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15. Patagonian Royalty in the Camp of the Saints
67 Plays2 days ago
Helen and Sarah discuss The Camp of the Saints, a racist novel that has quietly become fundamental to how the right wing talks about immigration.
PS: Our RSS publisher bugged out. Sorry to be getting this episode to you twelve hours late!
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Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
Introduction and Contextual Background
00:00:00
Speaker
In this episode, we look at Camp of the Saints, a racist novel that has quietly become fundamental to how the right-wing talks about immigration. This is the most extreme content we've covered so far, but the most disturbing thing about it is how its influence has continued to grow.
00:00:17
Speaker
As we explore in the episode, This novel and the ongoing attempts to advance it as a work of prophetic literature are also a fascinating case study in the lines that the extreme right believes it must cross without explicitly crossing.
00:00:31
Speaker
I think you'll enjoy this look at the worst s novel I've ever read, and it's truly odious fans. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
00:00:58
Speaker
Do it live! listen, you. I'll suck you your goddamn face. You'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:01:11
Speaker
some level of masochism,
00:01:15
Speaker
Hi, I'm Helen. And I'm Sarah.
Hosts Introduction and Podcast Information
00:01:17
Speaker
And this is Odium Symposium. A podcast about the production of bigotry. Today we actually have a little podcast business to start with. We have a new patron to thank. Thank you to books. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
00:01:29
Speaker
You can check us out on patreon.com slash odium symposium and sign up to become an odium connoisseur. Also, whether you're a patron or not, you can join our discord. We'll have a link in the description.
00:01:42
Speaker
Yeah, also, we have a website, we're bad at plugging it, but odiumsymposium.com. The episode today, a little, like, behind-the-scenes work for the listeners, we really maintain each episode like a total, like, fog of war. So going into the recording of an episode, almost always, only, like, the person who hasn't prepped the episode straight up doesn't know what we're gonna record about, like, not even any details, like, is it going be even about misogyny, is it going to about whatever, right?
00:02:07
Speaker
This week, because we're working on some stuff that is sort of adjacent to the topic, Sarah actually told me what the episode was about in broad strokes so to make sure that I avoided learning about it.
Understanding the Novel's Themes and Author's Influence
00:02:20
Speaker
And it was kind of like the perfect amount of information because you told me we're going to be doing Camp of the Saints, which all I know about it is it's an insanely racist French dystopian novel and nothing else. So it's been sort of looming like, oh, I'm going to learn about this novel that I only know as being like extremely racist and like a favorite of like the American white supremacist movement.
00:02:45
Speaker
And so I'm a little scared going into this. Well, i have terrible news. I read so many quotes from esteemed intellectuals saying that of course this book isn't racist. Of course the author isn't racist. So I don't know. You might have this information that you've been fed by the vast global conspiracy challenged a little bit, Helen.
00:03:05
Speaker
Try and keep an an open mind, okay? I'm going to open my mind so much that my brain will fall out and then maybe I'll know some peace. Okay, so Camp of the Saints is a novel by the French author Jean Raspail. I actually have no idea if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I don't care. It came out in 1973. We're going to go through three stages here. So first, I'm going to talk about the author. Second, I'll walk you through as much of the book as I can bear to It's 400 pages almost.
00:03:35
Speaker
And it is, oh it is painful, painful reading. Third, we'll talk about why I picked this text. So I think the best way to start introducing Jean Raspail is to look at his choice of three quotes that preface the camp of the saints, because you can deduce a lot about this guy from thinking carefully about these. Okay, I'm ready to do some careful thinking. Okay, here's the first one. I'm sending these to you in reverse order.
00:04:05
Speaker
Okay. As seen from the outside, the massive upheaval in Western society is approaching the limit beyond which it will become metastable and must collapse. Solzhenitsyn.
00:04:16
Speaker
Solzhenitsyn is a far-right Russian novelist who has been held up by right-wing intellectuals in America and Europe as some sort of historian and sharp social critic.
00:04:29
Speaker
He's definitely not a historian. And I don't think he's a very sharp social critic either. This is a guy who wrote a two-volume history of the Jews in Russia that depicted them as parasites who invited attacks from the proud common people. He's a revisionist.
00:04:45
Speaker
Like a lot of centrists and liberals... don't know that much about him, but know him as this like brave dissident in the Soviet Union who like pulled back the curtain on what was going on in the gulags and really like uncovered the real horrors of Stalinism is how they would put it, right?
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah, this guy is, like, very famous, and I first heard about him and didn't know he was right-wing, and Gulag Archipelago, was like, oh, this is, like, a brave... And then I started reading some of his stuff, and i was like, oh, this guy is kind of sus, but he's definitely one of these people who is, like, just by sort of, I guess, an accident of circumstance and just, like, factors that I think are outside of his control, he has a much better reputation than he ought to among like centrist liberals or even like slightly left liberals this quote is actually from a lecture he gave connected to his accepting a nobel prize that nobel prize speech like it could potentially be an episode just in itself okay anyway let's let's get quote number two this guy's name sounds familiar but i can't place it
00:05:59
Speaker
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. Lawrence Durrell.
Literary and Historical Influences on Raspail
00:06:10
Speaker
All right, so Lawrence Durrell is mid-20th century, urbane, international, cosmopolitan sexual predator.
00:06:20
Speaker
He was considered one of Britain's foremost writers, and you can see from the quote that he experienced a deep nostalgia for its... heritage, but in point of fact, he was kind of out of the existing order.
00:06:36
Speaker
This was a guy who was born to British colonial occupiers in India, and for complex reasons, he was not actually a citizen of Britain. So he was kind of a stranger in his own land, and yet also carrier forward of its alleged intellectual history and heritage.
00:06:58
Speaker
This is reminding me of like literally today i stopped in the used bookstore. They had just gotten in one of Neil Ferguson's books. The back described like, oh, it's like a history of the West and like why the West rose to prominence and literally contained a line about like the rest of the world. Like the the West invented, you know, all these different things like science and science.
00:07:21
Speaker
all these other civilizational things that it refers to as, quote, killer apps that now the rest of the world has downloaded and they're using them. Meanwhile, we've lost faith.
00:07:33
Speaker
Holy shit, that's embarrassing. And I was like, this so funny. And so this is what this reminds me of, like the perennial nature of this, like, oh, we're losing because we're afraid to own our heritage. From the, again, very little that I know Camp of the Saints, which is like the title and general, like,
00:07:51
Speaker
who is a fan of it, as well as this quote, I'm like, okay, I think that's going to be one of the big themes. I'm sort of, i'm I'm calling it now. Okay, I think that's going to turn out to be a good call.
00:08:04
Speaker
Here's the third quote. Oh my God. And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will go forth and deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and will gather them together for the battle, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up over the breadth of the earth and encompassed the camp of the saints and the beloved city.
00:08:29
Speaker
Apocalypse 20. So yeah, that's from the book of Revelation. Gog and Magog are reoccurring antagonist names in the Bible, but the particular threat they refer to shifts over time.
00:08:46
Speaker
In Ezekiel, there's a reference to a hostile Gog who is from a place called Magog. But by the time of the New Testament, Gog and Magog are understood to be tribes, and they show up as the enemy faction in the apocalypse, and their attack is part of the end of a thousand years of peace.
00:09:08
Speaker
Okay, so already you've learned a significant amount about the book. Let's try and tie all this in to the history of the man himself, which I'm about to tell you about.
00:09:19
Speaker
He was born in 1925, and his father managed a factory. So I think we can guess he was upper middle class, but in any case, he was definitely not aristocracy.
00:09:32
Speaker
He goes to a sequence of Catholic schools, culminating with a private Catholic university, run along boarding school lines, and serving a few hundred students.
00:09:43
Speaker
He thinks the French Revolution was a mistake, and he wants the House of Bourbon restored. He's a monarchist. Oh, so he's like right-wing in the original sense of the word. He would have been on the right side of the National Assembly in revolutionary France. He's actually right-wing in the not metaphorical sense. Yeah, I don't know if he would have even been in the National Assembly. I feel like he would have been. He probably would have been Reign of Terror, yeah. Yeah.
00:10:16
Speaker
He's also an adherent of what is euphemistically described as traditional Catholicism. These are Catholics that reject Vatican II. Vatican ii is a council called by the Pope in the 1960s in an attempt to modernize church doctrine and presentation.
00:10:35
Speaker
and ever since Vatican II happened, there's been a certain slice of right-wing Catholics that have been just spitting mad at it.
00:10:46
Speaker
And the big thing they focus on rhetorically is that the ceremony of mass can now be given in whatever the local language is rather than just in Latin. But there's also kind of a general sense that the spirit of Vatican II is the spirit of liberalism and internationalism and racial tolerance, you know,
00:11:06
Speaker
Woke shit. Here's a quote I pulled off Wikipedia. Church historian John W. O'Malley wrote, For the new churches, it recommended adaptation to local cultures, including philosophical and theological adaptation.
00:11:19
Speaker
It also recommended that Catholic missionaries seek ways of cooperating with missionaries of other faiths and of fostering harmonious relations with them. It asserted that art from every race and country be given scope in the literature of the church.
00:11:33
Speaker
More generally, it made clear that the church was sympathetic to the way of life of different peoples and races and was ready to appropriate aspects of different cultural traditions. Though obvious sounding, these provisions were portentous. Where would they lead?
00:11:46
Speaker
Maybe this is an instance in which horseshoe theory is true, because I also... disapprove of these techniques, but that's because I understand them as methods by which the Catholic Church is trying to expand its followers, and I would rather that the Catholic Church just didn't do any of the mission work and actually just stopped.
00:12:08
Speaker
Yeah, okay, okay. Sheen Rispail, ideological ally of the pod. This is not going to come back to bite us. Definitely not. Okay, a slightly more serious tack. You can see why people who are obsessed with this vague, almost incoherent notion of the West and the heritage of the West would oppose these things. But it's just such a nonsense critique. Like, do you not understand how the church became the influence that it is? Like, how are you...
00:12:35
Speaker
Annoyed at like what is Easter right? Like I feel like this is an obvious thing that we maybe don't even need to point out but like the church has already incorporated so much pagan observation and and Ritual and all these things like in its spread across the world the problem here is that you're trying to approach this from a point of view as some sort of ah religious real politic and What's important here is that the mysteries and the ritual be preserved for their own sake The rights themselves are the valuable thing.
00:13:07
Speaker
Yeah, but my point is you can never add more rituals. The rituals can never change. But how did the rituals come about? Why was it that they were allowed add doesn't matter. They need to be preserved. I'm not being sarcastic here. This is actually how this works.
00:13:24
Speaker
Oh my god. I can see your brain melting.
00:13:31
Speaker
He doesn't start off as a novelist. Until The Camp of the Saints comes out, his writing is almost entirely travel writing. He's still going to be doing travel writing into the 2000s.
