The Camp of the Living Dead

Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is one of those literary works... which has gained meme status within the online Right without actually having been all that widely read... it describes the annihilation of the West by a mass movement of migrants from the third world who advance under the banner of their own wretchedness to disarm the West via its own bad conscience. If that sounds like it could have been lifted from the headlines of the last decade, congratulations, you can now see why the work is regarded as prophetic.

One of the reasons that The Camp of the Saints is not actually all that widely read is that the book has been suppressed in the English-speaking world. The book was a bestseller when the first translation was published in 1975...

... copyright-squatting is how books are actually de facto banned in the Western world...

Fortunately for all of us, the small publisher Vauban Books has recently released a new translation, which you can pick up in any format of your choice for a very reasonable price...

The Camp of the Saints also has all the key tropes of a zombie apocalypse story.

Like every good dystopia, however, The Camp of the Saints is first and foremost a satire of the modern world, a warning about where things will head if certain sociopolitical trends are taken to their natural conclusion...

Raspail holds up a mirror to the West, and it is this and not his unflattering portrayal of the third world, which arouses hatred in his critics...

The living death of a civilization that is merely going through the mechanical motions of cultural forms it no longer believes in is easy meat for opportunistic moral warfare, and Raspail is explicit about this...

The Camp of the Saints is available on Amazon in Audible, Kindle, paperback, or hardcover editions. The prices are very reasonable. You should read it. You should talk about it. You should give it to a friend to read. It may well be the most important novel of the last century.

[The original article contains a more in-depth analysis and review of The Camp of the Saints.]