Dalrymple Misses The Point

Theodore Dalrymple has published a book review, entitled "We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches,"  of Jean Raspail's dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints. Raspail's novel, published in 1973, is of a France too full of guilt and self-loathing to drive off a flotilla of immigrants sailing from the slums of India to France; and when the immigrants do land, it results in the collapse of France and Western Civilization, generally.

    Dalrymple's essay begins well enough, roughly describing the book and the reaction it has engendered among those same elites which are condemned in the novel. But at the end of the review, Dalrymple faults Raspail for selecting Hindus from the slums of India as the invading hordes rather than Muslims, which turned out to be the hordes that ultimately invaded Europe. He writes:

But there were some things that he did not foresee—or if he foresaw them, omitted to mention. Chief among these was his failure to foresee or mention the peculiar difficulties for Western countries posed by large-scale Muslim immigration. In making Hindu Bengalis the Trojan horse, he was startlingly, almost diametrically, mistaken. Hindu immigrants have never created difficulties anywhere; and, oddly enough, it is Eastern, Muslim Bengalis, not Western, Hindu Bengalis, who have established a vast ghetto in London’s East End, and have profoundly corrupted the local politics. A member of the British Parliament, who was elected in a constituency in which Muslims were a majority, on a platform that made Gaza the most important issue, recently made a speech in which he called on Muslims to remain united in the face of the enemy—the very West to which they had emigrated.

 I can understand why Dalrymple focuses on the Muslim hordes, but I think it misses the overall point made by Raspail. Raspail could have picked most any people for his horde when he wrote his book. At the time, though, India was the poster child of overpopulation, overcrowding, and revolting slums. The overcrowding of Muslim cities, such as Cairo, had not yet occurred; and neither had Africa yet seen its population start to explode. 

    But the idea behind the book is not that there was something particular about the population he had picked for his invading horde. Rather, it was that they were not Western and did not appreciate Western Civilization. They were barbarians, but of a different sort than had previously shown up in history. Not warriors that militarily destroyed a civilization but a vast unthinking horde that washed over a France (and, by extension, the West as whole) like a tidal wave. They were Indians in his book, but could have just as easily been Africans or, in the early 1970s, starving Chinese peasants. His book wasn't a warning about Islam because it was more broadly a warning of mass migration, particularly from non-European peoples, into Europe. 

    The Gates of Vienna actually has a good article about this entitled "The Varieties of Cultural Enrichment" which, while acknowledging that "[t]he Islamic variety [of enrichment] may be the worst, ... there are other contenders constantly vying for the title." Or, to put it another way as I saw in recent meme: "If local panda numbers were declining, you would never just bring in a bunch of cockroaches & say[ ] things are good bc 'the number of animals is growing'."

    And the reason that any third world people could have been the horde in the novel is because the real warning of the book is not about the horde, for there are always barbarians trying to force their way through the gates, but about the people that not only left France (and the West generally) helpless and prostrate before invaders that could have been easily stopped at any time before they arrived, but reveled in the destruction of the white race.