Mass Migration and the Crisis of the West

In Episode Fifty-One of Roots, Rights & Reason, host Lee Smith welcomes political philosopher and writer Nathan Pinkoski for a timely discussion titled Mass Migration and the Crisis of the West. The conversation examines the controversy surrounding the 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints, which recently drew renewed attention after being temporarily removed from Amazon, and explores why its themes continue to resonate today.

Smith and Pinkoski discuss mass migration, censorship, multiculturalism, and the growing identity crisis facing the West. The episode explores the loss of cultural confidence in Europe and the United States, the influence of decolonization ideology, and the broader debate over national identity, assimilation, and the future of Western civilization.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

From the brave roots of our founding, to the unstoppable force of American ingenuity, to the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist Lee Smith on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Powered by America's future.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome and thanks for joining us for this new episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. This week, we're discussing the dangers of mass third-world migration and the controversial 20th-century book that may have predicted our present reality. Written by French author Jean Raspet in 1973, The Camp of the Saints is one of the most influential and controversial works ever written about mass immigration and the future of Western civilization. A novel as visionary as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Camp of the Saints was recently banned on Amazon. When the bookseller restored the book to its shelves, it climbed Amazon's bestseller charts. The book depicts a massive flotilla of Indian migrants heading to Europe, while Western political leaders, intellectuals, clergy, and media figures prove unwilling or unable to end the crisis. The author's argument is not merely about migration itself, but about the internal weakness of societies that have lost confidence in their own traditions and identity. The central warning of the Camp of the Saints is that civilizations cannot survive if they no longer believe they have the moral right to defend themselves. In the novel, France possesses the military and legal power to stop the migrant fleet, yet its leaders hesitate because they fear accusations of intolerance, racism, or cruelty. Raspay portrays a ruling class consumed by guilt and self-doubt, one that views its own civilization as morally illegitimate, and this psychological collapse is more dangerous than the migration crisis itself. Borders, of course, are not simply lines on a map, but expressions of national sovereignty and cultural continuity. Once a nation loses the will to enforce its laws and defend its borders, political authority begins to erode. And so does national identity. Mass migration can transform a nation, and that's what we're starting to see today in Europe, with migration from the Middle East and Africa. There is evidence that America is starting to undergo the same problems with migrants from the Third World rioting in US cities to support anti-American causes and institutions, including terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. If US officials and institutions don't wake up, and if Americans don't take responsibility for our own nation, we're headed toward crisis. And yet, as Camp of the Saints shows, Western civilization is vulnerable because it no longer possesses confidence in its own culture or the legitimacy of self-preservation. Today we're speaking with Nathan Pinkosky, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America. Nathan is an author and translator who has written the introduction to the English language translation of Camp of the Saints. Thanks for being here with us today. Tell me, why was uh Camp of the Saints banned from Amazon? How controversial is this book?

SPEAKER_00 3:37

All right, well, thanks for having me. It's a delight to be here. So this is really one of the interesting stories of our time because when the book was released back in 1973, the New York Times reviewed it, National Review reviewed it, the former gave an unfavorable review, the latter gave a favorable review. Uh in the 1990s, um, it was uh it appeared in a long essay, um, it was December 1995 in The Atlantic. Um so there was a time where it was deemed to be a book you could talk about even if you disagreed with it. But sometime in the last few years, uh things have changed. And um it's always been available in French, but uh Vauban Books, a small publishing company that launched just a few years ago, won the right to uh issue a new translation. So it was a fresh translation done by um a scholar translator named uh Ethan Rundell, and I wrote the introduction uh for it. And uh we noticed uh it that it had been getting some more attention in the mainstream media, the the book and the edition. Um and it must have uh it must have got into the way of the powers that be, because uh on Friday, let's see, this would have been uh April 17th, um, the book was uh had been selling well, the paperback edition, uh, and yet it was taken down um uh abruptly by Amazon. Uh, they didn't give an explanation until the Monday when they said it had been removed for offensive content. And again, just to reiterate the oddness of this, uh, this was the Vauban books edition. The uh French edition was still available, as maybe we'll go on to say a little bit more. Jean Raspay is uh is a very well-known, uh uh uh notable uh French writer who won a number of literary prizes. His books were still available in the French site, so it was just the US version where it had, I guess, uh gotten some attention and people had deemed it to be um an offensive uh book. Um, you know, again, just to say the strangeness of this, uh Amazon sells all kinds of offensive material, right? Yeah, say the least. Um, so this one had been targeted in particular. Uh Vauban books on the Monday issued a press statement, you know, not really expecting much to happen. But uh the happy ending to this is it ended up getting quite a bit of attention that Amazon had pulled this. Uh and because of the arbitrary character of the decision, because the the book had largely been available um for uh and was still available on the on the on the French side in the French version, and it by the end of the day they said, oh, this was a decision made an error, and they restored the listings. So it could have been for a small publishing company like Vaubon, it could have been a real uh a real blow and potentially a strangulation event because uh not only does Amazon control most of the market, I think it's important for people to know that the other uh booksellers rely on its listings to have it. So a small publishing company can really get strangled if you have if you if um if you have your your book taken off Amazon.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