00:13:43
Speaker
His first book is a travelogue where he proceeds from the southernmost tip of South America to Alaska by land. And at the time, there's a fad for adventure nonfiction, which this plays into.
00:13:57
Speaker
It's in French, but I Google translated this passage from it. We often talk about the extraordinary allure of adventure for young people today. We waste time trying to explain it when the reason is quite simple. Adventure is within everyone's reach, simply because there is no longer any adventure, and ultimately, despite the influx of pretenders, true adventure remains what it has always been, to preserve of a select few.
00:14:20
Speaker
These will survive, although they must fiercely defend their place in the sun because adventure is expensive. As for the others, the public, saturated and initiated by 10 years of experience into all the tricks of real and fake explorers, will gradually abandon books and travel lectures to quietly return to what interested them before this curious trend arose.
00:14:41
Speaker
He thinks adventure, really meaning travel, is for the elite and that's how it should be. And everything will return to the way it should be soon.
00:14:52
Speaker
i also get the sense that he thinks he's too good to be writing about it. He's too good to be doing this as part of making a living. Yeah, he's like, oh, people just want to read about this because it's faddish. But eventually they'll go away and the the next fad will come. And I will, you know, be able to finally just like continue to adventure and not have to like...
00:15:17
Speaker
appease the masses. that's' It's very bizarre for a travel writer to write this. Yeah, it is. It's weird, right? Yeah. Soon after this, he starts writing in what's going to end up being one of his favorite veins.
00:15:31
Speaker
He writes about societies that are either vanishing under the waves of modernity, threatened, eroding, crumbling, or that are already gone.
00:15:42
Speaker
He has a travelogue about visiting the Inca lands and peoples. He has one about tracing the steps of the lost societies depicted in the Bible. He has one which is disgustingly called the Redskin Journal about visiting indigenous Americans and so on.
00:16:01
Speaker
Tons of books like that. He also has a thriller which has not been translated to English so I didn't try and find a PDF, but I'm gonna send you the description.
00:16:13
Speaker
The Widows of Santiago, an extraordinary feminist thriller set against the backdrop of dictatorship and popular resistance in Peru.
00:16:25
Speaker
Daily life traditions and the decline of family heads and small landowners in Peru. The incredible struggle, but also the loves, joys, and sorrows of proud and seductive women.
00:16:38
Speaker
prophetic invitation to challenge prejudices, ideologies, and the war of the sexes. Synopsis. How captivating it is to be swept away by the barely blossoming charm of a first novel of flesh and blood. It's not his first novel, by the way.
00:16:54
Speaker
The end of the haciendas in Peru inspires this engaging tale of raw passions and virile confrontation. When the abandonment of local tradition goes hand in hand with the breakdown of social relations, resistance to the unjust agrarian reform takes on the seductive and proud form of two stunning women with nerves of steel, Aurora the blonde and Vicuรฑa the indigenous woman determined to force their men into battle.
00:17:23
Speaker
What is the value of a modern life where future and progress are synonymous with betrayal, dishonor, and male impotence? Thus begins this swashbuckling saga set in Latin America. A cruel story, but a captivating thriller but brought to life by Yan Miao's elegant illustrations.
00:17:42
Speaker
Wow. This sounds awful. yeah maybe we should read this on the pod.
Raspail's Personal Ideologies and Bizarre Claims
00:17:50
Speaker
There's several episodes we can mine out of, like...
00:17:53
Speaker
the history of South America and the squashing of various attempts to like undo the like brutalizations of colonialism, whether it's like the role the U S had in like the Pinochet coup or things like this, right? Like, Oh, we're going to hear a little bit of that coming up and not Pinochet, but, um,
00:18:22
Speaker
There's a story you've probably never heard of about to come up. Okay. Just, like, the more you know about the history of South America in general, and Peru in particular, like, the more infuriating this, like, concept gets of, like, oh, you're doing land reform, but it's, you know, it's its modernity, it's wiping away traditional ways of life. And it's, like, by traditional ways of life, do you mean, like the continuing legacy of like spain and the rest of europe like completely destroying like people's lives oh my god okay yeah this sucks this guy sucks already i hate him already it's gonna get so much worse i know it is he also writes a novel about the kingdom of ericunai and patagonia
00:19:12
Speaker
There's a region divided between Chile and Argentina inhabited by a people called the Mapuche or Ericunians. In 1858, a French lawyer named Antoine de Tounon, inspired by a novel he'd read about the Spanish conquest of Chile, traveled to Aracunae and told the Mapuche, Hey, I'm European.
00:19:39
Speaker
I have connections and I can get you armed shipments. Appoint me your leader and I'll declare independence and make sure you're safe from the Chilean and Argentine governments.
00:19:51
Speaker
they said okay and elected him their leader he declared himself king declared independence and ericunae was promptly invaded by chile and several years later it's going to end up largely incorporated into chile the chileans capture him effortlessly and they deport him to france and tell every everyone that they executed him several years later he comes back he's like listen I'm alive, and I know it didn't go great last time, but this time i can really get you weapons. It's going to go great. Let's go again. Let's do it again. And they're like, yeah, sure, buddy. Sure, buddy. Just sit down, have a drink.
00:20:32
Speaker
And during a meeting with the Chilean general, they're like, hey, I just thought we'd mention Antoine is back in town. And so he gets deported again. And he tries this a few more times, and he gets deported each time.
00:20:47
Speaker
I love that you just said the phrase like, he tries this a few more times, he gets deported each time. Traveling from France to Chile was like not hopping on a plane and just going. So the he tries a few more times, he gets deported, like that represents like years of this man's life. Yes, absolutely.
00:21:06
Speaker
That's so good. Okay, so this briefly existing kingdom never really comes up again in South American history. This is like this is not really a topic in South America.
00:21:18
Speaker
But Antoine ends up with a few friends in France who are very into this idea of a new royal line with a kingdom in South America. And ultimately, he doesn't have any kids, and he's the king of this kingdom.
00:21:36
Speaker
So he appoints an heir. his friend, a champagne salesman. In France, among a tiny sliver of weirdos who sort of like masturbate to the thought of royalty, the idea of this kingly line that issues from the champagne salesman is something of an obsession.
00:21:57
Speaker
Here's some text from a telegraph obituary of Raspail. I'm gonna just announce for our listeners that I do know that this guy's name is pronounced Jean Raspail. I don't care.
00:22:09
Speaker
But Raspail, who styled himself king or sometimes consul general of Patagonia, was also guilty of some swamping of his own. Wait, wait a minute.
00:22:19
Speaker
Does he think he's the descendant of this champagne salesman? No, not really. He's more like a pretender to the throne.
00:22:31
Speaker
Okay, but he he thinks of himself as a pretender? yes That's incredible. that's incredible Okay. A practitioner of elaborate practical jokes, or as he put it, games that are not entirely games, Raspail was behind the invasion on three occasions of the Minkies Reef, known in French as Le Minkier, A tiny, uninhabited, rocky archipelago in the St. Malo Bay, part of the bailiwick of Jersey, by intruders who claimed the territory for Patagonia. In... jim
00:23:11
Speaker
In June 1984, Raspail led a force consisting of what one British newspaper called sozzled French students.
00:23:22
Speaker
Renamed the territory Northern Patagonia in response to Britain's unacceptable and prolonged occupation. of the Malween islands, a territory of Patagonia, and fled when the Coast Guard was alerted.
00:23:40
Speaker
The invasion was repeated in 1998 when the intruders lowered the Union flag from the island's solitary flagpole, replacing it with the Patagonian flag, and painted the island's one lavatory, a small wooden hut, in the Patagonian national colors of blue, white, and green.
00:23:55
Speaker
The invaders were sent packing a day later thanks to the intervention of the sun, which dispatched an inflatable dinghy skippered by Jersey Gendarme PC Fitchett to reclaim the minkies for queen and country.
00:24:08
Speaker
However, the British embassy in Paris ended up having to intervene to get Respy to return the Union Jack, which he initially said he would only do on the return of the Patagonian flag on neutral territory, a Parisian bar.
00:24:24
Speaker
before agreeing to present the captured flag to the embassy. In October last year, probably at Respye's instigation, the so-called Special Forces of the Kingdom of Patagonia once again hoisted the Patagonian flag on the islands and repainted the lavatory hut, this time in retaliation for Brexit before retreating upon the arrival of the hut's owners.
00:24:47
Speaker
This is so funny. This guy's so stupid. Like, you know he thought he was cooking when he was doing this shit. You know he's like, oh, I'm totally trolling them. Meanwhile, like, whatever, like, British, like, police force is like, my god, we gotta deal with this fucking dude and this fucking drunk college students.
00:25:05
Speaker
Fucking drunk college students being instigated by a drunken French racist. Like...
00:25:13
Speaker
Oh my god, this is so stupid. How serious is he about thinking that he's the king of Patagonia? Well, as he puts it, he engages in games that are not entirely games.
00:25:25
Speaker
This is like proto-4chan trolling, right? Uh-huh. We've talked a lot about this notion of the sort of, you know, you're doing it trolling, it's a it's a joke, it's ironic, but...
00:25:38
Speaker
in this way where it's like you're pretending that it's ironic it's not really and you're kind of taking this this position of pseudo irony in a way and it's funny to like see that in this pre-internet era right like he's like he's discovering this like he invented trolling you know okay so there's a second big thread to his novels He has a book called The King Over the Sea, which is sort of a novel, but really more just a series of letters to a future French monarch, urging him to rule, not just decoratively, but with force.
00:26:15
Speaker
He's got a novel called Sire about an 18-year-old becoming the king of France and restoring true monarchy.
Critique of Camp of the Saints' Racism and Writing
00:26:23
Speaker
He's got a novel about the Catholic Church dealing with the revelation that the true pope descended from the line of popes that spun off during the Avignon Papacy has returned.
00:26:41
Speaker
You get the idea. oh and a bunch of his books have won prizes, often exactly two prizes, neither of which I've heard of, but which seem like candy given away by rich reactionary jerk-offs to pseudo-intellectuals who flatter their prejudices. Do you have the name of the prizes handy, or does it...?
00:27:01
Speaker
Like a sire won the Grand Prix du Romain de la Vie de Paris and the Alfred de Vigne Prize. Huh, okay. Or the novel about the restoration of the line of succession of popes won the Prix Maison de la Presse and the Prince Pierre Foundation's literary prize. Okay, i haven't heard of any of the... and Not that I've heard of that many prizes in like French literature or whatever, but like i mean he's not winning like the Prix Goncourt or anything like no he's actually prestigious. okay
00:27:33
Speaker
He actually he does have an award for lifetime achievement from the Acadรฉmie Franรงaise. And that's like that's his big one. But all the others seem to be like along these lines.
