Srdja Trifkovic wrote of Jean Raspail’s New Warning on the website of Chronicles Magazine. Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1973; that novel was a controversial take on immigration and multiculturalism; it depicted France decaying into a state of violent incoherence in a multicultural age.
Forty years after publishing his prophetic dystopia Jean Raspail is still with us, ever more resigned that our civilization is on the “road to disappearance.” As he explained in an interview published in Valeurs Actuelles on October 25 (transl. by ST), he has no desire to join the big circle of intellectuals who spend their time debating immigration because, in his view, such talk is useless:
The people already intuitively know that France, as our ancestors shaped her over the centuries, is on the road to disappearance. The audience is being kept amused by endless talk about immigration, but the final truth is never stated. Furthermore, that truth is unsayable, as my friend Jean Cau had noted, because whoever says it is immediately hounded, condemned, and then rejected. Richard Millet [a prominent figure in French literature who lost his job and was hounded out of public life because he claimed that Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass killer, was a product of multiculturalism] came close to that truth, and just look what happened to him!
What can be done? Raspail tells us:
There are only two ways to deal with immigrants, Raspail says. “Either we accommodate them, and France—her culture, her civilization—will be eradicated without so much as a funeral. In my view, that is what is going to happen. Or we do not accommodate them at all, which means we stop sanctifying the Other and rediscover our neighbors.”
You can read the above quote with “the United States” or “Great Britain” or “Italy” substituted for “France” and the truth remains, though American culture is far less substantial, less of a loss to the West. At the same time, the United States, if we had chosen to grow up as a people, was the logical center for a newly reinvigorated Western Civilization. Likely it is that such an opportunity for greatness is lost, though I feel it likely that the American people will participate in some substantial way in any new civilization growing up in the next century or so. But it’s far from clear we’ll have the stuff to take a truly central role.
In any case, we in the West have a mess on our hands, a mess productive of high crime rates and revivals of political irrationalism. The US Army is said to have many soldiers proudly wearing the tattoos of various gangs from the Latin Kings to the Aryan Brotherhood; there would seem to be remarkably few large criminal gangs which aren’t ethnically or racially based. The crime rates for the core American population of European-descent are about the same as for the old countries, but American crime-rates, violent and otherwise, are relatively high because of other ethnic groups, such as African-Americans and Hispanics.
Bishops and ministers and rabbis and Senators and professors and others so charitably offer up the lives of their fellow-Americans and also their money through programs to bring in more immigrants to a country which still hasn’t figured out how to assimilate African-Americans who’ve been here for centuries. All this while job-creating capital is dwindling and infrastructure is decaying in the United States. Bishops and Senators alike show no capability of truly raising these more recent immigrant groups out of their primitive cultures, their illiteracy, their lack of the sociability needed to form or join higher-level cultures—unlike the British and French and Italians and Poles and other European peoples, Hispanic peoples show no inclination to form social clubs or to found schools. After all, any efforts to help these people to assimilate to a more complex and more civilized life would require that they first raise their children properly. It’s much easier to cry as the dark-skinned teenagers kill each other in between gathering in barbarian mobs to loot convenience stores to the sounds of songs which glorify rape and the killing of cops.
Our leaders have presided over the decay and sometimes violent destruction of what was given to them in stewardship. Yet, these men who couldn’t even maintain the institutions of a phenomenally wealthy and powerful country think to help others to…what? Assimilation isn’t in the cards and hasn’t been for a while. Those leaders seem not to have the faith in moral order or higher culture or even the God of Moses or Jesus Christ to impose any of the Western ways upon the troubled and disordered alien peoples in our midst; nor can we help them to form their own higher-level cultures—they must take the initiative.
It might not be possible to bring these immigrants to a state of moral order in any foreseeable time. Raspail might be right; we may have admitted and may be feeding and clothing those whose role is to kill the West and all that was good in it.
Politicians and Christian charity-workers look at these unassimilable peoples lovingly as potential dependents and corporate executives look at them with dollar signs in their eyes. It’s hard to believe that American cultures, mostly as vulgar as European peasant cultures without the vitality and dedication to biologically healthy ways of life, can stand up as our exploitive masters further degrade their products, communication devices and movies and popular music and political speech and acts, to accord to new mass-markets whose most aggressive and opinionated consumers are at the cultural level of pre-urban tribesmen. A fair number of the children of European descent are headed toward that state. Others are just going to be befuddled little soft things in a world demanding a large degree of toughness.
Things will get worse, will be magnified by our ongoing economic and political problems which seem be solvable only by a wholesale reform of Western ways of life—a set of tasks well beyond the doing of soft Americans or Frenchmen and unimaginable to our Sudanese or Hmong immigrants. Whatever happens, reform or decay into a state of utter barbarism, things are sure to be ugly and painful and we seem to determined to make things as ugly and as painful as possible for the next few generations.