As it it turned out to be somewhat uh some somewhat of a blessing, however, didn't it? Because all the controversy. I mean, I I the book the book wound up listed very high on the Amazon charts. I mean, I saw it, but that it got up, I don't know, that it broke the top 10, I'm not sure. But I mean, this is fascinating. A translate a translation of a French novel from 1973 was one of the top sellers on Amazon, right? Going up against Hollywood memoirs, all these different things. So it it must have stirred a lot of uh a lot of controversy.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Yeah, well, I think people saw that even if you disagreed with the book, uh, the notion of banning one, and all it takes is a quick Google search to see that the author um is a serious author. He's not the he's not some screed writer, he's not some polemicist, he's not some uh some some racialist or something like that. Uh he was a serious novelist uh who was nearly admitted into L'Académie Française. He won the top prize at l'Académie Française. This is of course the most prestigious institution, an academic institution in France. He won their top literary prize in 2003 for lifetime achievement. So it doesn't take uh much digging around to realize that he's a serious figure. But of course, this novel is uh is a more controversial one. Um and I think the the summary of the controversy around it is it's a dystopic novel in which the main plot involves mass migration. And uh the New York Times review and the the the unfavorable review um this that was released just after the book uh came out, it says it complained that the book imagined a fantastic, preposterous, I think was the exact wording, preposterous event uh a million migrants coming to the shores of France. You know, imagine that it's preposterous. Uh and yet uh nowadays uh it's basically the headlines annual immigration intake in France is about 500,000 right now. Uh in Germany, um it it's uh around one million. Um in England during the Boris Wave, it exceeded one million, same with Canada, and then of course in in uh in the US uh during the Biden years, we had uh three million as the top number of legal immigration, not even counting the legal ones. So I think it hits a little close to home, and that's why it rubs uh certain people uh the wrong way.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

So the question is And that's why that's why it was that's why it was banned. The topic is uh is something people don't want to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

I think so. And I think it becomes harder to uh to discuss it and to see it when it's when it becomes part of your reality. When it's a distant event, you can take the stance that the New York Times did uh back in the 1970s and say, this is a preposterous novel, it seems an eccentric figure, uh but uh still still uh hold it up. But now that it uh is so much uh mass migration, the drama of it is so much saturated into our into our politics, uh into our you make a very good point in your introduction, which is really great.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

