To wrap up the year, it might be useful if we all shared recommendations on books we read in this last year – adopting the “John Walker’s Reading List” criterion that what matters is when we read it, not when it was published.
My contribution is “The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts”, by English writer Louis de Bernieres, published in 1990. I don’t often read novels – there is too much history & biography to get through first – but this was on the bookshelf in a vacation rental. It is well-written, humorous in parts, and thought-provoking.
The novel begins with a hat tip to James Joyce, and later wanders off into magical realism. In between, it tells a tale of escalating misadventure in the pampas, mountains, and jungles of a fictional South American country.
Two wealthy expatriate landowners get into a silly conflict over water, leading one of them to acquire an aged bulldozer which backfires so often that rumors reach the capital of gunfire and guerilla activity in the area. The government dispatches the hardly-ready army to deal with this non-existent threat. The local community resists the unwelcome intrusion of the army with every tool at its disposal, including the local prostitutes. This growing conflict attracts actual, albeit incompetent, guerillas. Along the way, one sincere patriotic soldier transforms into a sadistic torturer, while another becomes a renegade intent on eliminating the army’s leadership. Ultimately, the community decides that exodus is their only way out of the troubles.
A brand new translation of The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail was published in 2025. The book made quite a splash when it was originally published in French in 1973 (first translated into English in 1975). This dystopian novel about uncontrolled mass immigration from the Third World is well written, with amusing vignettes and erudite cultural & biblical allusions. The title is taken from Revelation 20:7-9.
In his preface to the 2011 French edition, Raspail relates that he had previously sent copies to prominent figures in French politics and letters, many of whom responded courteously instead of running from the room shrieking RACISM, including socialist president Francois Mitterrand. The book really took off when it came to America, where its readers included Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations) and Ronald Reagan. Solzhenitsyn wrote a blurb for the American edition, published by Scribner’s.
Spoiler alert: the novel ends with the migrants invading France by sea, encouraged by leftists and Christian church leaders (including the Pope), and by members of the weak-willed political class who lack the courage to defend their country. That’s not really a spoiler since the novel opens with a first-hand account of the arrival of the migrant armada by a resident of the Côte d’Azure (retired professor Calguès).
Grokipedia as a good synopsis of the novel, as well as a discussion of its publication history, reception, and contemporary parallels. Aside from being an amazingly prescient and relevant book, it is also a fun read in which the author lampoons politicians and journalists with relish.
The post quotes Jean Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints,” describing how outsiders, cold and tired, will destroy cultural symbols like burning an oak door for fire and using library books casually, reflecting the novel’s theme of civilizational collapse from mass migration.
The attached video shows protesters in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, during October 2026 water crisis demonstrations, where crowds smashed into a government building (Casa Jalisco) amid smoke, graffiti, and clashes over contaminated tap water affecting millions.
Sellner, an advocate for remigration to preserve national identity, pairs the quote with the Mexican protest footage to illustrate indifference to established order and potential parallels for cultural erosion in Europe.
Hancock traces this lineage to the present day. The 20th century was tormented by catastrophic attempts to elevate individual parties, races, or nations to the status of world-dominating powers. We can call this the triumph of the Same: the fanatical aspiration to bring the whole world under the authority of one Reich or one Party. More established in our time, however, is the triumph of the Other—or what Manent has called the “religion of Humanity.” This ersatz faith, a deformation and subversion of Christianity, is a mania for the universal. Whereas any true encounter with the universal must be mediated through local human attachments, the religion of Humanity holds out the promise of unmediated access to Humanity as such. Its sacred figure is the victim—human qua human, pure, uncontaminated by the mediation of nation, class, or creed. The victim is pure negation, absolute Other.
The religion of Humanity accounts for much of the derangement in our most pressing political disputes. For example, devoted Humanitarians do not see immigrants as being from specific places, with distinct beliefs or commitments, formed in ways of life that might or might not be compatible with the nation to which they are journeying. The Humanitarian sees only “migrants,” exemplary figures of pure Humanity: “No human is illegal.” Any claims the receiving nation might wish to invoke or obligations it might wish to impose become a priori illegitimate relative to the unsurpassable moral status of the victim. In this way Humanitarianism depoliticizes core political contests, whisking urgent questions outside the realm of acceptable debate and shrinking the field of political action. The religion of Humanity is a theocracy.
The above pithy quote, by Ian Tuttle, comes from Claremont Review of Books. Tuttle is reviewing Love and Virtue in a Secular Age. That dense book was written by Ralph C. Hancock. It sounds right on.