The American Freedom Network

Camp of the Saints?

Lest we forget, in the midst of the spawning hyperinflation engendered by the profligacy of the duopoly in D.C., (“Never has so much been spent by so few at the expense of so many”) there is a civil war raging on our border , with the violence and terror spreading into our midst, and it is largely ignored by our press.  Our border is wide-open, and our welfare state is generous, set to expand and not overly concerned about the identity of those on whom it lavishes its’ largesse .  Our new President is on record as supporting de facto amnesty , which will create millions of potential new voters, in addition to encouraging the continued flouting of our law and our borders. (Not to worry, the government is erecting surveillance towers on the Canadian border….)

As Milton Friedman noted, it’s just obvious that you can’t have open borders and a welfare state.  We do.  The result will be that America will continue to see heavy immigration, much of it illegal.  The immigrants of the Ellis Island era wanted to be Americans, learned English, and assimilated.  This generation of immigrants does not.  They may be mostly hard-working, God-fearing, and family-oriented; of that I do not doubt.  What I do doubt is their intention to assimilate.  Why would they want to do so, however, when our culture is marinated in self-hate?  We spend so much time apologizing for the real and imagined sins of our ancestors that we give ourselves and others reason to question our right to a place in our own country.

This brings us to the point of the title.  Jean Raspail, a French writer, wrote a book in 1973 that has remained an underground classic ever since – The Camp of the Saints.  He novelizes what some of the best thinkers on the subject suggested would come to pass:  Civilizational suicide.  Societies can survive the rigors of a long war, as Rome did when Hannibal destroyed legionary armies in detail at Cannae and Lake Triasemene, and over the course of two decades killing with the sword more Romans than were on the citizenship rolls when his elephants crossed the Alps.  They can survive plague, such as that that carried away one-third of Europe in the 14th century, just prior to the dawn of Western political, military, economic and cultural triumph.  They do not, however, survive loss of faith in themselves, as was the case with the Greek city-states before Phillip II of Macedon, no more formidable a foe to them than Darius or Xerxes, even though the Marathon generation was poorer than that which fell into Macedon’s orbit (Sparta excepted).

That is what we face now.  Oswald Spengeler analyzed the reasons for the growth, triumph decadence and eventual decline of civilizations in his The Decline of the West, written before the rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany. He saw civilizations as having cyclic existences – a heroic Spring, when the world is wide, thought is young, action is prized and the Homeric type prevails.  Summer follows, with cultures maturing into civilizations, building on the foundation of confidence that comes their rise.  Civilizations explain their ascent as divinely-ordained, with their sense of self as that of specialness, uniqueness – Manifest Destiny, the American Spirit, or the Roman, or the English equivalent.  At the zenith, such sentiments seem logical, and help to explain the dizzying climb from humble beginnings on the banks of the Tiber, the Thames or Massachusetts Bay.  As summer hues into fall, Edmund Burke’s “Economists, Sophisters and Calculators” come to the fore, as foxes profit from the safety provided by the work of the lions who came before them.  The Age of the Hero gives way to that of the Lawmaker, then of the Financier, and finally, in Winter, of Caesar, who holds a crumbling Center by force, when spirit begins to fail.  The Age of Caesar is what Spengler saw for the West, in the aftermath of the carnage of the First World War.

So, where does all of this exercise in histrionics lead?  To the present day, when producers matter less than financiers, when concepts like national honor matter little to those who matter most in the councils of our nation, and to a citizenry and its’ common stock of virtues held in contempt by those who have no have none themselves.  Europe is farther down the road to suicide than we are, but we are far enough.     Will we demand that our rulers defend our borders, or will we choose, through inaction, to be accessories in national suicide?  In The Camp of the Saints, the action moves quickly, and with a sense of foreboding of an end that I will not spoil by revealing.  Suffice it to say that the unanswered question of that astringent book is:  Do we have the willpower to defend ourselves?  It is not from external threats that we must first guard ourselves, but from internal weakness and loss of the will to fight.  For no power can overthrow a civilization, until it is first weakened, and then, like an opportunistic infection, the small may bring down the once-mighty.