In passing, it may be fun to know there’s a French idiom, in the infinitive: “foutre the camp”. It means any of several variations on GTFO, etc. - of some possible utility here? Context?
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I think the phrase “camp of the saints” is from the Book of Revelation.*
But what I meant about “endorsing” the book was, the good guys, such вs they are, lose. Bigly as Trump used to say. Nobody takes any effective action. They can’t, really, it would be like trying to turn back the tide, like going to literal war against a virus. It’s also hard to believe anybody could “endorse” the victory of the filthy unindinviduted mass. It’s months ago I finished the book and I still feel sick thinking about it.
Yes, of course the lefties are saying Vance WOULD want to resist the onslaught, and that’s bigoted and evil. But in the book the French govt takes the opposite position, like Ol’ Jo(k)e did—and those idiots don’t come off as any wiser or more admirable.
I reckon what the a lefties object to is that anybody should want to preserve what is theirs. Or even to,presume anything at all CAN be “theirs”. And it’s just like Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged, to paraphrase some conversation Dagny has with her hapless brother:
But what if a person really IS superior to other people? Why, then, the idiot says, why, then—he ought to be ashamed of himself! And he ought to apologize!
Endorse it or not. Like it or not, here we sit, dear polymaths, just like the camp of the saints in the book of revelation, surrounded by a rising tide of filth and misery.
*Revelation 20:9
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We’re not just surrounded by the “rising tide”; our “elites” - the ones with actual power - are actively subverting the majority (previously dumbed down, in anticipation of just this planned breakdown, and coerced to believe they must remain silent), and inviting in a tide of people intent on destroying our system and installing theirs. The fact this is not widely understood and not being forcefully resisted (witness the “legal” and “majoritarian” di$enfranchi$ement of about half the population of VA yesterday) beggars belief. Do any of us need more proof that the US is done? Time to learn Arabic or Chinese, keep your mouth shut and delete what you’ve written (if you can) online.
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The real point of the book was that the French people just ran away, abandoning properties their ancestors had built. The elites were glad to posture about their humanity in accepting the fetid masses – but the ordinary French people ran away. Better homeless or dead than rude to the arrivals.
The author was probably right about that. He already had the model of US Middle Classes abandoning the cities their ancestors built and moving to the distant suburbs instead of demanding civilized behavior from the arriving underclass.
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The important question is why? If you live in California or Minnesota, you understand the rationale. You find yourself in an absolute political minority. It happens well before the invaders arrive. The Minneapolis city council has members that are not DFL (Democrat Party). They are officially members of a Marxist party and run for office as DFL candidates. But this is the near end stage. It happens slowly and imperceptibly by most normal citizens. What do you fight if you’re in a political minority? Do you take up arms? When should you take up arms? What policy along the way is so egregious that an individual in an absolute political minority should take up arms against the majority?
These policies seem reasonable to the members of the political majority and when they don’t work, because they never do, there is always the next logical step that also is reasonable to these same folks.
Most of the policies make the situation worse. Helping the supposed unfortunate creates more unfortunate. The unfortunate becomes a large percentage of the base of the majority. You get large parts of the population that have never contributed to society. George Floyd lived his entire life and never contributed. Ever. What he did was create problems. There are a lot of George Floyd types and there is a large percentage of the population that think it would be heinous to exclude these types from society.
At one point 25 or 30 years ago, Chicago would give their scum bus tickets to Minneapolis. The benefits were better and the downside less. Was that the time to take up arms?
Why would I take up arms? What are the potential outcomes and probabilities? Prison or death are the probabilities.
Minnesota created what is called the Met Council. It has a huge amount of authority in all of the suburbs adjacent to the Twin Cities. They use this power to force policies that would never be accepted by the local communities for which the council has power over. From forcing low income housing to forcing the population to use city water and sewer. If you have a well, it must be capped so that it cannot be used.
It has to turn to absolute crap with your back to the wall and no alternatives before people will use violence to defend their Liberty.
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History says that a significant number of people in that position go Irish – they vote with their feet. That is a reasonable recognition it is usually a losing proposition to try to fight city hall … but you don’t have to stay around in the city either.