00:27:44
Speaker
Okay, let's start in on the camp of the saints. Okay. This is from the first page. Okay. The sea itself, calm and blue, the rich man's sea, now suddenly stripped of all the opulent veneer that usually overspread its surface, the chrome-covered yachts, the muscle-bulging skiers, the gold-skinned girls, the fat bellies lining the decks of sailboats, large but discreet, and now, stretching over that empty sea, aground some fifty yards out, the incredible fleet from the other side of the globe, the rusty, creaking fleet that the old professor had been eyeing since morning.
00:28:23
Speaker
The stench had faded away at last, the terrible stench of latrines that had heralded the fleet's arrival like thunder before a storm. The old man took his eye from the spyglass, moved back from the tripod.
00:28:37
Speaker
The amazing invasion had loomed up so close that it already seemed to be swarming over the hill and into his house. He rubbed his weary eye, looked toward the door.
00:28:48
Speaker
It was a door of solid oak, like some deathless mass, jointed with fortress hinges. The ancestral name was carved in somber wood, and the year that one of the old man's forebears in uninterrupted line had completed the house, 1673.
00:29:06
Speaker
Okay, before we even dive into any of the many things happening in this, this is such dogshit writing. It's so bad, Helen. I was trying to like parse it as I was reading it, and I'm just like, I need to like read over it again because there's just like this avalanche of clauses that don't really stitch together that well.
00:29:28
Speaker
No, it's not good. and It's bad. When you're reading about this book, you will read a lot of people being like, ah The power of his writing. There isn't any.
00:29:40
Speaker
And the the reason I point to the craft first is that when you get things like this, because you have this kind of hard to grasp, you have this sequence of clauses, it's easy to sort of glaze over individual each individual clause and how batshit it is. So immediately, like the third clause I read, the rich man's sea,
00:30:06
Speaker
now suddenly stripped of all the opulent veneer that usually overspread its surface? What are you talking about? What? Like, he's literally saying the rich men are gone.
00:30:18
Speaker
Yes. Not the the veneer the the opulent veneer of the rich man's Stretching over that empty sea, the incredible fleet from the other side of the globe.
00:30:30
Speaker
Yeah, so it's literally the refugees are invading, but instead of imagining, right, like this is the image that now haunts like every racist's head, every racist's mind of like boats of refugees are actually secretly like a coherent invasion coming from the other side of the globe and the stench of latrine, like this is already so hateful, oh my God.
00:30:57
Speaker
Alright, well, I mean, we're pretty much done with the book. I think you've cracked the code. Let me also point out, by the way, he's very clearly and very consciously trying to use literary technique, or you could uncharitably say, play literary games, but he's very blunt.
00:31:18
Speaker
He's very obvious. We go into talking about the old man's door of solid oak. in his ancestor's house with the year 1673 carved on it.
00:31:31
Speaker
Like, do you think that door might be a metaphor? Do you think it might be a metaphor? This is the level we're going to be operating at through the whole thing. Here's what he says about the door on the next page.
00:31:43
Speaker
Oh my god, there's more about the door? Yeah, the door comes back repeatedly in this chapter. Oh my god. It was cool in the house when the professor went inside, but he left the door open all the same. Can a door protect a world that has lived too long? Even a marvel of workmanship 300 years old and one carved out of such utterly respectable western oak? What does he mean by that, Helen? Kill yourself. What does he mean? Kill yourself.
00:32:13
Speaker
Oh my god. the situation here is that there are 100 ships... each of which is carrying about 80,000 people, and they've arrived at the shores of France.
00:32:27
Speaker
There's no power on the coast of France because all the people in charge of maintaining infrastructure have fled the incoming invasion. Here are the sort of terms that he describes the ships in. How many of them were there out on those grounded wrecks? If the figures could be believed, the horrendous figures that each terse news bulletin had announced through the day, one after another, then the decks and holds must be piled high with layer on layer of human bodies, clustered in heaps around smokestacks and gangways, with the dead underneath supporting living, like one of those columns of ants on the march, teeming with life on top, exposed to view, and below... a kind of ant-paved path with millions of trampled cadavers.
00:33:12
Speaker
Oh my god. Okay, I don't know. This sucks. Yeah, see, when I told you that we were going to go through as much of the book as I could bear to present to you, now you're getting it.
00:33:25
Speaker
I'm just going to try and give you enough so that you can understand the highlights of its rhetoric. I mean, I think it's worth saying, like, this vision of ships crammed full of bodies in this inhuman way, he's describing the ships that were involved in the transatlantic slave trade as if they're invading. I don't know. It's, like, hard for me not to think of that image.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. It could just be making a connection that's not really there. But it's like he's trying to talk about these ships that are organized in a way that is ignorant of like the value of human life, right?
00:34:07
Speaker
But it's like, this actually happened and it was the Europeans who did it. You know, I'm just going to go into some of my theory of the book, which is like why even included this excerpt. I think what he's invoking here is the Nazi concentration camps.
00:34:23
Speaker
Because he's talking about the smokestacks. Yeah, I can see that. And actually, a future episode I think we are going to do is a theory in practice where the theory is Amรฉ-Cรฉsaire's discourse on colonialism. It's one of the one of the most popular sort of texts that that makes this point that Nazism and fascism should be understood as the techniques of colonialism brought back to like the imperial core.
00:34:50
Speaker
That if you understand like Nazi Germany as this complete break with European history as something that's like a complete aberration you don't actually understand what it was it's actually like the techniques of population control that were already used by colonialism in the center right and and that's yeah so so I think these are not like these two comparisons are not opposed at the end of this episode I'll come back to why I think he's making this comparison
00:35:22
Speaker
Okay, so the flotilla is littering the beaches with corpses, and the French soldiers are burning them, and we get this passage. The West doesn't like to burn its dead. It tucks away its cremation urns, hides them out in the hinterlands of its cemeteries.
00:35:39
Speaker
The Seine, the Rhine, the Loire, the Rhone, the Thames are no Ganges or Indus, not even the Guadalquivir and the Tiber. Their shores never stank with the stench of roasting corpses.
00:35:53
Speaker
Yes, they have flowed with blood, their waters have run red, and many a peasant has crossed himself as he used his pitchfork to push aside the human carcasses floating downstream.
00:36:04
Speaker
But in Western times... On their bridges and banks, people danced and drank their wine and beer, men tickled the fresh, young, laughing lasses, ah and everyone laughed at the wretch on the rack, laughed in his face, and the wretch on the gallows, tongue dangling, and the wretch on the block, neck severed, because indeed, the western world, stayed as it was, knew how to laugh as well as cry, And then, as their belfries called them to prayer, they would all go partake of their fleshly god, secure in the knowledge that their dead were there, protecting them, safe as could be, laid out in rows beneath their timeless slabs and crosses, in graveyards nestled against the hills, since burning, after all, was only for devilish fiends, or wizards, or poor souls with the plague.
00:36:57
Speaker
What the fuck? Yeah. This is so incoherent. What is happening? I do think that there has historically been more of this focus on like civilized and non-civilized ways of dealing with dead bodies. This feels like such a throwback, like calling someone primitive because they burn bodies instead of burying them.
00:37:16
Speaker
What really strikes me here is the pleasure he takes in depicting the cruelty of the West. Like this is his ideal culture here. This is the superior culture. And he's talking about guys just like making out with women next to like chopped off heads and shit. And he's like, oh, that's the good stuff.
00:37:38
Speaker
It's like trying to pat ourselves on the back because we in the West understand that like even if you're mocking a corpse, you bury it, like at least we're not burned. Like, I don't know, it's so weird. It's just such a weird, like i I don't understand how these two ideas are connected. I guess that's why I'm going to this like burial versus burning thing. Like I don't really understand in his mind why these two ideas are juxtaposed. Like, I mean, this phrase, like, men tickled the fresh young laughing lasses and everyone laughed at the wretch on the rack. Like, it's just gross. And it's gross on its face. And even just that chunk is like bad. But the fact that it's in the context of being like, this is the correct response to death.
00:38:25
Speaker
and burning is like disrespectful and like the smell of rotting corpses i don't know it's just so weird part of the new testament includes this supposed transcendence of the understanding of the importance of the materiality like in jewish practice you're not supposed to do anything that marks your body because it's understood that when the messiah comes to raise the dead and institute the kingdom of Israel, blah, blah, blah. Like you need your body to be intact.
00:38:57
Speaker
And like one of the things that is like explicitly addressed in the New Testament is this idea there's the terrestrial body and the celestial body and they're different. And you know, it's like, it's like sowing seeds and getting grain. Like it's not the same. I don't just, so he's not even good at Catholicism. He's not even good at understanding the Bible.
00:39:17
Speaker
No. Well, one thing he kind of communicates through this book is that he thinks the West needs to abandon its attachment to supposedly Christian virtues of kindness in order to survive.
Themes of Cruelty and Western Betrayal
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, okay. Okay, I see. Yeah, there is joy and cruelty and our ancestors understood that and maybe you need to understand it too. You're burning bodies because you don't understand the joy and value of being cruel to a hanging... like, I don't know. it just doesn't make any sense. This passage doesn't make any sense, Sarah.
00:39:53
Speaker
gonna stop trying to unpack it. Okay, so the French soldiers are trying to deal with the bodies that are littering the beach, and they can't handle it. And here's his description of that.
00:40:04
Speaker
Then, hands clutched to temples, he dashed off, zigzagged like a terrified jackrabbit into the ring of darkness beyond the burning pile. Five minutes more, and ten other soldiers had done the same.
00:40:16
Speaker
The professor closed his binoculars. He understood. That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one's own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity's finest.
00:40:29
Speaker
None of that had ever filled these youngsters' addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all.
00:40:41
Speaker
In their case, it wasn't a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of sentiment, most interesting to find in the flesh and observe at last in action.
00:40:55
Speaker
The real men of heart would be toiling that night and nobody else. Basically what he's saying is, This inhuman flotilla of ships full to the brim of bodies has started disgorging dead bodies on the the shores of France.
00:41:15
Speaker
And the soldiers are needing to go in and burn these bodies because that's the only thing you can do to get rid of the like masses of dead bodies. And in that, like, nightmarish scenario, like, I can accept on one level that this is an extremely racist story, but of course, like, in the terms of the story, this would be a nightmarish scenario. Like, corpses start piling up, and you have to start burning them to try to, like, address this, like, emergency situation.
00:41:45
Speaker
If you are too overwhelmed at this task, it's clearly because you're not racist enough. Like, is that, that that's what he's saying. Like... Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or rather, you've been taught to feel bad about being racist. You've been taught to feel bad about the urge toward cruelty and the urge to enjoy cruelty. You've had this cancer implanted in your mind.
00:42:12
Speaker
If you were in a situation where you had to start mass burning corpses, if you feel bad at that,
00:42:23
Speaker
It's because you're a cuck. Oh my god. This is so disgusting. I kind of can't wait to get into... Because you you you also seeded this idea that like many people have defended this novel against a claim of racism.
00:42:43
Speaker
And right now, I could not begin to imagine, not like how I would defend, obviously I wouldn't defend it because it's obviously racist, but if you were like, let's play a game, imagine an intellectual trying to defend this novel against a claim of racism, like what would your defense be? i have no idea.
