SIBLEY: Mass migration is changing Europe — and reviving a novel the Establishment tried to bury

Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.“Stretching over that empty sea, aground some fifty yards out, (lay) the incredible fleet from the other side of the globe ... There were better than a hundred ships in all, each one caked with rust, unfit for the sea ... On this Easter Sunday evening, eight hundred thousand living beings, and thousands of dead ones, were making their peaceful assault on the Western World.”Such is the opening scene in Jean Raspail’s famous — some say infamous — novel, The Camp of the Saints. First published in 1973, it offers a dystopian tale of Europe inundated by wave after wave of Third World migrants. At the time, Raspail was, of course, labelled a “racist,” that catch-all tag used to silence those who dare to peek outside the box of progressivist ideology.Six decades later, the book is increasingly recognized as being ahead of its time — “the 1984 of the twenty-first century,” as one book blurb puts it.It’s not hard to figure out why Raspail’s novel stirred so much controversy 60 years ago. Or why its message resonates today. Back in the ’60s, European powers were hastily abandoning their former colonies. Professors taught the young to feel guilty about the West’s imperialist past. Public intellectuals became popular flagellating themselves about the evils of the West. To quote Susan Sontag, one of the more prominent flagellants, from 1967: “The white race is the cancer of human history.”So why does The Camp of the Saints seem so prescient today? Consider what Raspail imagined: an alien invasion of the North by the South — the arrival on the French Riviera of a fleet of rust-bucket ships packed with nearly a million “refugees” who fled the collapsing cities of the Indian subcontinent for a better life in the West. French politicians offer hand-wringing platitudes as the horde comes ashore unopposed and spreads across the country. Millions from Africa and Asia decide to follow: “in all the stifling Third World ports … other huge armadas were ready to weigh anchor, bound for Australia, New Zealand, Europe …” Western leaders are, no surprise, rendered impotent. If they try to stop the refugees, millions will die. If they don’t stop them, Western civilization will die..I won’t give away the ending. Suffice it to say “suicidal empathy,” to borrow Canadian academic Gad Saad’s immaculate phrase, prevails among the political and social elites.With recent decades having witnessed millions upon millions of migrants pouring into Western countries — the Great Replacement, as some have called the phenomenon — it is no wonder that Raspail, who died in 2020, has come to be regarded in some quarters as prophetic. One commentator refers to his novel as “the 1984 of the twenty-first century.”Last week, we saw a substantial, if smaller, fulfillment of the prophecy. Some 60,000 mostly young, military-age men from Morocco occupied Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave of 85,000 bordering Morocco on the Mediterranean coast. They scaled fences and swam around breakwaters to gain entry. Spain’s government insists most returned to Morocco the next day — which makes you wonder if the Moroccan government sponsored the event — and there’s no reason to panic.Nevertheless, videos posted by locals suggest thousands remained even after the Spanish government called in the army.This latest episode in mass migration has embarrassed Spain’s socialist leaders. Other European politicians are fearful the horde will come their way. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she’d consider “extraordinary measures” to prevent this, including suspending the Schengen Area Agreement. The agreement abolishes internal border checks among its member states, allowing for passport-free movement among 25 European Union members plus four non-EU states: Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein. Images from Ceuta were “striking evidence” that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a serious threat to Europe’s borders, Meloni said..Other European politicians echoed that view. Alice Weidel, co-chair of Germany’s Alternative for Germany party, expressed concern that many of Ceuta’s invaders would be heading for her country. She called for borders to be closed and the swift deportation of illegal migrants. She compared the situation to the 2015 European migrant crisis when then German chancellor, Angela Merkel — sounding like one of Raspail’s hand-wringing characters — opened the door to more than a million Syrians fleeing civil war, trumpeting “Wir schaffen das!” “We can do this!”Ten years later, Merkel’s naïve sentiment is risible. Statistics recently released by the German police “showed that migrants of Syrian and Afghan background are eight to nine times more likely than the average German to be suspects in criminal cases.” Late last week, after a terrorist attack on Berlin’s Pride event in which a woman was killed, and dozens of others hurt, one of Germany’s biggest police unions called for major changes to the country’s laws on citizenship, deportation, and asylum.“Across Europe and the United Kingdom, migrants like (those who invaded Ceuta) — from Islamic countries and Africa — are overwhelming cities, bringing with them serious social disruption and crime,” says Free Press columnist Rod Dreher in citing the police statistics.Even Sweden, the poster-child of the we-welcome-migrants ethos, has started to crack down on foreigners who commit petty crimes to supplement the state’s generous social benefits. After years of downplaying such behaviour, the Swedish government is “moving most aggressively to tighten immigration rules and combat crime, an area in which immigrants are substantially overrepresented,” Johan Wennström, a Research Fellow at the Swedish Defence University, observed in a recent issue of the online journal Unherd.None of this seems to have registered with Spain’s leadership. Prime Minister Sánchez chastised Meloni, defending his immigration policies as both humane and good economics. “The West needs people,” he said in a New York Times op-ed. Unless Westerners embrace migration, “they will experience a sharp demographic decline that will prevent them from keeping their economies and public services afloat. The only option to avoid decline is to integrate migrants in the most orderly and effective way possible.”.But what if integration isn’t orderly or effective? Even if there are economic benefits to mass immigration — the subject is still debated by scholars — are those purported benefits offset by crime and social disorder like that now seen in Western Europe? The reality is that some migrant groups, while happy to partake of Western economic largesse, refuse to integrate peacefully, much less adopt the values and traditions of the host society. It’s not simply a matter of wanting to retain particular cultural practices; they want the society to which they’ve come to adopt the values of the country they left.So, what do you do when millions of “newcomers” don’t want to assimilate or respect majoritarian traditions? What happens when they take advantage of democratic electoral privileges and use their increasing demographic clout to elect candidates who seek to impose a less democratic order on the host society? This, I suggest, is a formula for social chaos, if not civil war.If that sounds extreme, consider the arguments of David Betz, a Canadian-born historian at King’s College London. In a recent interview with The Free Press, he characterizes the migrant-related disorder that has emerged in Western Europe in recent decades as the beginning of “extreme civil discord.” He blames state-sponsored mass immigration.Mass immigration, Betz tells journalist Dominic Green, has produced “a mass social and cultural alteration of values and demography.” The indigenous majority sees itself as besieged, displaced, and even replaced. This sensibility is a “powerful propellant to civil conflict.”Betz thinks “the tipping point has already been passed” where civil conflict can be avoided. He points to rising levels of conflict in Britain, France, Belgium, Scandinavia, Ireland, and Germany. For these countries with their large immigrant populations, he forecasts low-level, asymmetric, guerrilla-like terrorism and brutality between the indigenous population and migrant communities.The authorities will have difficulty suppressing the violence even if they call in the army, says Betz. Indeed, the state’s efforts to control things may well fail because the political class, in its willingness to cater to migrants against the indigenous population, has forfeited its legitimacy as far as the majority is concerned. The result will likely be the balkanization of Western Europe, Betz says, noting the existence even now of immigrant-dense no-go zones in many cities where police, firefighters, and ambulance services have to negotiate access with local leaders.George Orwell’s 1984 helped us understand the totalitarian mindset of the twentieth century. Perhaps Raspail’s Camp of the Saints will help prepare us for the twenty-first century’s clash of cultures. Of course, some, perhaps most, will continue to prefer the reassurances of our ruling elites.I can almost hear Raspail’s ghost saying, “I told you so.”Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.

SIBLEY: Mass migration is changing Europe — and reviving a novel the Establishment tried to bury

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