Thus European dissidents got on the boat and went to America and other then-God Forsaken places. In the last half century, their descendants again voted with their feet, abandoning the cities their ancestors built and moving to the inconveniently remote suburbs.
What happens when there is no place left to run, and the Irish safety valve has been screwed tight? I have a feeling we will learn the answer before too many more turns around the sun.
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No. The real point of the book is that the political leadership lost their nerve, i.e., didn’t have the stones to do what was required. Specifically, the president was ready to do what was necessary but lost his nerve at the very last moment. A secondary point is that many of the institutions were cheerleaders for mass migration, specifically the churches and more specifically, the Catholic Church. Like much of the other elements of the book, that has proven to be prescient.
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“But East and West will pinch the heart/That cannot keep them pushed apart,/And he whose soul is flat: the sky/ Will cave in on him by and by.”
-–Millay, from “Renascence”
I think the key is pity. The wretched do not pity anyone, there’s no lower to go, nobody on whom they can look and say “there but for the grace of God..”. That makes them invincible. A few soldiers in the book actually fire on the migrants, then shoot themselves in horror, they can’t bear the thought that they inflicted pain and death on other humans whose lives essentially consisted only of constant experience of pain and death, that they repelled the repulsive.
In LOTR, Sam or Frodo says that Gollum deserves to die, and Gandalf says (as I recall): “Deserves to die! Yes, I dare say he does. And many who die deserve life: can YOU give it to them?”
No, we the fortunate CAN’T give the wretched masses life, not en masse. So pity insists: if you can’t bestow life then don’t deal in death either.
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Hey, P. S.: the book is unbanned again, according to Pinkowski’s article on American Greatness, 4/23.
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The expression making the rounds is suicidal empathy. Empathy works within a high-trust Western society of shared values but becomes suicidal when faced with the Third World. As you say,
The wretched do not pity anyone, there’s no lower to go, nobody on whom they can look and say “there but for the grace of God..”. That makes them invincible.
That is the key message of this book.
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Yes the political leadership failed. But many individual French citizens made their own independent decisions to abandon their homes and businesses on the south coast and run away.
The book described a failure on the part of almost the whole French society – right down to the large group of French pilots who bombed their own citizens resisting the arrivals. Can’t blame this one only on the worthless politicians! The citizens mostly failed too.
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They made these decisions based on an accurate assessment of the political leadership’s fecklessness. It was the prime duty of their government to protect them against such dangers. They had little choice but to run from imminent danger. Only a fool would do otherwise. The only person who remained (Prof. Calguès) expected to die, not to fight.
It would have been quite different if the government had issued a call-to-arms, asking citizens to help defend the homeland. Instead, it did the opposite, telling the people that the government would secure their lives and property. Ordinary French citizens realized their government was lying to them and acted accordingly.
It is (was) a feature of civilization that citizens do not take the law into their own hands. Your argument appears to be that it’s every man for himself: the law of the jungle — or of the Third World.
The French pilots were instruments of the government. You contradict yourself inasmuch as you acknowledge that some French citizens were, indeed, trying to resist the invasion against the orders of their government, even as they understood that their quest was futile. They fully expected their government to thwart their efforts. Absolutely no one had any hope of repelling a million invaders (with millions more to follow). The government had both the means and the duty.
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Government is simply something we do together – as someone once said. And government is simply people – usually not the best people, just people.
We agree – the ideal kind of government we would both like to see indeed had the “duty” to defend France. But the only “means” the people who constituted the government had was to order French soldiers and others to commit acts of violence – acts which those in the military were loathe to commit, except when it came to killing fellow Frenchmen.
The French government in the novel was a reflection of the French people. Individual citizens were not willing to stand their ground, and the individuals in government reflected that.
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Yes. The last several items touch on an essential truth: the state’s forces are deployed and ready to act against their own native populations and not the invaders - at the behest of their elites; the UK today and every day. How easy it is for the apparatus, composed of ordinary people, to use violence against their fellows because they have been dumbed down for generations and can no longer see beyond their own short term interests. The new pledge of allegiance: “shut up and do as you’re told”. It worked in Germany in the 1930’s. See this chillingly apt description of America today - HERE.
