John Derbyshire: Will Europe’s “Camp Of The Saints” Produce A Humanitarian Crackup?
The one real question in the world today: whether those rights of man that we hold so dear—of certain men, that is—can be preserved at the expense of others. I’ll let you think that one over …
That is the President of France, speaking to ambassadors from other Western nations as his own is being overwhelmed by a flood of illegal immigrants from the Third World.
It is of course fiction, so far at any rate. To be precise, it is Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of The Saints, Chapter 34.
I remember thinking when I read Raspail’s book a dozen or so years ago that he had missed the mark—forgivably enough, I suppose, for a writer in the early 1970s (see below). Raspail’s poor Third Worlders coming ashore in Europe are from subcontinental Asia. Wouldn't they, in the 21st century, more likely be black Africans, I thought?
I thought correctly. India is currently stable and improving. Right now they are having an election—a fair and orderly one by Third World standards. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are politically wobbly but inching forward. The situation in Pakistan remains perpetually “desperate but not serious.”
Meanwhile there are indeed hordes of Third Worlders trying to get into Europe, but they are mostly Africans. The European territories near to Africa—or, in the case of Ceuta and Melilla, tiny Spanish enclaves on the Moroccan coast, actually in Africa—are being besieged by would-be illegal immigrants.
Needless to say, all the Main Stream Media stories about these Mediterranean illegals take a sympathetic line. . . .
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