through mass migration, coupled with a woke elite that detests their own civilization.