The Most Racist Book Ever Written?

“Civilization is incommunicable” so said the nineteenth-century “spiritual racist” Arthur de Gobineau. His pessimism about the prospect of positive, reciprocal cultural exchange is echoed in the famous passage by French novelist, Jean Raspail:

“Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door…”

The Camp of the Saints once enjoyed a cult following, after its 1975 English translation by American publisher Charles Scribner and academic Norman Shapiro. Ronald Reagan and Samuel Huntington praised it; as did figures on the French right and left, anxious about the threat that a million immigrants from the Indian subcontinent might pose to Europe’s economy and civilisational continuity.

Finding a copy has proved difficult; admitting to owning one, even more so. Back when the Southern Poverty Law Center maintained an illusion of credibility, it called the book “the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement… widely revered by American white supremacists”. When now-White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller compared the 2015 European migrant crisis to the novel, the New York Times accused him of touting a “canonical text in white nationalist circles” (unlikely, given Miller’s Jewish grandparents fled European pogroms).

But why should we take these discredited outlets’ word for it? Vauban Books have published a long-awaited retranslation, so now everyone can read this radioactive text for themselves. They were kind enough to provide me with a copy to review.

Raspail’s premise is darkly comedic, fifty years later. When an armada carrying a million migrants from the Indian subcontinent sets sail for France, Europe’s politicians panic. The armies of the West are unilaterally disarmed by universalism — having “learned the ways of remorse” for a foe that does not grant them the same courtesy (p.199). Britain, which once bombarded Zanzibar into submission in 38 minutes, is paralysed by committees and commitments to its former imperial territories (p.188-189). The Belgian Consul is abandoned by his last Sikh soldier, and is trampled to death on the banks of the Ganges (p.89-90).

France’s President dithers, worrying “Aren’t we rushing things a bit?”, and pledges to “present the world with a clear, coherent view of the event” before taking preventative action (p.105). He falters live on television, incapable of ordering the military to fire on the fleet. His indecisiveness is taken as weakness. This emboldens the latent racial resentment lurking in the hearts of migrant workers, who rape and butcher their French hosts: “Any girl who felt she was being ogled and followed each day – a common enough illness in our cities – now met her death under the dreadful face of sexual madness” (p.272).

Since Angela Merkel announced “Wir schaffen das!”, scenes from the novel have played out across Europe. Every day in Britain brings a new story of an immigrant sexually assaulting a woman or child. The number of foreign nationals convicted of sex crimes has surged 62% in four years. Muslim countries top the per-capita rapist league tables; but Indian nationals were responsible for the largest raw increase in sexual offence convictions. The same is true in France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

These atrocities are suffered alongside low-level acts of cultural vandalism. The incoherent Yookay aesthetic of halal butchers beside “American” candy stores (staffed by Indians) scars British high-streets. Mosques and minarets cast ominous shadows over northern mill towns. Shirtless Shia Muslims flagellate themselves to mourn Muhammad’s grandson on Westminster Bridge. Hindus smash coconuts in honour of Ganesh in the streets of Paris. Foreign vagrants cook meals over the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Our monuments, buildings, and traditions have no meaning to the millions who have arrived since Camp of the Saints was published.

In 2025, Britain alone has received over a million legal immigrants every year, for four consecutive years. Over a million were from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. These diasporas still harbour historical grudges against their hosts. Indians and Pakistanis respond to complaints about migration into Britain by gloating about revenge for colonialism and the Empire. Our individualistic morality is not equipped to deal with this imported clannish nepotism and ethno-narcissism. When an illegal Sikh immigrant U-turned on a Florida highway and killed a family of three, millions of Indians signed a petition for his release, donated to his bail fund, and celebrated the deaths of the “white paedophiles” online. The family were later identified as Haitian immigrants. When Ed Husain interviewed a “moderate” imam in Bradford, asking why Muslims live in self-segregated enclaves, and why Pakistani men prey on white English girls, the imam blamed the British Empire:

“Remember India? They divided the country and left the Kashmir issue unresolved, and now they blame the Indians and Pakistanis and urge them not to fight. They go to war in Iraq and create terrorism, then they tell us to stop complaining about foreign policy and deal with Islamic extremism.”