00:43:06
Speaker
so I'm excited. Not that I'm expecting them to be good defenses, by the way. Like, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just like, it could it could be anything. they They could say anything because I have no idea. The professor who has been our point of view in this first chapter, we're still in the first chapter.
00:43:23
Speaker
We're in like the first few pages here, Helen. And already like the book has largely been laid out for you. you said You said this is 400 pages? 400 pages.
00:43:34
Speaker
And we're on like page three. the We're below 20 for sure. Okay, the professor kills this worthless hippie who shows up to tell him that the apocalypse is good and actually whites are bad.
00:43:49
Speaker
And the whole novel is full of that sequence of events basically repeating. Some liberal cuck shows up, displays allegiance to the invading non-white horde, and in one way or another is justly killed, usually by the migrants.
00:44:09
Speaker
Seeing that pattern play out over and over for 400 pages, it actually kind of reminded me of The Dark Knight Returns.
00:44:24
Speaker
Because you get that twice in there. You get the vaguely Jewish psychiatrist who the Joker murders, and you get the mayor who's murdered trying to negotiate with the leader of the gang that's overrunning the city.
00:44:40
Speaker
And it's gotten very, very Camp of the Saints vibe, I know, understand. Do we get, like...
00:44:48
Speaker
I mean, I'm assuming yes, because there's 400 pages, so this happens, like, at some point. Because so far, out of the clips you've showed, there's not, like, an invasion in the sense of, like, people actually coming out and, like, having any kind of...
00:45:01
Speaker
like Doing any invading right like there's just like the disgorging of corpses like how does that? Evolve at all. Oh, I mean eventually they're gonna land Yeah, okay, and then there's just gonna be like a bunch of people from poor countries who are brown running around Okay, but it's not like yeah, so my question is like how explicitly is it like?
00:45:25
Speaker
We are a militarized force who is like taking over or is it is it just like we're here to just be here They're taking over. Okay. We get an update on the Pope.
00:45:39
Speaker
The poor had overrun the earth. Self-reproach was the order of the day, happiness a sign of decadence, any pleasure beneath discussion. Even in Monsieur Calg's own village, if you did try to give some good linen away, they would just think you were being condescending.
00:45:55
Speaker
No, charity couldn't allay your guilt. It could only make you feel meaner and more ashamed. And so, on that day, he remembered so well, the professor had shut up his cupboards and chests, his cellar and larder, closed them once and for all to the outside world.
00:46:09
Speaker
the very same day that the last pope had sold out the Vatican. Treasures, library, paintings, frescoes, tiara, furniture, statues, yes, the pontiff had sold it all as christen cheered as Christendom cheered, and the most high-strung among them caught up in the contagion had wondered if they shouldn't go do likewise and turn into paupers as well.
00:46:34
Speaker
Useless heroics in the eternal scheme of things. He'd thrown it all into a bottomless pit. It didn't take care of so much as the rural budget of Pakistan for a single year.
00:46:45
Speaker
Morally, he had only proved how rich he really was like some Maharaja dispossessed by official decree. The third world was quick to throw it up to him, and in no time at all he had fallen from grace.
00:46:58
Speaker
From that moment on his holiness had rattled around in a shabby deserted palace, stripped to the walls by his own design, and he died at length in his empty chambers in a plain iron bed between a kitchen table and three wicker chairs, like any simple priest from the outskirts of town.
00:47:14
Speaker
Too bad, no crucifixion on demand before an assembled throng.
00:47:21
Speaker
Oh my god. You doing okay over there? I feel like we've had a run of episodes where we've picked up people who are more subtle, right? Like, I mean, the last episode, for example, we were taking up people who, like, directly thought, like, I want to be affirming and and had good things to say, right? And we had to kind of play this game of, like, picking apart with some complexity, like, good ideas from bad and understanding why something was upsetting.
00:47:48
Speaker
And that just feels like now we're like taking the weights off and we're just looking directly at some odium. And it's like, I don't even know what to add to this. Like, this is just so bad. This is so bad. It's so easy. I feel like we're shooting fish in a barrel at this point. You know, we've already covered it. Christendom is actually about, you know, Christianity supposedly about having some kind of empathy and pity for poor people. and And so, of course, like...
00:48:14
Speaker
ah This is hypocritical, but, i you know, whatever, yeah, bigots are hypocritical, that's not adding anything new. This line is revealing, no, charity couldn't delay your guilt. Like, that is how a lot of reactionaries think about charity, right? You you go out and you do whatever you want, and then you do a little charity so you feel less bad, right? Like...
00:48:33
Speaker
We talked about that a lot when we did the Jingle Smells episode, right? Like, what is charity? It's like you go out and, you know, there's a lot of poor kids out there and it's not really their fault and it's kind of sad and they they feel like Santa isn't visiting them and it's because their families are... So what do you do Well, you got a garbage truck full of plastic shit.
00:48:53
Speaker
Give it to the kids right that's the best that's the Christmas spirit that's the Christmas spirit is giving trash to children and He's like yeah, even that is too cucked right like this guy's like even that level of like Caring about poor kids enough not that you're actually gonna like change their lives, but you're just gonna give them garbage That's responsible. That's the cancer that's killing the West There are many passages that I clipped from this book and then I was like, this is too blunt, this is too racist.
00:49:27
Speaker
I can't include this. You're actually getting almost like best of of this book in the sense of like you're getting some of the least offensive content. It's already at like a peak of offensiveness. Like I don't like, and we could just go line by line here, right?
00:49:44
Speaker
He had thrown it all into a bottomless pit. It didn't take care of so much as the rural budget of Pakistan. Okay, all these jewels that the Vatican has and then all these West, right? Like the crown jewels of England. Where are they all from, right? Why do all these other countries, you know?
00:49:58
Speaker
ah Like, why is Pakistan on poor? Why is India, right? why Why do all these places not have these resources because they were stolen, right? It's just so so so backwards. You've exactly inverted things, but it's the same bullshit that they're always doing.
00:50:13
Speaker
The whole instigating incident for this invasion is that the country of Belgium agrees to adopt a certain number of Indian babies per year.
00:50:25
Speaker
And these massive hordes of parents surround the Belgian embassies in India and like hold up their babies and are like, adopt this baby, this baby is yours now, this baby is yours now, and They're holding up like these big well-fed babies, but they're trying to sneak in these quote, monsters, end quote.
00:50:49
Speaker
Oh my God. and eventually Belgium realizes what a terrible mistake they're making. And they cut off the adoption policy. And that's what sparks the invasion. Just from that outline, we could play the same game, go line through line through my description, be like, oh yeah, adoption has often been used as a tool of like genocide by colonial oppressors. That was happening you know when this book was being written, Native Americans were having their children like taken away to be reeducated. Yeah, and I mean to say nothing of like the actual history of Belgian colonialism, which like the Belgians were some of the most brutal colonists in the West. Like it's another situation right where like I can by fatal kindness here. Helen I can think of like anecdotes that I almost like just don't want to share because it's just nightmare fuel. There's just no reason to share it, but just the absolute horrific shit. You want to learn about it you can go read about like the history of the Belgian colonization of the Congo. It's fucking disgusting stuff.
00:51:52
Speaker
they're too nice and that's going to be the fucking downfall. Like,
00:51:57
Speaker
okay.
00:52:02
Speaker
A big part of the book is taken up with descriptions of fifth columners. So a lot of these are the sort of liberals, atheists, et cetera. I told you about who get owned because of their traitorous intentions.
00:52:19
Speaker
But also, he makes sure to hit on more or less every demographic that is part of France and is not white and just emphasize how awful they are.
00:52:35
Speaker
All in all, a few hundred thousand Arabs and blacks, invisible somehow to the ostrich Parisians, and far more numerous than anyone would think, since the powers that be had doctored the statistics, afraid of jolting the sleepwalking city too violently out of its untroubled trance. Paris was no New York.
00:52:53
Speaker
They waited now the same meek way they lived, overlooked and unknown, in virtual terror, whole tribes of fellow sufferers hiding away in the depths of their cellars or huddling together up under the eaves, happy to shut themselves off in infested streets where grimy facades hid unsuspected ghettos as wholly unknown to the people of Paris as Ravensbrรผck and Dachau once upon a time had been to the Germans.
00:53:19
Speaker
There's, like, a bunch to talk about here, but, I mean, just towards the beginning, my immediate reaction to this thing about the ostrich Parisians, it's, like, the the racist who thinks that having a multicultural city is actually a threat, and and seeing people who aren't white around is an existential threat to your existence, like, has to believe that other people are putting their head in the sand. And it's, like, no.
00:53:47
Speaker
They're just normal, right? They're not ignoring that there's a lot of non-white people around. They just understand that that's fine. It's not something that you have to experience as an existential threat to your way of life because that's stupid as shit, right? Like, oh, all these people who are ignoring the threat and it's like, what threat?
00:54:06
Speaker
that there's black people near you, like, that couldn't be less of a threat. That couldn't be more of just, like, a statement of fact. Like, yeah, there's black people who live in Paris. Like, that's just how it is. And it's always been that way. And that's fine. And people aren putting their head in the sand. They just don't care because they're not as racist as you.
00:54:24
Speaker
He has about two and a half pages where he rants about a black intellectual who's spreading sympathy for all these awful, awful people, publishers of smut, bricklayers, rioters.
00:54:45
Speaker
authors, pop stars, etc, etc. All of them black or queer or something like that. He's just like going through a laundry list of like every position in society that a person who is not white can have.
00:55:02
Speaker
And he has like this little rant or he has this unflattering character portrait of them. Huge part of the book. Wait, hold on. Before we move on, I do feel like we should take a second with this.
00:55:13
Speaker
Whole tribes of fellow sufferers hiding away in their cellars, happy to shut themselves off in infested streets where grimy facades hid unsuspecting ghettos as wholly unknown to the people of Paris, as Ravensbrรผck and Dachau once upon a time had been to the Germans. He's talking about...
00:55:30
Speaker
like Jewish ghettos is he saying like like white Parisians are shutting themselves up and becoming ghettoized in these like infested streets is he drawing a comparison between like the white citizens of Paris and the Jews or is he saying like what is this who is in the ghetto here because his his sentence structure is really vague here no he is talking about the black and Arab residents of Paris The ghettos weren't, like, places... i mean, maybe he just thinks that's what they were, but the ghettos weren't places where, like, Jews were hiding to, like, infest... They were places where Jews had been corralled into and forced Like, this is what i was trying to ask, because it's so weirdly written.
00:56:14
Speaker
The ghettos... Like... I'm a little... So he's just doing Holocaust denial. I don't think he's... doing Holocaust denial. All right, I'm just going to go ahead and say what I was going to say at the end.
00:56:27
Speaker
I think what he intends to suggest to the reader is that people who are not white are genociding themselves, and so it doesn't matter if you do it to them.