Mixtures of peoples, for good and bad, prevent the sort of moral coherence which allows a nation or smaller community to respond to problems. In fact, a mixture of cultures, even of morally well-ordered peoples, makes it difficult to even engage in the ordinary transactions of life. When we go to a store, we British-Americans, and likely others, wish to buy goods or services in the way to which we are accustomed, such as set prices, rather than find ourselves involved in a Middle Eastern negotiation for the price of oranges and beef roasts. I’m sure immigrants from the Middle East mistrust store-owners who refuse to bargain. We would like to assume our family doctors understand their role in the way of, say, a smalltown New England doctor rather than in the way of a corporate or government bureaucrat. Modern men of the West are restless and dissatisfied partly because we’ve gone multicultural in a willy-nilly manner that takes away one of the great advantages of human culture: we don’t know what to expect of neighbors, merchants, providers of professional services, or public servants. We have lost our human cultures which were shaped to our customs and habits. Our leaders have given us only illusions of a kinder and gentler world, one whose best attribute is the impossibility of bringing it into existence.
We should not underestimate the importance, for good and bad, of the large-scale migrations of history; nor should we forget their relationship to periods of war and other forms of upheaval. We should not court the disasters attendant upon those large-scale movements of peoples into alien lands, disasters often leading to future goods of lesser or greater sorts, but only after generations of suffering and then hard work. In the cases of the United States and Europe, I fail to see much good coming from large-scale immigration from Asia and Africa and Latin America, especially at a time when our own troubles are maturing and are likely to result in reduced living-standards for the next few generations as well as being likely to result in a very shabby inheritance for our descendants in the political and cultural realms.
Yet, there are many out there, morally well-meaning in a juvenile and irresponsible way, who think that we—especially we Christians—can solve the problems of the poor by direct and simpleminded actions, though they would more likely claim the phrase, “direct and simplehearted,” to be closer to the truth. Given my understanding of human being, see A More Exact Understanding of Human Being, there isn’t so much difference between simpleminded and simplehearted. If you think it good to be comfortably dumb, you should also think it good to be simple of heart, undisciplined and spewing forth sentiments upon all who don’t get away fast enough.
As I have noted repeatedly, we modern Christians tend to claim the world is simple when we set out to worship or understand or serve our Maker though we are awfully willing to recognize the complexity of the world when seeking to save our own lives by way of modern diagnostic machinery or surgical techniques, let alone the technological wonders of cable television or smartphones. See Taking the Fresh Fruits and Giving God the Leftovers for a very short discussion of this issue.
I’d like to point back to some of my essays where I’ve discussed the moral disorder (lack of participation as worshipers or voters and uncivil responses to strangers and even those in one’s own communities—sound familiar?) which comes to multicultural communities: Networks of Public Spaces Rather Than One Square and We Prefer to Cooperate With Those Like Ourselves.
I’ve also tried to address in a short essay the frustrations of watching well-meaning and intelligent men and women who seem not to see problems until they’ve run us over and passed by: Reality Bites Back but Maybe It Started Nibbling Many Years Ago; as some of us would have feared, they are now aware there are problems and are waging war against the symptoms. After generations of many Christians, including the domineering leaders of both the American Catholics and American Protestants, pushing for government programs which would make the ordinary citizens dependent upon centralized political and economic powers, Christians—including many leaders—are surprised, surprised that gambling is taking place in Rick’s nightclub (see the movie Casablanca or just the short clips of that scene available on the Internet). This is to say, they were surprised that the sorts of men and women who seek political power would misuse the dependencies of the citizens upon the central government (and centralized medical industry corporations). Maybe it’s unwise to expand the central government’s power to cover all important areas of human life?
But, and this is a big BUT, would it matter in the long-run to a Christian if Western Civilization were to utterly collapse? If God is in charge, the story of the development of the Body of Christ in this mortal realm will continue, even if we find that Body suddenly centered on the Pacific Rim (one possibility and the one I think most likely). It will matter in the sense that we men of the West will have to admit to our failures of nerve, of faith, of the sheer guts that leads good men to live or die for God, family, Church, civilization, and nation—in approximately that order though clergymen and others with peculiar vocations might have a slightly different ordering to meet their peculiar duties.
Moral order, even when embodied in warrior societies or exploitive societies, is the raw stuff of the Body of Christ. When it is embodied in such a society as the United States has become, not the society Adam Smith lauded but the one he feared might arise? Yes, rather than full-chested Christian men setting to the task of being more active stewards of the world’s natural resources, including human talents, we have become the genial men lacking the tougher moral characteristics—as Adam Smith feared for just a sentence or two before returning to his sometimes irrational optimism. Maybe we are invited to destroy ourselves and Western Civilization because Western men hollowed out their own chests—with more than a little bit of assistance from our mothers and our mostly female teachers.
It’s a bit disturbing to think we are falling from the heights of wealth and power, of cultural accomplishment, because we have become fat, dumb, and lazy, but that might well be the best way to understand out current problems. If we were to recognize the real enemy is the Western man who looks back at us from the mirror, could we rescue the West, at least so that we can participate in the birth and development of a greater Christian Civilization? A somewhat more complete, if not yet a more mature, Body of Christ? I don’t think there is much possibility for a large-scale revival of Western Civilization because I don’t think Western men are honest enough, courageous enough, to face up to the fact that they lack balls, no matter how much muscle mass they develop in trips to the gym and no matter how many hours they put in viewing brutal sports events or the far more brutal assaults of the American military upon civilian targets in countries not able to defend themselves.