In Camp of the Saints, Indian civil servant fetishises the migrants as a much-needed injection of virility into Europe: telling the terrified Belgian Consul that “This country of mine is but a river of sperm that has abruptly changed course and is now flowing West” (p.86-87). How quickly diversity shifts from being our strength to our punishment.

Was Raspail a racist? His nameless narrator concludes the novel by saying:

“Will the word “racism” still mean anything to them [his grandchildren]? In my time, it had already assumed such a variety of meanings that what was for me a simple observation of the incompatibility of races when forced to share the same general environment immediately became, for most of my contemporaries, a call to hatred and a crime against human dignity. Oh well, let them think what they will!” (p.339-340)

Raspail ridicules the blank slate account of human nature — that “skin color is just a matter of outward appearance, beneath which all men are identical” (p.136). He doesn’t refrain from describing the dysfunctional and disgusting conditions aboard the ships either. Sailors wretch at the stench of the armada: the smell of burning faeces and dead bodies and the men, women, and children having intercourse amidst the filth (p.143-146).

“When these million people, men, women, and children, fermenting since Calcutta in their filth and shit, suddenly stood up on the decks of the ships, when all those who had sweat away inside the dark hulls, steeped in urine and the breath of the malnourished, rushed for the hatchways vomiting them forth into the sunlight, the stench became so thick that one would have thought it visible.” (p.293)

In transit, the migrants reject aid supplied by the bleeding hearts of South Africa and France — tossing it ungratefully into the ocean. Women, children, and the elderly are thrown overboard in the race to embark upon the India Star, drowning in excrement in the Ganges. They are trampled underfoot by thousands crying “Buddha and Allah… Shiva, Vishna, Garuda, Ganesh, Krishna…”, like sacrifices beneath the wheels of a Jagannath. As the ecstatic masses land in France, bodies are hurled from above deck into the sea. The professor thinks “that the corpses thrown out onto the shores of France had reached their paradise”:

“…they were indeed drifting in it, unconstrained and forever. They were luckier in this respect than the living themselves, who, by throwing their dead into the sea, had in one go given them deliverance, happiness, and eternity.” (p.51-52)

This fatalism and necrolatry is present in both Islam and Hinduism. Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained in Heretic how the Muslim belief in predestination discourages conscientiousness and deferred gratification. If Allah determines everything, Ayaan asks, “Why pick up trash, why discipline your children, when none of those acts is stored up for any type of reward?” Hinduism, too, exculpates its believers from personal responsibility. Reincarnation incentivises those of upper castes to do little to improve their circumstances, and those of lower castes to hasten their deaths once their karma is in good stead. Hence India’s reputation for reckless driving, chronic littering, telephone scams, and lethal habit of taking selfies with oncoming trains. Accumulating status at the expense of others, when and wherever one can, is all that matters.

This is also true for tribal African traditions, where there is no concept of the future or maintenance. Time is not a universal and predictable constant, but rather created when events happen — rendering people the playthings of fortune. Fast-life strategies are favoured. Impulse control is not necessary. Though this does not feature in Raspail’s dystopia, this manifests in modern Britain as milling around, rampant qualifications fraud, and machete killings.

These differences become obvious only when it is too late. “Now that the Third World has descended upon us,” Raspail writes “it’s quite clear that their unconscious drive overcame every obstacle. Language, human relations, the pace of life, the pace of work, the play of emotions, productivity, the conception of everything, even the way one did nothing at all . . .  it all changed” (p.267). For Raspail, it’s a simple equation: if you input a foreign people and culture, then the output will not be the same civilisation. You cannot replace a people and sustain a culture. Hence why, in 2016, he warned “we’re not at the end of the book” — Europe is at the beginning “right now”.