00:56:41
Speaker
oh Oh.
00:56:46
Speaker
That is what I think is going on with the smokestacks and the boats earlier and what is going on with the Ravensbroke and Dachau comparison here. Right, right, okay. Oh my god.
00:56:59
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. Okay.
00:57:05
Speaker
There's a reason that I said the third part of this episode was going to be me explaining why I picked this book. Okay. Because up to now, I have been trying to pick out, like, I know... you know, again, going into this, like, I only knew the title of the book and, like, a little bit about the role it played, but but again, like, not not any details. And so I've been trying to figure out exactly, like, is he saying... Because here, I mean, okay.
00:57:30
Speaker
Okay. But I think what you're saying makes sense, because then it would make sense that these concentration camps, which he's referring to as ghettos, but... Which also this idea that the Germans didn't know what was happening is also wrong. Like it it is a common claim that people make, which is like, oh, most Germans didn't know the extent of the Holocaust. And there's some extent to which that may be true. But the idea that like most Germans didn't know that the extermination of Jews was happening in Nazi Germany is a claim that...
00:58:00
Speaker
Right-wing people will make and it's just historically false like it's just another sort of kind of Holocaust denial where you're saying okay the Holocaust happened But you know lots of Germans didn't know about it and it's like no that's not true because there were lots of Jews in Germany and then they started disappearing like yeah It actually happened in this widespread way people noticed that it happened and they were actually just being anti-semitic so Yeah, people were actually hiding Anne Frank because they just think she needed a place to couch surf Yeah.
00:58:31
Speaker
Here's an excerpt from the run-up to the actual landing. At the selfsame hour, 147 minutes ahead of the refugees' actual landing, the myth of redemption by the Ganges armada swept over the nation's industrial zones in plant after plant.
00:58:49
Speaker
Once again, we should point out that this coincidental occurrence was in no way due to any preconceived scheme on the part of the principles or to any conservative concerted action by the usual phalanx of outside agitators.
00:59:02
Speaker
If the third world factory workers of France rose up in spontaneous revolt that night in places as far removed from one another as Paris, Lille, Lyon, and Mulhouse, it's because for the last three days the pent-up tension had built to such a pitch that the lid finally blew, in a seething eruption of wild expectant hopes.
00:59:21
Speaker
To be honest, we have to admit, however, that the crimes committed that night, for the most part, had no needless cruelty or malice about them, no excess of subtle finesse but seemed part of the natural order of things.
00:59:32
Speaker
one might have feared that this was to be the first wave of a fierce brewing storm instead it was the one last visible tremor in an underground upheaval and it quickly subsided since the country had drowned in its waters long since besides one thing is sure Even if Western-style law had survived with its weighty decisions about justice as we knew it, the courts would have judged each one of these crimes as quite defensible on social grounds, going through the motions for appearances' sake and handing down suspended sentences or light ones at most.
01:00:04
Speaker
So there's something I really want to draw your attention to here. This is one of many times in the book that he takes pains to assure us that none of this was driven by a conspiracy.
01:00:18
Speaker
Interesting, okay. When the third worlders capturing ships in order to head out to Europe to conquer it, there are ringleaders, but he takes pains to say...
01:00:34
Speaker
There was no conspiracy. It was just in the air. Everybody understood. Happens over and over and over in the book. That's something I'm going to return to later.
01:00:45
Speaker
There's also a sense that you get from this excerpt that is a major part of this book that the West was already defeated. it had already lost.
01:00:59
Speaker
So in a sense, this whole invasion involves a little bit of violence. and involves enough incidents for him to portray in what he thinks is like this very comical and satirical and exciting fashion.
01:01:17
Speaker
But like it was kind of already over. He describes a situation in which car factory overseers abuse their assembly line workers by timing their movements, and then we get this passage.
01:01:31
Speaker
And days went by, until that night when one of the time gobblers, chosen among the most ruthless of the lot, was trussed up like a sausage and laid on a piece of sheet metal en route to the body assembly with a sign in Arabic around his neck.
01:01:44
Speaker
For now the thousand years are ended. When the massive drop hammer fell against the metal to stamp it into shape, the clocker was nothing but a puddle of blood, quickly dried in the heat.
01:01:55
Speaker
A great roar went up, and the assembly line stopped, as thousands of Arabs next to their machines fell prostrate towards Mecca and gave thanks to Allah. The underdogs had had their scapegoat, and that was that.
01:02:09
Speaker
There were no other crimes in Javel that night. They needed only one, and everyone understood it. If we want to pursue the historical facts a bit further, here too, again just for the record, we might point out that cars are still coming off the lines at the Javel plant, though they're awfully expensive and terribly scarce.
01:02:25
Speaker
They're reserved, first choice for the officials of the new regime. To buy one himself, a worker in one of those people-run plants would have to pay ten times what he makes in a year, a pleasure he can ill afford.
01:02:36
Speaker
He can take consolation, however, in using our public conveyances, chaotic and decrepit, or in joining the rest of the ill-shod pedestrians thronging the streets. When the author of these lines returned to Paris after a lengthy stay in Switzerland, his car was surrounded by breathless little urchins, as if it were some new kind of toy.
01:02:55
Speaker
Combining those with the last excerpt, I feel like I'm not totally putting together what he's doing here. Because again, this has that feeling of like, it's already lost. Like, what does he mean by the time gobblers here?
01:03:08
Speaker
Oh, he means the overseers who were clocking the workers movements. Right, so he does want them to be understood as, to some extent, like deserving of these crimes.
01:03:21
Speaker
oh No. Does he? No? Okay. No. Because Time Gobbler just sounds like an insult. Yeah, no, no, no. He thinks it's fine for them to exploit the workers.
01:03:33
Speaker
he portrays them He portrays them as cruel and acting monstrously towards the workers, and that's just supposed to be fine. I guess I'm just thinking about the line in this last excerpt. To be honest, we have to admit, however, that the crimes committed that night for the most part had no needless cruelty or malice about them, no excess of subtle finesse, but seemed part of the natural order of things.
01:03:55
Speaker
it's It's bizarre. And in this line about like, even if Western style law had survived with its weighty decisions about justice as we knew it, the courts would have judged each one of these crimes as quite defensible on social grounds.
01:04:07
Speaker
He is mounting an explicit defense of cruelty against non-white people. He is, as you said before, like he's saying, you know, we already lost and, you know, we the West have already lost because...
01:04:25
Speaker
Of our Western sense of justice, the idea that cruelty is bad is a cancer. Yes. Like, that's what he's saying. Okay. it's Usually these guys, you i expect them to, like, do a little bit to pretend or pay lip service to some kind of idea that cruelty might be bad in some contexts. Yeah.
01:04:51
Speaker
But he just actually thinks the real problem is that you're not cruel enough. Okay. Okay. yeah that's they only Yeah. That's the only way the pieces fit together, right? Like, he's just explicitly saying that. Okay.
01:05:06
Speaker
The events in France in which the migrants easily take over the country inspire this global revolution of the non-whites.
01:05:18
Speaker
They take over New York. They take over England and force the queen to have her son marry a Pakistani woman. They take over everywhere. There's more armadas.
01:05:28
Speaker
bla Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's part, this whole plotline actually, which is clearly intended to be extremely funny, involving a Russian soldier who's trying to defend the border against like a horde of Chinese migrants, and all his men de desert. He's like the last one.
01:05:49
Speaker
He thinks this is like Dr. Strangelove. the author flees to Switzerland and it manages to keep itself out of the fray, neutral for a while, and then this is how the novel ends.
01:06:04
Speaker
Then, Easter Monday, and it all turned to hate. She had called up her reserves. Like every other time when war threatened to surround her, she picked herself a general, she she sealed off her borders. Even worse, she threw out all her black and brown and tan.
01:06:20
Speaker
Or at least she kept them under such close surveillance that a hue and cry went up, accusing her of building concentration camps and ghettos, none of which was true. Not a word, I assure you. Though a dark skin was in fact viewed with some suspicion.
01:06:34
Speaker
And I wonder, by the way, if that really was so new for this land that was always in the forefront of freedom. The UN, of course, packed up and left, along with its futile and meaningless cortege of charitable institutions.
01:06:47
Speaker
All at once, in Geneva, the air seemed clearer. You could take a deep breath, but needless to say, it didn't last long, just a few short months, not even a year, because Switzerland's foundations, too, had been sapped from within.
01:07:01
Speaker
The beast had undermined her, but slowly and surely, and it merely took her that much longer to crumble. Then in time, chunk by chunk, she let herself go, forgot herself, and began to think.
01:07:14
Speaker
Her collapse was really in the best of taste. The famous shield of perennial neutrality still made a vague impression. The beast put on gloves before yodeling for the kill. From inside and out, the pressures grew stronger.
01:07:26
Speaker
A Munich-style coup, no way to avoid it. Back to the wall, she had to give in, and today she signed. At midnight tonight, her borders will be opened already for the last few days. They've been practically unguarded. And I'm sitting here now, slowly repeating over and over these melancholy words of an old Prince Babesco, trying to drum them into my head.
01:07:48
Speaker
Fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week. There's tons and tons of references to the fall of Constantinople in this book.
01:07:59
Speaker
That makes sense. Yeah. Like, for example, the stout French general who is like... You see him as like this heroic muscled silhouette, like throwing bodies into the flames, like at the start of the book.
01:08:16
Speaker
He's named after the last Byzantine emperor. Yeah, that's the book. Helen, I gotta say... I didn't enjoy reading it very much. No, I mean, I didn't enjoy the snippets that you sent.
01:08:31
Speaker
I didn't enjoy reading those, and I feel like I read less than two pages in total, and you're saying the book is 400 pages long. It's 400 pages, and it is all so much worse than what I sent you.
01:08:47
Speaker
Oh my god. The fucking leader of the invasion is a guy named Churdeater. who carries around his child who is limbless and deformed and he's kind of a demon is the implication.
01:09:08
Speaker
It's bad. This is kind of a bad book. i I would even go so far as to say this is an unusually racist book. I don't know if you can get behind that description, Helen. It might be a little harsh, but... We talked not on the podcast, but actually on the stream.
01:09:24
Speaker
We were talking about the Michelle Ulbeck book submission because there was that article that opened with this reference to it, which... As far as I understand it, having not read either, is like in the same genre in that it's about like the fall of the West and an invasion of of Arab values.
01:09:40
Speaker
And like that book, I know people who are like, yeah, it's good. It's like really racist, but it's a good novel. And i think it's like there's like a genre in French literature of accounts of the decay of Western society by the Arab horde.
01:10:01
Speaker
And this is like a particularly bad entry in that genre as far as I understand it Yeah, this fits right into the canon of the Nouveau Droit, or New Rite, which is a European literary movement from the late 60s, which explicitly modeled itself on Gramsci.
