Jean Raspail: ‘We Are Only At the Beginning’
Le Point: Some on the right consider your book The Camp of the Saints, written in 1972, as visionary, especially since the refugee crisis. How do you feel about that?
JR: This migrant crisis puts an end to thirty years of insults and slander against me. I have been called a fascist because of this book considered to be a racist work…
Are you a racist?
No, not at all! You can’t spend your life traveling the world, be a member of the Society of French Explorers, meet I don’t know how many endangered populations, and be a racist. That would be hard, it seems to me. When it came out in 1972 the book shocked people tremendously, and for a reason. There was a period, notably during the seven-year term of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing when a veritable intellectual terrorism was employed against right-wing writers.
More:
What’s happening today isn’t important, it’s anecdotal, for we are only at the beginning. Right now, the whole world is talking about this, there are thousands of specialists on the issue of migrants, it’s a chaos of commentary. Not one looks at the thirty-five years that lie ahead. The situation we are living through today is nothing compared to what awaits us in 2050. There will be nine billion people on the earth. Africa has gone from one hundred million to one billion inhabitants in a century, and perhaps twice that in 2050. Will the world be livable? The overpopulation and the wars of religion will make the situation fragile. That’s when the invasion will occur, it is ineluctable. The migrants will come in great part from Africa, the Middle East and the borders of Asia…
Should we fight the evil at the roots and bomb the strategic points of Daesh, as France has just done?
It’s their problem not ours. It doesn’t concern us. What are we doing in this business? Why do we want to play a role? Let them cope! Years ago we got out of these regions? Why go back?
And what do we do when Syria sends out orders to attack France?
We block them. We prevent them from entering French territory. The politicians have no solution to this problem. It’s like the debt – we pass it on to our grandchildren. Our grandchildren will have to manage this problem of massive migration.
The Catholic Church is not at all on this wave length. It is urging the faithful to show their generosity…
I have written that Christian charity will suffer a bit when faced with the answers to the influx of migrants. It will have to steel itself and suppress compassion of all sorts. Otherwise, our countries will be submerged.