The American press have thus imposed a cordon sanitaire on Raspail’s work, accusing him of stoking a race war. In 1975, the review in the New York Times ridiculed the plot as “preposterous” — but the author insinuated that “the Third World, protesting the unequal division of the world’s goods and western indifference to its misery” would be right to “strike back” against Europe. Raspail’s warnings were inspired by this call for global socialist revolution, found in the canonical text of post-colonialism: Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Jean Paul-Sartre wrote in the foreword, to “shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone … [to] destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man.” Racial violence has been present since the inception of the decolonisation movement. As one Somali living in America infamously posted on X, after the October 7th massacre, “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? Essays?” Raspail’s sin appears to be failing to celebrate this future that antiracists envision. One racist’s dystopia is another antiracist’s revenge fantasy.

It will shock readers that Raspail reserves his most scathing indictments for these Western liberals. When the migrants arrive, Europe’s political leaders, militaries, and media fall like obsequious dominoes. The continent is defenceless against the moral charges of hunger, need, and human rights made by the migrants. Broadcaster Alfred Durfort’s insistence that “we are all men of the Ganges!” is repeated ad nauseum by protestors, condemning all opposed as “guilty of blind, racist hatred” (p.122, 152). White leftists huddled below deck aboard the India Star, fantasising about expelling sick Europeans from hospital beds to make space for the migrants; letting hungry Indians raid supermarkets, “loose in these giant shops, fat, happy, breaking everything…”; and mandating interracial marriage to “advance the single race of the future” (p.96). A (purely fictional) South American Pope sells the treasures of the Vatican, and issues an edict from his straw throne for us to give away all “our worldly goods” to the foreign marauders (p.225-226). “Public opinion,” Raspail writes “was thus once again made aware that ‘racism’ in the cause of self- defense is the scourge of humanity” (p.141). Compassion becomes an autoimmune disorder. “Drop by drop, the poison acts painlessly but, at the end of the day, it still kills” (p.185).

The infamous passage I opened with is taken from a tirade by a French leftist, frothing at the prospect of levelling European civilisation:

“Hey, you know what? You and your house, you’re a lot alike! You’d think the two of you have been here for a thousand years.”

“1673, to be precise,” said the old gentleman, smiling for the first time.

“Three centuries, father to son… disgusting. I look at you and you know what I think? I think you’re perfect. That’s why I hate you. And it’s here, to your house, that I’ll bring all the most wretched ones tomorrow. They know nothing about what you are, about what you rep-resent. Your world means nothing to them. They won’t try to under-stand. They’ll be tired. They’ll be cold. They’ll build a fire with your lovely oak door. They’ll shit all over your terrace and wipe their hands on the books in your library. They’ll spit out your wine. They’ll eat with their hands from the pretty pewterware I see on your wall. Sitting on their haunches, they’ll watch as your armchairs go up in flames. They’ll use your embroidered sheets to play dress up. Every object will lose the meaning you attach to it. What’s beautiful won’t be beautiful anymore. What’s useful will become laughable. And what’s useless will become absurd. Nothing will have any real value anymore, except maybe that bit of string left in a corner that they’ll fight over, breaking everything around them. Who knows? Now get lost!”

“One last question: they’ll destroy without knowing, without under-standing. But what about you?”

“Me? Because I’ve learned to hate all this. Because the conscience of the world makes me hate all this.” (p.59)

Raspail makes clear that we do not understand the vindictive “decolonisation” advocates — who disguise their contempt for their own countries with pretences of cosmopolitanism and compassion — any more than we do the thousands of desperate immigrants they use as their change-agents.

These leftists are true believers in the blank slate, contra all evidence, and in spite of their own safety. “Neither proud of it nor aware of it” a Belgian Consulate statue pronounces about being white, whereas the migrants see his skin colour as a proxy for his “lack of conviction”, his “weakness, [his] dereliction”, and the “fact of Western wealth” awaiting them. Ignorance is “the price of equality among men”, the statue says, “And we’ll gladly pay it” (p.72-73). What has such ignorance brought us? Today, 70% of Brussels’ population is foreign-born. That’s not including second-generation immigrants, as Belgium refuses to collect stats on ethnicity. 36% are from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Like the stone that strikes the head of the Consul after he issues his empty threats, our cowardice is their permission-slip.