01:10:27
Speaker
And... ah are you okay? I know, right? What? Like the Marxist? less ok Yes. Okay. Yes. this sort of particularly literary racism is, i don't know, it's a phenomenon that we really don't have that much of in the U.S., actually.
01:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's not really an American phenomenon just so much. And in fact, so the the context in which I had heard about this book was some American white supremacist organizations that like this book. And it's like, they kind of have to go to this like French book example because there's not...
01:11:05
Speaker
Not that there's not racist American writers, like, let's be clear, but it's just, it's different. It's not in the same, it's not the same kind of thing. Why did I decide that we should have an episode about this book?
01:11:16
Speaker
Well, first off, it was well received by the literati in France, but it didn't actually sell very well. So the Telegraph obituary claims that it only sold 15,000 copies in its first year.
01:11:28
Speaker
A Wellesley professor eventually translated it into English, and when it got a release over here, it was excoriated. Even the New York Times was on the right side of this one.
01:11:42
Speaker
The New York Times figured it out? The New York Times figured it out. Yeah, that one hurts. It also didn't sell super well here. It did have its defenders.
01:11:54
Speaker
So for example, William F. Buckley was a fan, and the person who reviewed it at the National Review was a fan. So minor book, three reasons I want to talk about it.
01:12:08
Speaker
First, it's set up for future episodes. So we're kind of eating our veggies here. The book was kept circulating by wealthy figures. particularly Cordelia Scaife May and John Tanton, both of whom are potential future episode subjects.
01:12:26
Speaker
It never really disappeared, and so it ended up with a lot of connections to stuff that we're likely to get into in the future. Second, over the last 30 years, and especially the last 20 years, it's had a big comeback.
01:12:42
Speaker
The fascist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen was a promoter of the book, and it turns out that his much more popular daughter, Marine Le Pen, is also a big promoter.
01:12:52
Speaker
And there are no less than three notable racist Steves in America who are big fans of this book. Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Steve King.
01:13:04
Speaker
All Camp of the Saints fans. Victor Orban is a fan. And just generally, the rhetoric of invasion and apocalypse that it created the blueprint for is a huge part of our politics now and of how issues around immigration are presented.
Impact on Modern Right-Wing Rhetoric
01:13:26
Speaker
Do you remember the caravan? Yeah. This was a thing back in 2018 where a caravan consisting of thousands of people went from Central America to the southern border of the US in order to attempt to claim asylum.
01:13:46
Speaker
And this happened right in the run up to the 2018 midterms. And the hysteria and the frenzy around that was like incredible.
01:13:58
Speaker
Fox News was talking about almost nothing else. And then the day after the midterms, there was an actual measurable, sharp, numerical decline of discussion of the caravan to almost zero.
01:14:12
Speaker
And the caravan was supposed to be like the apocalypse. In a way, it's almost like silly to call out specific things in the rhetoric around immigration as coming from Camp of the Saints because it's actually so pervasive.
01:14:29
Speaker
This whole business with the boats. At the time, the concept of migrant invasion by boats was more or less just something in Ras Bail's head. And now it is the everyday rhetoric of immigration in Europe.
01:14:47
Speaker
The EU in effect pays Syrian slavers to capture and enslave migrants so that the EU with its stated relatively humane policies around boats that it intercepts won't have to deal with these people.
01:15:06
Speaker
It's a huge thing that drives, like, staggering amounts of cruelty. That happens on a structural level, but there's also been incidents of, like, the phrase, like, turn back the boats has become this, like, repetitive thing in, like, UK politics, for instance. Like, we need a prime minister who's going to turn back the boats, who's going to stop this, like, tide of the invading horde. And it's, like, on the interpersonal level has led to instances of, like...
01:15:32
Speaker
people seeing a brown person kayaking in a river specifically just like a dude in a kayak and being like that's a refugee like this has happened on more than one occasion that they then like start like either physically attacking the person or like they call the police or like they're like this is a small boat and it's literally just some dude out for a kayak on like a Sunday afternoon like the level of derangement that has entered these people's minds like cannot be exaggerated like like the median yeah uk op-ed is an argument that this scene that i'm going to paste in from the book right now should happen
01:16:10
Speaker
What came out of his story was this. The Greek freighter Isle of Naxos, skippered by Captain Notaris, was en route from Colombo to Marseille through the Suez Canal with a cargo of precious wood. She had crossed the 10th parallel halfway between Ceylon and Socotra.
01:16:24
Speaker
The sailor, qualified helmsman, had just taken his turn at the wheel when she came across a first half-dead victim who seemed to come back to life as the ship approached, waving a feeble hand out of the water.
01:16:36
Speaker
The sea was calm. There was no wind. The captain ordered the engines cut and called for a boat to be lowered. At just that moment, the officer on watch, spotting the poor devil in his glasses, noticed that the water all around him was teeming with corpses just below the surface. The captain grabbed his binoculars.
01:16:52
Speaker
There, spread out before him, far as the eye could see, was an ocean of bodies, some floating on top, some slightly submerged, depending on whether they were living or dead. The mob from the Ganges, he exclaimed, and he called back the lifeboat, already being lowered, and gave orders to start up the engines, easy astern.
01:17:07
Speaker
The drowning man, seeing the ship pull away, closed his eyes without a murmur and let himself sink. Captain, the officer shouted, are you just going to leave them to drown? He was a very young man, pale with shock and on the verge of tears.
01:17:19
Speaker
You know the orders, Captain Natar's replied. They're pretty damn clear. Besides, what if I took on that crowd? What then? What we what would we do with them all? My job is to haul a load of wood, not to help that mob invade Europe. Okay, the third reason I brought this up is that there's something missing in this that I think is revealing and that ties into later developments in an interesting way. So I mentioned earlier the lack of conspiracy in this novel.
01:17:49
Speaker
In fact, the explicit rejection of conspiracy. There's also the lack of the insidious Jew, which is a figure that we expect to see from these kinds of people.
01:18:02
Speaker
Not in there. There's zero anti-Semitism in this book. And also notice the lack of a proposed solution. When the apocalypse comes, he wants the whites to shoot the non-whites, but there's no clear prescription about what to do now when the apocalypse hasn't happened yet.
01:18:23
Speaker
This is something he gets asked about frequently in interviews, or he did, but he died of COVID in 2020.
01:18:34
Speaker
Okay, here's a transcript from a TV interview. I'll read the question. What should we do? That is the question you asked back then. One answer was that we have to have the courage to shoot the whole lot.
01:18:47
Speaker
At the time, that was regarded as racism. You have simplified just a bit. In truth, the Camp of the Saints is a parable, written in 1972, published in about a million people from the Third World.
01:19:00
Speaker
They're weak, they're unarmed, women and children, they're poor, and they come in search of paradise. But there's a million of them. They land on the Riviera, and behind them there are other flotillas with more millions ready to land according to whether or not Franz's response is positive or negative.
01:19:16
Speaker
The problem of the camp of the saints is very simple. There is unity of time, place, and action. Everything happens in 24 hours. What happens is that they have a shipwreck, a million of them, unarmed, weak, they inspire sympathy, pity, but a million, and if the response is positive, there are a million more waiting.
01:19:36
Speaker
What do we do? That's the question posed by the camp of the saints. And is the question the same 40 years later? The Camp of the Saints is a novel. Its purpose is not to send a message. I'm a novelist. I imagined this situation, which is a bit like ours today, except the arrival of millions of immigrants seeking paradise did not happen in 24 hours, but over a longer period of time.
01:19:56
Speaker
And the Camp of the Saints ends badly, badly or well, according to your opinion. There are 400 pages. Imagine all the questions it raises in our minds on a social level, on the national level, but also on the inner level of each person. What do you do? If you allow in such a mass, what happens to the country?
01:20:12
Speaker
If you don't allow them in, where is your Christian charity? Where is your pity? And many other things like that. Okay, so what happened here is he just dodged the question. I think what he's doing here is... And I don't know to what extent this is happening on like a conscious level, or it's just like reflexive bullshit he's learned, just because this is the way these guys talk, right? This this thing about a unity of time, place, and action...
01:20:37
Speaker
This is a reference to Aristotle's Poetics, which is describing the structure of Greek tragedy. He's not explicitly saying it, but what he's trying to sort of get at with that is like, this is a Greek tragedy.
01:20:52
Speaker
i think it helps me understand what he's saying and his racism to understand that he's saying this is in the form of a Greek tragedy, right? I'm showing you like an unavoidable loss of something.
01:21:06
Speaker
I do think he's dodging the question, right? Because he's kind of playing this game of like, oh, well, it's a novel. It's not a prescription for real life. But it's like, well, clearly you're trying to say something. And it's like, what is it you're trying to say? But he's pointing to the absolute destruction of the tragic hero, which happens through, you know, a fatal flaw.
01:21:23
Speaker
The fatal flaw in this case, right? Like we can we can put all the pieces together and we can sort of answer the question that he refuses to answer, which is he's saying the main character the West. the west is going to get destroyed because of its fatal tragic flaw which in this case is not being full-throatedly cruel enough i can tell you that whatever games he was playing involving the form of tragedy certainly the person who transcribed and translated this interview, it was originally on French TV, and then posted it to their blog, interpreted this as dodging the question, because they got so mad at this that they appended this footnote to the interview.
01:22:04
Speaker
Note, the interview leaves something to be desired. Raspail asks, how do we get rid of them? But he never proposes that all immigration be stopped, although it is vaguely implied when he criticizes the politicians of the past 40 years for their empty words and insincere promises.
01:22:19
Speaker
He also think seems to think that Christian charity would be violated if the millions were turned away. Catholic writer Bernard Antony responds forcefully to Raspail on this point. It is not in the name of genuine Christian charity that the immigrants blah blah. He then goes on to append a quote from this random racist Catholic blogger.
01:22:39
Speaker
The quote is from a post where the blogger got mad at a totally different interview, whereas Spale did the exact same thing. Here he is in another interview.
01:22:50
Speaker
What do you feel about the current situation? You know, I've no wish to join the big group of intellectuals who spend their time debating immigration. i have the impression that these talks serve no purpose. The people already know it all intuitively, that France, as our ancestors fashioned it centuries ago, is disappearing, and that we keep the gallery amused by talking ceaselessly of immigration without ever saying the final truth, a truth that is moreover unsayable, as my friend Jean Cao has noted, because whoever says it is immediately hounded, condemned, then rejected.
01:23:19
Speaker
Richard Millet came close to it. Look what happened to him. So I guess I would say this footnote is saying this dude is leaving something to be desired.
01:23:30
Speaker
And he thinks it's not Christian charity. But as we discussed, when he says, if you allow in such a mass, what happens to the country? If you don't allow them in, where's your Christian charity? He is against the notion of Christian charity. Absolutely. Like what these people are, right? They're saying, oh, he's dodging the question or, oh, he's, you know, it's not fair for him to say this and he should not, he shouldn't say it's a real Christian charity. He's not engaged in the same game that these people are.