It really sort of, you know, it identifies where uh it identifies the issue now, but also explains who Respai was, the author, um, that he's he was a man of the left, basically. And his his books are are uh he was Catholic, but also essentially a man of the left. And his books are uh uh looking for lost cultures. He was interested in lost cultures. This was in North America or in other continents, and he sort of imagined uh he imagined that this it was possible of doing this with the West as well. But the West was so powerful uh and and and so expansive, and it effectively wiped out all these other indigenous cultures that he imagined, uh he imagined a scenario which as we all know is uh may come to pass where this very powerful uh expansive culture may be wiped out, if not through if not through absolute slaughter, but just by losing its identity through mass migration.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Yeah, exactly. And uh yeah, as you say, uh Raspay's kind of uh uh his political positions were were all over the place. Um he was close friends or at least correspondence with um the president of France, François Mitterrand, the socialist president of the 1980s. Um but I think the the scandal of the book is that he imagines that Europeans, that Americans, that Westerners writ large could suffer the same fate as the indigenous tribes, um, uh like the Mohicans, the the Alacoofs, those that have vanished uh from the face of the world. And that is a it's a tough, it's a tough lesson to bear, I think, because what the novel is about, I think it's important for people to see that that the novel itself is really a conversation about what will happen when the migrants come. Um, there's the initial uh famous opening event where there's a professor who sees a fleet arrive uh outside uh outside his home. Uh he's watching them from up in the hills, and then uh young miscreant comes uh basically to insult him and say, I'm gonna bring the migrants here tomorrow. This is a French miscreant, a white French miscreant. Uh and uh and the response of the professor is to shoot him. Uh and so it's a good thing to keep in mind that the backdrop is the migrants and this dramatic. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 11:50

First, you know what we should do. We should let's explain the the, I mean, the the basic plot line. And the basic plot line is that there's an enormous flotilla of at least one million people, right, coming from India, and they've been shut out uh of Egypt, they've been shut out uh where else? I can't remember where else.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

South Africa, all the way up to the street. South Africa. Right.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

They say if you if if you try to land here, we're gonna sink the boat and you're all gonna die, and we don't care. But when they head for Europe and when the plans are that they are coming for France, then this is this is really what sets uh it sets in motion. And it's it's it's I think there's probably a number of reasons why he chose Indian migrants and and not uh not say Algerians, uh not not Moroccans, uh Syrians, but but Indians. So yes, so that I just wanted to make sure that everyone's understanding that's the that's the starting point. And now we come back to it's like you again, you make the case and and uh that the real issue is not just the migrants, it's also the the failure, the moral failure of the West. And this was part of a much larger debate, especially in France, but of course this came to the United States as well. And in a sense, this is what the 1970s were about in the United States, and then Ronald Reagan becomes president, and the conversation changes somewhat, but not that much, because we keep going back and forth between these different polls. So if you can, but why has the West, and we're not talking about everyone, we're talking about significant, influential intellectual and cultural factions on the left that have lost confidence. Uh what have they lost confidence in? And how did it happen? And to what extent are these people actual actual agents, uh enemy adversarial agents?

unknown 13:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

So we're throwing a lot there. No, no, that's great. That's great. And it's great you brought up the the 60s and 70s as a kind of litmotif here. Um, because I think this is key for understanding the the drama of the novel and also its relevance to our to our own times. You know, we could tell, and many people do, tell an account of the of the 1980s as the the victory over the Soviets in the Cold War, the victory over communism. Well and true. The additional step, though, that many people make is to say uh that liberalism is the only universal ideology left in play. That the story of the 20th century is beating the two big ideological challengers, fascism first, then communism, and then it's just liberalism left over. But if we look, have a have a closer look at the 60s and 70s, I think, we see this ideology of uh we could call it decolonization, we could call it third worldism, that did survive the Cold War. It was sort of suppressed or uh wasn't the main focus in the 1980s and into the 1990s, but it started to come back in uh right around that time. I think, for instance, of uh Clinton's uh speech that he gave at Georgetown just after 9-11, where he effectively said that Europeans, or I think his line was something like uh those of European descent uh bear some responsibility for, and then he listed the crusades, colonialism, and he was effectively saying for 9-11. Um and that's a that's an ideal that's a statement that could sound jarring, uh, but it but and it is jarring, of course, but um but it makes sense by reference to the decolonization or the third world uh ideology. And this is what the novel is getting at that coming out of the 70s, uh 60s and 70s, you had a real loss of confidence in the West, and our uh uh a lack of capacity to love ourselves. Uh, whenever we would try to love our own, whenever we try to affirm that there was something good about ourselves, our communities, our history, you always had the the voice come in of Western guilt to say, no, no, you're in fact responsible for all these crimes that have gone on for centuries, if not thousands of years. And as a result, you cannot have confidence in who you are as a people, as a nation, as a community, as a as a bearer of heritage. And the novel, uh, the I think the strength of the novel is it it's a kind of sature, a mixture of satire and black humor um that that that satirizes all these different groups that are stuck there. So the novel's uh uh about um to reiterate what we were just saying earlier, the novel um has this initial kind of dramatic moment, this encounter between the professor and the miscreant, um, but then the rest of it's a flashback. And so it's really not about the moment when the migrants arrive, but rather the conversation about what to do uh takes out most of the plot of the novel. And it's that conversation where you see the paralysis, the self-doubt, uh, the guilt that preoccupies uh Western thinkers.