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That someone must have been a leftist because I’ve only heard that from the lips of shitlibs. The entire idea of civil society is that government has a monopoly on the lawful use of violence. I think Max Weber said that.
Absolutely not, as most governments in the West ignore or thwart the will of their citizens. Examples abound; many have been cited at Scanalyst. While it is true that, in the book, many Frenchmen had been indoctrinated in suicidal empathy, they were far less willing to go along with the invasion than their government. One such family is highlighted in the book.
The same phenomenon is before your very eyes in the US today, where the overwhelming majority of citizens (~70%) favor stricter voter ID and voter fraud protection but a bill insuring the same cannot pass the legislature. Let that sink in: almost everyone wants something but their government ’representatives’ won’t let them have it. Whom do they represent?
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Very true about out worthless “representatives”. But what are we – the great majority whose clearly stated wishes are being ignored by our “representatives” – doing about it? The answer is very clear --Nothing!
Camp of the Saints is a novel. The author exaggerates for effect. But he identified a key element in post-WWII Western society, not just in French society – We refuse to stand our ground. We believe we are beaten before we start, keep our heads down, and grumble to ourselves. This was not the attitude of the colonists in the 1770s, who also had a government which did not represent them.
I just today got back from a trip which included Germany: Dresden and Berlin, inter alia. .
The very word “Dresden” was for the later half of the 20th century synonymous with ruin, desolation, destruction, sometimes wanton and gratuitous destruction depending on your point of view.
Today Dresden looks exactly like Canaletto painted it in the 18th century (but cleaner). In fact, in Dresden, all the venerable-looking buildings —the Semperoper, the Frauenkirche—are recent reconstructions; only the more modern looking buildings are “historical”.
And Berlin! The former East Berlin is now spectacularly developed, bright, I hafta say glitzy.
After WWII, we rewarded the West German sector with the Marshall Plan; in East Germany and East Berlin, the Soviets demanded punitive reparations from the Germans.
But neatly 40 years on, what difference has it made?
We visited “Checkpoint Charlie”, the American station on the Berlin Wall ( the wall today is memorialized by a few bronze plaques in the sidewalk). Even when I was there two years ago, this site was a bigger deal, people knew its significance. Now, it’s just a small hut in the middle of the busy street. I think it’ll probably be removed over the next few years, probably commemorated only by a flat,traffic-friendly brass plaque in the pavement.
Incidentally, the EU has just approved a new policy vis à vis India, didja notice? In 2027 it will to an extreme extent facilitate immigration from India; Indians will essentially have their own Shengen-type agreement.
As it relates to Camp of the Saints:
Life imitates art.
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Gee, I dunno. Remember January 6, 2021? That’s when “we, the great majority” tried to do something. Ask Ashli Babbitt about that. Oops, you can’t 'cause she’s dead. Okay, instead ask all those folks who spent about 2 years in jail waiting for their — what’s the expression again — “speedy and public trial.” I could’ve sworn that’s in the Bill of Rights somewhere.
What’s missing from your analysis is the simple fact that government is force and it doesn’t hesitate to use it against the people, all those pretty words on paper notwithstanding. Voting hasn’t been working so well, so, sure, a violent revolution is an alternative approach, i.e., using force against government force. You seem to be intimating that in your references to 1770s. It would be highly asymmetric warfare — much more so than in the 18th century.
And what, pray tell, have you done so far? Vote harder, perhaps?
Just entre nous, I’ve been losing my patience with NormieCons, GrillerCons, and the rest of the muh democracy gang. It’s not working out.
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This guy is doing something.
https://x.com/samuraioccident/status/2047760464092750244
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Please tell us more! Especially about any hints on the German people and their attitudes. Are they enthusiastically preparing for another war against Russia? Is the unemployment situation beginning to weigh on their minds? Do they hate the EU as much as they hate US? What about their own immigration situation?
Of course the limited interactions on a trip are not statistically determinative, but the vibe a smart traveler picks up can be informative.