01:23:56
Speaker
He's saying like, where is our Christian charity? He wants the conclusion to be, we need to jettison a Christian charity, right? Like, right this is why he said the thing about the tragedy and the structure of a Greek tragedy because he, in his mind,
01:24:11
Speaker
thinks that Christian charity is the tragic flaw that is causing our downfall as a society. And again, he's saying the same thing here. You know, he's like, oh, look, what do you want me to just say? so you know, like, he's saying, whoever says it is immediately hounded, condemned, and rejected.
01:24:28
Speaker
You couldn't be more clear here. He is saying, look, you, the interviewer, want me to play this game and just say, i think we should kill all the immigrants. But I'm not going to say that because...
01:24:40
Speaker
And he's very clear because saying that is counter to the purpose of us doing it. Like, he understands that if he says that out loud, it will hurt his political project. That's exactly what he's saying. These talks serve no purpose. The people already know it all intuitively.
01:24:57
Speaker
He's figured out, and I'm going to hate on liberals again, he's figured out that there's another tragic flaw in the liberal mind, which is that if you don't ever outright say, i am a racist, there will always be someone who will accuse you of bad faith if you call a racist a racist. Right?
01:25:16
Speaker
So as long as you say, i don't know, I'm just a novelist, right? Somebody can come along and say, i don't know, he's just a novelist, but he's saying right here, right? We know that he's a fan of games that aren't games. He has a sense of rhetoric that's like 1% more sophisticated than the guy who wrote the footnote on this blog. That's what's happening here. He never quite says anything. The thing that you can easily infer from everything he has ever written, everything he has ever put out into the world.
01:25:48
Speaker
But you don't quite say it. And writing the line ever so carefully is good enough. Notice he says, Richard Millay came close to it. Look what happened to him.
01:26:01
Speaker
Here's an excerpt from a news item about Richard Millay. French writer Richard Millay, who caused an uproar late August for praising Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik in a pamphlet, has had to step down from a top position with France's prestigious publisher, Gallimard, though he remains on the payroll.
01:26:18
Speaker
Richard Millay remains a Gallimard employee, the company stressed Friday, but he will no longer sit on its committee of readers, which helps select books for publication and shapes the output of established writers. This is infuriating.
01:26:31
Speaker
Like... The dude was like, oh, yeah, this Anders Breivik guy had a few good points, which, I mean, I imagine our listeners know. how I'll just say Anders Breivik was a Norwegian Nazi who killed 77 people in a combined mass shooting and car bomb attack intended to preserve the racial purity of Norway.
Far-Right Movements and Ideological Parallels
01:26:50
Speaker
Yeah, and left a pretty extensive manifesto that has become kind of a urtext for like a lot of white supremacist movements. Like it's one of the things that you you constantly see referenced is the is the pamphlet, or is is the manifesto.
01:27:06
Speaker
So what this guy like he praised this terrorist like this white supremacist Nazi terrorist and then gets like a paid vacation or just gets like paid like yeah he's still an employee. Yeah this is like a cop getting suspended for an officer involved shooting like time to sit back and play bejeweled at home instead of in the subway.
01:27:29
Speaker
Look what happened to him like yeah he got to just oh my god okay. Ugh.
01:27:36
Speaker
Okay, so he has this project of trying to suggest to the reader that, you know, we gotta to just kill the non-whites. But he wants to maintain respectability, he wants to ride that boundary.
01:27:50
Speaker
And what today's far right have done is pick up where he left off and keep pushing that boundary back. In 2010, Raynaud Camus, inspired by Enoch Powell and The Camp of the Saints, published his book, The Great Replacement.
01:28:06
Speaker
The Great Replacement takes the thesis of the Camp of the Saints, which is that whites are going to be, and are being, replaced by an invading horde of migrants, and brings in a conspiracy element.
01:28:21
Speaker
And in Camus' conspiracy, Muslims are the puppeteers. American Nazis fused this with their existing theory they called white genocide, in which Jews were the puppeteers.
01:28:36
Speaker
And so now we have a version of this conspiracy theory for every orientation between wanting Jews to be the villains and wanting Muslims to be the villains.
01:28:51
Speaker
And partially as a result of this diversity of options, it has exploded. The Great Replacement saturates right-wing rhetoric now.
01:29:03
Speaker
Usually it's not referred to by that name. You have to be like roughly as far out as Tucker Carlson currently is for that. But right-wing media personalities almost uniformly push this idea that the elites are replacing you with the migrants. And by you, they of course mean the white listener.
01:29:21
Speaker
There's something interesting about Russ Bale's insistence that it's not a conspiracy. Because in his mind, again, and I think that this image of the the tragedy, the Camp of Saints as like a classical tragedy, helps to illustrate this a little bit, that it that it really is Christian charity that is the flaw here.
01:29:42
Speaker
If there's a conspiracy, then you have this other evil group of people and you can destroy them and you can save things by destroying them. But it's sort of somebody else's fault. And the problem isn't Christian charity. And this is exactly the gap that this footnote this guy trying to say, like, he seems to think Christian charity would be violated if the millions were turned away. But this other Catholic guy points out that it's not actually genuine Christian genuine christian charity. He is trying to make a point here.
01:30:10
Speaker
That his audience is just too stupid to understand. Yeah. And like. That's partly his fault. They're just watching their French TV and fucking shutting out. Yeah. He's writing slop shit for idiot racists.
01:30:25
Speaker
Of course they're not going to understand it. But it's always funny when you get these kind of misalignments between like. You know there's a reason he's like so clear. And in in in a way it makes his point stronger.
01:30:36
Speaker
that there's not a conspiracy. Because then it really is that charity is a cancer invading the West. And these other guys just don't understand that. They're too stupid. And there's just like not, like, it almost makes me feel like, what are we even doing here? Why are we trying to understand the subtle details of this? Like, even the people who like this shit aren't doing that. They're just shutting out, as you say, right? Like, it's all just fucking stupid. They're all so stupid. The other thing that this is reminding me a lot of, like, you know, we're in the rhetorical world the Camp of Saints created. What, you know,
01:31:07
Speaker
In a way this is like somebody turned the rhetoric and subtlety dial down on Atlas Shrugged.
01:31:18
Speaker
Like, this book, in a way, feels very Ayn Rand to me. Ayn Rand is explicitly, like, not being a racist, but she has the same vision of a society that's going to collapse because the the cool, good people, which she just doesn't want to explicitly say are, like, the white people, although we did actually...
01:31:38
Speaker
in our Ayn Rand episode, get into parts where she talks about, like, the West and, like, why the West is cool and, like, you know, she's racist in a lot of the same ways. So it's kind of funny that, like, you've got, like, Atlas Shrugged for, like, the Silicon Valley type people who, like, understand that, like, you can't be openly white supremacist, right? But you still want to be able to say, like, I'm super cool and everyone else, the hordes, the masses are just, like, haters for the sake of being haters.
01:32:03
Speaker
And then if you want to get more explicitly racist with it, you've got Camp of the Saints, you've got And if you want to get more conspiratorial, you can do, like, replacement theory. Like, there's a whole menu. There's a whole, like, a range of politics here that are more or less the same in terms of how they think you should run the world.
01:32:20
Speaker
You were curious about defenses of this book. Helen, I am so sorry to disappoint you. Because the way people defend this book is they just avoid addressing the content.
01:32:32
Speaker
They say things like, oh, well, Raspail was an explorer who spent many years hanging out with like indigenous people and writing about them. He can't be racist.
01:32:44
Speaker
I'm not exaggerating. That is both something I have read other people say about him and an argument he himself has made in response to the question, are you racist?
01:32:55
Speaker
Or they'll say, ah, he was profiting. That's crazy. That's like, okay, hold on. That's like even stupider version of like, I can't be racist, some of my, you know, my best friend is black. That's like, I can't be racist, some of the people I've met in my life are black. like I've had professional contact with black people. That's the argument.
01:33:17
Speaker
I've seen black people on the street before, I can't be racist. Like, what are you saying, dude? oh my god.
01:33:26
Speaker
Or, this is the really intellectual version of the defense. they'll say, actually, he's satirizing the West. Actually, he's critiquing the West. That's what he's primarily attacking.
01:33:37
Speaker
And like, it's kind of true that the West is what he's primarily attacking. But that's because
Evaluation and Critique of Racist Literature
01:33:44
Speaker
his starting point is that everyone else is subhuman and not even worthy of critique, per se. okay, he's critiquing the West. What's his critique? That the West isn't racist enough. Like, yes! Like, okay. Like, I guess you're right.
01:34:02
Speaker
oh Oh my God. That's so funny. I read one defense of the book, which was literally just a person saying, that's ridiculous. Of course he's not a racist.
01:34:13
Speaker
Like that was the complete argument.
01:34:16
Speaker
yeah On this podcast, we don't do subjective analyses. Instead, we have a scientific system called the FAG rating system. It's a three-bullet point scale.
01:34:27
Speaker
We rate each of our guests from one to five on F for ferocity, A for arrogance, and G for gullibility. In exceptional circumstances, we'll go off to a six.
01:34:40
Speaker
How ferocious is this guy towards... his abjects, the people he is bigoted towards. I think it's it's tricky here. Like, it's ah it's an easy five. I'm kind of between a five and a six.
01:34:55
Speaker
I give it a rock-solid six myself. Okay. I guess, because what I'm thinking about is, I think i'm that the six for me is, like, on the basis of...
01:35:10
Speaker
These being the least bad excerpts from the book. But not only the fact that you've said there's much worse stuff in the book, but the way this book is used and understood by white supremacists as a call to action to genocide non-white people.
01:35:34
Speaker
like That's when we've done six before on Ferocity, is someone on the level of saying the Holocaust was good and we should do it again? like The other two sixes we've given are Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes, and I think in that context, yeah, this guy's a six. Yeah, I think he's just an ornamented Andrew Anglin, to be honest. Yeah, I think that makes sense.
01:35:55
Speaker
Arrogance is is another interesting one. so We both give Andrew Englund a 5 for arrogance. In a way, this guy strikes me as more arrogant.
01:36:07
Speaker
I have to agree. What's all this shit with being the king of Patagonia? Which is a game, but not a game, by the way. Monarchist who thinks he's a monarch.
01:36:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, thinking you're a monarch, right? I mean, there's the there's the famous, like, Lacan quote, if a man who thinks he's a king is mad, then a king who thinks he's a king is no less so. Like, if we ever rate an actual monarch, I think I'd give him a six as well, just because it's so arrogant to think you're by the power of your blood in charge of people.
01:36:37
Speaker
Even if, like, materially you are. so Yeah, I think we're giving it a six. So gullibility is the one I think we always need to explain a little bit.