SPEAKER_02 16:50

I mean, it's fascinating because with with France, it's on with France it's understandable, though though though they're loath to admit it. But of course the French collaborated with the Nazis. So they would come out and say, well, you know, and of course they were most of them were never quite specific about why they were guilty. They said, Well, it's the third world's like, no, you collaborated with the Nazis. This was a bad thing. You wound up on the you wound up on the losing end no matter what de Gaulle says, no matter how it goes. But Americans, uh I I I know that the the the the um the uh transmission, the the tunnel French thought to American campuses was very important, but it always strikes me as strange. It strikes me as strange every time that we commemorate uh D-Day, right? The boys, the the the the boys who fought on Omaha Beach, their children, if they went to college, these were the ones who end up adopting basically the ideas of those that their fathers were fighting. How did that happen? How did we in the United States, like what what what were we what were what did we feel that we were guilty of? You know, the fr again, the French, I actually get it. And lots of other parts of Europe, the Germans, certainly. But why the United States? Why us?

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Well, it's a it's a great question. I think it's a combination of factors. One was the the influence of some of the ideas, the kind of trajectory that you're uh referring to. But I think there were two other parts that played a role. One was um, I would attribute it to our overconfidence that the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, represented an ideological victory for American liberalism. And it was a sense that there just wasn't any other option out there. Our side had won, and that was that. When if we looked a little closer, um, I think we would have seen uh the presence of third worldism, the presence of the decolonization ideology on our campuses, and in a way, and this is I think the third point, in a way that a lot of um the civil rights movement had developed its own understanding of itself, that rather than look back, say, as was the case in the 1950s, to a distinctly American tradition, uh, you know, the promissory note uh of the declaration, um, to base it really in a kind of uh liberal Protestant Christianity, which was uh Martin Luther King's milieu. Um instead, what you had was you associated the struggle of civil rights with those struggles of other countries around the world. Um and so it all became conceived of as one single uh one single struggle. And uh we didn't pay much attention to this in in North America, uh this this ideological force that um conflicts that most of us uh may have heard of at some moment, but don't really have much of a knowledge of, you know, in Rhodesia or the details of of South Africa, these things that we this is just a brief moment uh in history and that's over in a relatively short time, you know, you move on to Mandela and so forth, that these were actually constitutive events that were decisive for shaping a whole new ideological force. So I think by the time you hit the early 2000s and you see why someone like Clinton feels that it's good politics to make a statement like that, you know, after 9-11, is an indication of how uh much this um this ideology had had gone forward.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

We're talking of I was just gonna ask, we're we're talking a lot here about the uh the intelligentsia and also political elites. I mean, Bill Clinton, the former president of the United States. How much do you think that this has permeated? Because we're talking about two or three generations of uh of radical academics, right? Of people who have been teaching this, maybe two generations of the decolonization stuff. The first thing that we got was basically strict Marxism. So we're talking about two generations at least of this, and this is obviously uh trickled down not only into undergraduate courses, but now high school uh in some places. We we we we see uh grammar schools, we see pre preschools even. To what extent do you think that our con that the country as a whole is afflicted with uh is afflicted with these doubts, uh with skepticism about what we mean as a country, as a people?