This cowardice will prove the death of us. Ballan, a Belgian leftist, condemns “Passports, nations, religions, ideals, races, borders, and oceans [as] all nonsense!”, before leading the masses gathered outside the Consulate to the India Star. He is crushed in a stampede up the gangplank, and drowns in the Ganges. In his final moments, Ballan realises that his universalist egalitarianism rests on Western givens which he worked to undermine; and so, “overcome by love and homesickness for the West… he deliberately opened his mouth and greedily inhaled death” (p.85-86).

Imperialism, and the guilt complex it produces, is the hidden villain of Raspail’s novel. In The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony warns that when an empire transitions to a liberal state — neutral concerning its loyalty to any one people or culture — “the government and armed forces of the imperial state [that were] built upon the ties of mutual loyalty” between the ruling people will be weaponised against that nation (p.96-98). If the state refuses to make qualitative distinctions between peoples and cultures, then ethno-nepotistic foreigners will form enclaves, enter the offices of state, and use the institutions that administered the empire against the indigenous host population. No better example exists than modern Britain: with a civil service and Home Office captured by Pakistani clans and Muslim networks, who work to recruit and import their co-ethnics, and to insulate Islam from criticism after Jihadist attacks.

This is also the case in Camp of the Saints. Like the HMS Windrush, the boat which ferries the fictional migrants to France is the India Star: a sixty-year-old ocean liner which once serviced the Empire’s Indian Mail service, repurposed for the  “transport of poor pilgrims to Mecca” (p.81-82). Europe gave its subjects the instruments of its own undoing: when they could not maintain the infrastructure gifted to them, they used it to invade the homelands of their administrators.

Then who is most to blame? Raspail is clear: the delusion of egalitarianism, and desire to build a Tower of Babel housing all as a universal human type. “Perhaps that, too, was an explanation?” muses Raspail’s omniscient narrator on the many reasons the migrants came to Europe. He repeats this throughout the chapters; except on page 83, where he suggests “‘The world seems to be controlled, not by a single orchestra conductor, but by a new apocalyptic beast, a sort of anonymous, omnipresent monster who has vowed, first and foremost, to destroy the West.”

“The beast has no specific plan. It takes advantage of the opportunities that present themselves, the crowd assembled on the banks of the Ganges being but the most recent and most consequential of them. Perhaps it is of divine or, more likely, demoniacal origin?… Nothing can stop the beast. Everyone knows it. Among the initiates, this lends a certain triumphalism to their way of thinking, whereas those who still struggle within themselves perceive the futility of their fight. A fallen archangel himself, Ballan immediately recognized the lackeys of the beast and offered them his services.” (p.83)

Here, Raspail is definitive: “This is also an explanation.” We can read this metaphorically. Ideology possesses human beings and poisons them against their best interests. Many philosophers have compared the way that technology manufactures insatiable desires, homogenises cultures, and replaces human relationships to a demonic entity. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, “the Prince of this World [is] a very great electric engineer.” If not for the hubris of Enlightenment thought and the marvels of Western engineering, the horde would not have come. “There is no longer such a thing as the Third World,” the Indian civil servant says “that’s just a word you’ve in-vented to keep your distance. There’s just the world, and this world will be submerged by life” (p.87). Whether by plane, boat, or Beelzebub, all will be led like the slaves and treasures of Babylon to besiege New Jerusalem.

How does our civilisation get off this Faustian treadmill? Renounce our belief in the blank slate. Adopt a national conservative disposition. Privilege our own people and civilisation over those alien to it.

“Man has never loved mankind as a whole – all its races, religions, cultures – but only those he recognized as his own, those of his clan, however large it might be. As for the rest, he forces his love, and it is forced from him, and when the evil is done, all that remains is for him to disintegrate. In the strange war that was coming, victory would go to those who loved themselves most.” (p.56)

To forfeit a preference for our own history, heritage, and culture is to sign our suicide note.

As Nathan Pinkoski writes in the Vauban Books edition introduction, “multiculturalism is the cultural imperialism of European self- loathing” (p.16). If colonisation led to mass migration, then it will take a different kind of decolonisation of Europe to reverse it. We can start by not being so squeamish about reading Raspail.

You can purchase a copy of The Camp of the Saints here.