01:36:47
Speaker
Each of these people we understand as having a role in the production of bigotry. So the question of gullibility is how aware of that... role are they it's not a question of whether they like think something that's incorrect because all these people are bigoted they all think something that's incorrect right the question is like how aware of their role in its reproduction are they i don't think this guy's that high gullibility like i think he kind knows i'm tempted to give him a one I think I am too. i don't, there's not, there's no evidence to me of something he's doing or a use of his literature that he's not aware of. Like...
01:37:32
Speaker
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no sense in which he's pushed back. I mean, he's pushed back on the idea that he's a racist, but he's even explained that he understands to do that because if he gets labeled a racist, it will hurt his racist agenda, right? Like that interview where he explains like everyone intuitively knows the truth and you're just playing a game of trying to get me to say it so you can punish me for it.
01:37:56
Speaker
Like that's very revealing that he knows exactly what he's doing. Yeah, he might be a shitty writer, but I think he's a really skilled racist. I'm giving him a 1. That means he's got a 13, which is quite high. I mean, highest we've ever given is a 15, so... Well, we have measured his soul and found it wanting.
01:38:15
Speaker
Helen, do you have any parting thoughts on the Camp of the Saints and Raspel? raspal Yeah, we kind of we could have rated him lower, but that would have been Christian charity, which is a cancer on our soul.
01:38:33
Speaker
Yeah, no, this was this is a bad time. This guy sucks. I mean, i had a good
Conclusion and Podcast Promotion
01:38:38
Speaker
time recording the podcast with you, Sarah, but this guy sucks. I feel like this is about as extreme content as I'm like willing to bring to the podcast, like just personally.
01:38:51
Speaker
Yeah, to some extent, I think, like, there are obviously things that are more extreme than this, but... Yeah, if this were just some random guy, if this book weren't, like, influential and connected, like, I never would have done this episode.
01:39:05
Speaker
Yeah, and, like, there's even things where they're influential, but... The way to understand them is not really by diving into them in this way. Like an example that's just coming to the of my mind just because we were just talking about it. I don't think either of us is planning on doing like an Anders Bravik episode where we like read the manifesto. Like that just isn't something.
01:39:26
Speaker
We want to do. And part of it is just like, when it gets more extreme than this, usually it's something else like Anders Breivik, we shouldn't think of as like the guy who wrote the manifesto, we want to think of as the guy who did the car bombing terrorist attack.
01:39:41
Speaker
And also there was a manifesto involved, right? And I think like another place where i struggle with this kind of idea was like the Althusser episode, right? Where like there was a text, but we were also kind of talking about like a murder he did. so yeah, it's hard for me to imagine a text that's more extreme than this.
01:39:58
Speaker
That would be like something that makes sense to cover for us. Well,
Relevance of Controversial Texts and Media Influence
01:40:02
Speaker
you can get early access to episodes by checking out our Patreon, patreon.com slash odium symposium, and becoming an odium connoisseur for $5 month. Yeah, last week we released our first members-only episode.
01:40:16
Speaker
It was about papers produced by Cetoscience and posted to the website Vixra. We also did a little experiment that episode of, like, what if we had some alcohol while we were recording and discovered that it really changes the vibe. so It does. that was a fun That was a fun episode. That was our own little bit of science.
01:40:34
Speaker
Yeah. All right, that's all for now. Bye. Bye.
01:40:43
Speaker
Guess what, bitches? You thought that was the end of the episode. it wasn't. We're back. Yeah, fake out. When I put this episode together, i knew that Camp of the Saints was going to be a vibe ruiner.
01:40:55
Speaker
And so oh yeah I blocked apart a part of the script to just like indicate why I felt it was worthwhile for us to cover something this toxic, this extreme.
01:41:07
Speaker
And I gotta say, in the last few days, that decision has been totally vindicated because since we recorded, there have been three op-eds published in conservative newspapers defending Camp of the Saints.
01:41:21
Speaker
Two in the Washington Examiner and one in the National Post. Now, the Washington Examiner is a fascist rag that has been popular on a national level for about 13 years. And when I say popular on a national level, what I really mean is that it's had influence in right-wing media circles nationally for about 13 years. It's owned by a billionaire, so actual circulation numbers are kind of irrelevant, but they stay well-funded, so they're doing well in that sense.
01:41:53
Speaker
The National Post, I hadn't heard of. because it's a Canadian newspaper. And according to a chart I was just looking at, it's, I forget, the fifth or sixth largest circulation in Canada and the second largest national circulation.
01:42:09
Speaker
Now, all of this was prompted by Camp of the Saints getting republished and then pulled by Amazon because it's a white nationalist tract.
01:42:20
Speaker
The articles all mention this. So it's like pretty clear what they're motivated by. It's that sense of grievance of like, oh, our baby, our baby is getting harassed by big, bad Amazon.
01:42:31
Speaker
The story of what actually happened is a little inconsistent between some of them. Like some of them say that it was pulled for days and one of them is like less than 24 hours later, it was back. You can't keep a good message down. But in any any case, that's that that's the grievance story that they're all presenting.
01:42:48
Speaker
Yeah, as far as I could tell, it looks like, I mean, this is kind of guesswork, because again, it's a little tricky, because there's like, the official Amazon company statement about what happened, and then there's their versions of events, and like, none of them quite line up.
01:43:02
Speaker
But it seems very likely that this could be one of those situations where, you know and this sort of thing happens where there's some reports like, oh, this is hateful, and then it kind of triggers some like, automatic moderation. And then a day or two, someone steps in and is like, oh, actually, no, we shouldn't pull this, right? Like, The first of these articles, April 22nd, in the Washington Examiner.
01:43:23
Speaker
So relevant to our podcast. It's called From Rivers of Blood to the Camp of the Saints. and it's Yeah, it's kind of a masterpiece. It's explicitly drawing a connection between Enoch Powell's rhetoric and Camp of the Saints. And it provides one of those defenses of the book that we described in the episode. It describes it as prophetic without going into, you know, too much to detail about the book so that you really like understand how toxic it is.
01:43:55
Speaker
We talked about Enoch Powell in this episode before recording this addendum, and we understood these to be similar statements, right? Similar, like doing similar things in terms of stoking fears of immigration is going to destroy society.
01:44:12
Speaker
And indeed, Camp of the Saints and Enoch Powell together are the inspiration for the Great Replacement Theory. Right. And this article is doing, like, understands that these are the same and just thinks they're both good You know, Powell opens that speech talking about like, oh, one of the big mistakes people make is to, you know, to mistake people talking about troubles for the troubles themselves. And we have to not do that.
01:44:40
Speaker
And it's really funny because he's like, okay, and you know, that's the thing. And that's the thing people did with the speech, right? Moving forward, that's why people hated Powell's speech, because they didn't understand what he was saying. No, people understood what he was saying, and they understood it to be incredibly racist. And so they got mad on that basis, right? That that this...
01:44:58
Speaker
This narrative that he's offering, which is like kind of what we talked a little bit about with what defenses of this book will look like, is just lying about what's in it. Just making up a narrative about why people are mad and totally ignoring the real reason people are mad.
01:45:12
Speaker
It's really blatant here. It's it's really not not well done. Then, one day later, April 23rd, we have Jamie Sarkonak, I read The Camp of the Saints.
01:45:24
Speaker
Here's why it's relevant in the National Post. This one proffers one of the other defenses we talked about, which is saying, actually, this is a critique of the West, and all the Western characters are weak little cucks, and so you can't say it's racist, because it's really about how they suck.
01:45:46
Speaker
i think we I think we dealt with that ably in the episode. Yeah. I don't think we really need to say anything more about that. Yeah. Then one day after that, we have the campaign against the camp of the saints in the Washington Examiner by Dominic Green. And this one, to me, is quite different from the other two.
01:46:07
Speaker
Because the other two are trying to hide or otherwise downplay the racism of the book, trying to downplay what its actual argument is, And this one is just continuing its argument. It makes no apologies. It goes full on. It is more or less as racist as the Camp of the Saints itself is, and as overtly racist, I would say.
01:46:30
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree with that. I think, you know, there's some interesting stuff in this. I mean, there's interesting stuff in the in the first two. in terms you know it's Certainly any defensive Camp of the Saints, I would say, is racist because the book is extremely racist. There's some weird stuff in both...
01:46:48
Speaker
Rivers of Blood to the Camp of the Saints, and in the National Post article, where they're kind of playing some games about what's in there, and they're like, oh, you have to consider the political context, and then sort of citing things that are incorrect.
01:47:00
Speaker
This other one, I also think this other one is not billed as an op-ed. It's sort of, it's in their in-focus section, so it's sort of ambiguous whether it's supposed to be read as an opinion column or as just straight journalism. I think that this one is meant to be like an article.
01:47:18
Speaker
And that also is notable to me, right? This is like, oh, we're not telling you here's someone whose opinion you should consider. We're telling you like, this is an account of this phenomenon of the suppression of Camp of the Saints.
01:47:32
Speaker
So it's being offered sort of as journalism, as far as I can tell from the framing. It's also far longer than the other two. And it is from someone who I would say, like, pretty clearly knows their shit.
01:47:44
Speaker
They've not only read the book, like they've done research into its background. Yeah, I definitely get the vibe given that there's these two articles in Washington Examiner that the first one was kind of like, okay, we have to get something out there. And so somebody wrote like a two page like, oh, I've got this hot take. I want to write this thing. i want to do the sort of quick, right? One point in particular that I want to just touch on from the from Rivers of Blood thing that's funny is he does say that.
01:48:08
Speaker
You know, we looked at UK and what's happening to Rivers of Blood and that seemed far away, but now it's coming to America, which is particularly funny because we know from our Enoch Powell episode that Enoch Powell was actually looking at America and a lot of the tensions were from looking at America. So it's sort of confused. It's like very ahistorical and it's quick and it's like over in a couple paragraphs. This one is really quite long, pretty thoroughly argued.
01:48:35
Speaker
Obviously not correct because it's a defense of horrible racism, but definitely feels much more substantial as a piece. Now, I consider this to be, again, a complete vindication of the concept of the episode.
01:48:49
Speaker
On the other hand, i don't know that this really like changes my opinion of how current Camp of the Saints actually is or how much sway it actually has on the right. like We kind of knew the right wing was infested with Nazis anyway. We kind of understood that the ideas they put forth trace from this book.
01:49:11
Speaker
And, I mean, we're talking about the fucking Washington Examiner here, okay? I didn't have a lot of expectations of these guys. I kind of knew they were influenced by this book.
01:49:23
Speaker
ah The state of the world is a huge L for the state of the world, but I don't think these op-eds being published is a huge L for the state of the world.
Final Thoughts and Farewell
01:49:31
Speaker
All right, well, that's all we had to say.
01:49:34
Speaker
Yeah, we just wanted to address like it's back in the news, but yeah, it's more relevant than we thought. Totally vindicated, Sarah. All right. Bye for real this time.
01:49:45
Speaker
Bye. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
01:50:06
Speaker
Do it live! listen, you can write a loving name on your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:50:19
Speaker
some level of masochism.