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Well, I think it's pervasive. Uh I mean I notice it, I grew up in Canada, but I know I've noticed it uh in the in the years that I've been in the US, which is uh coming up to a decade now, more or less. Um and what I've just discovered too. Thanks. Um what I've discovered too, that this when I've looked into some of the history of this is just how um, say in the late 1980s, um you you saw real concerted efforts to introduce Pan-Africanism and multiculturalism into the into the school curriculum at the primary and secondary level. There was a big incident in New York State um in 1989, um, and uh Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal historian, got involved. And it looked, you know, to from the from the debates of the time, it looked like the school board backed off from those sorts of statements, and yet I think it showed that this was very, very uh deep into the way the intelligence. Saying. But I think this is the other point we need to bear in mind too, is that the people of the country did change in the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. And when you change the people, you do create pressure to change the culture. So this raises the question of integration and the failure of integration, I think, in those key years, key decades of the 1980s and 1990s, where what had happened was multicultural terms, multicultural uh the ideology had been something that informed the new immigrants who came to the United States during those decades. Rather than confront that and either adjust the numbers of immigrants or devote ourselves to a pro a real project of national integration, our elites preferred to look the other way in that. So and this is, I think, to go back to what we were saying at the start here, this is what rubs uh moves this, this is a scandal of Camp of the Saints in a way, is it suggests that mass migration means a change of culture. And mass and once you have a change of culture, you that means the end of the culture that was there or which to put it bluntly in this case, right, raises as an existential question for us can the American culture, the American way of life survive given the immigration?

SPEAKER_02 23:21

We're looking at, I'm gonna put you on the spot here. We're we're we're we're we're running out of time, so I'm gonna put you on the spot. We see what's happening with Europe and it seems almost inevitable. My wife is British, she says, forget it, don't don't don't sweat the elections, none of it matters. It's too late, the country's too small. We hear other people say this. I mean, and these are this is our this is our heritage as well. Uh, you know, uh uh London, Paris, Rome, all these things. Where do you put us? Where's the United States? Where do you see us in comparison to where Europe is? And we can see Europe almost over the almost over the edge. Where is the United States?

SPEAKER_00 24:00

Well, I think the situation here is better, but I think our heads are deeper in the sand about the problems that can exist. Uh so the advantages uh we have is a it's a vast country. Um we we do have a lot of, we're at we operate at a remove from some of the more uh the more fraught immigration questions that arose in Europe, say, in the 60s and 70s, which as you suggested had a lot to do with the the end of the imperial experience. You know, the the the United States didn't have that same uh that same experience. Um and yet our heads are in the sand because I think there's a notion of our of our own uh trust in our own capacity as Americans to just have integration and just have assimilation. If we just hold ourselves up and continue on the present course, it'll all work out, don't worry. And that Pollyanish attitude, I think, is a very dangerous one. I think actually, if there's a parallel that should worry us, I think it's Blairite Britain in the 1990s, which had a real confidence about integration all working out, and yet uh uh within a few years it was clear that it was not. You had major reports on parallel polis, uh developing parallel communities, and yet they just carried on uh the present course. So that's what I worry about uh right now is the head in the sand of Americans and the inability to recognize the scale of this problem and to to suggest, I think, that not all cultures um uh integrate. And um and then the other point too, I think, where Camp of the Saints comes in, uh where a novel like that does, is what is really going on here, the deeper issue, isn't the border control issue, uh immigration policy, it's our own identity crisis. Do we have the capacity to define who we are, to love who we are, uh, and to cherish that and transmit it, or are we always hedging our bets whenever we talk about ourselves or throwing in some statement like, well, well, we we can do more. Uh, we we we should be able to do better. That that kind of questioning our own our own confidence. And it's that bit that the decolonization ideology or third worldism is very, very good at latching on to uh and expanding and prying open until we lose confidence with ourselves entirely.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

Nathan, thank you so much for being here with us today on Roots, Rights, and Reason. A really important discussion, and it's a really important novel. Uh your work on it, your introduction is great. Thanks so much for being here with us and uh really come back again soon. Uh it was a real pleasure talking to you. And thanks to all of you. Well, that's great. Uh and thanks to all of you for watching Roots, Rights, and Reason. We'll see you next week for our next episode.