RUMP's Terror Caravan PANIC! Officials Identify Trump Supporting Terrorists Lurking In Caravans - RightWing Fringe Media Grows Increasingly Silent

Is the Right’s ‘Caravan’ Panic a Reenactment of Its Favorite Racist Novel?
By Ed Kilgore
 
Is the “caravan” of Central American migrants really an existential threat 
to civilization, as the president seems to suggest? Photo: Pedro 
Pardo/AFP/Getty Images
Last week Donald Trump launched a tweetstorm over the gradual approach to 
the U.S. border of a “caravan” of Central Americans (a few thousand people 
at the most):


Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
 I am watching the Democrat Party led (because they want Open Borders and 
existing weak laws) assault on our country by Guatemala, Honduras and El 
Salvador, whose leaders are doing little to stop this large flow of people, 
INCLUDING MANY CRIMINALS, from entering Mexico to U.S.....

7:25 AM - Oct 18, 2018
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Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
 ....In addition to stopping all payments to these countries, which seem to 
have almost no control over their population, I must, in the strongest of 
terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught - and if unable to do so I will 
call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!..

7:35 AM - Oct 18, 2018
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Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
 ....The assault on our country at our Southern Border, including the 
Criminal elements and DRUGS pouring in, is far more important to me, as 
President, than Trade or the USMCA. Hopefully Mexico will stop this 
onslaught at their Northern Border. All Democrats fault for weak laws!

7:45 AM - Oct 18, 2018
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Partisan politics aside, this whole meme involving a possible military 
response to refugees besieging the United States reminded me of something … 
and it finally hit me: It was pretty close to the central premise of The 
Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail’s racist French novel of the 1970s that 
nativists have recently revived as offering a literary warning that the 
West’s self-destructive liberalism is betraying white people into the hands 
of their Third World enemies. Here is HuffPost’s brief summary of the book, 
which I happened to have read shortly after its publication in English in 
1975:

The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named 
“the turd-eater” because he literally eats shit, and the deformed, 
apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an 
“armada” of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering 
European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a 
liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and 
accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by 
recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.



The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to 
reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere 
and overthrow white Western society.



The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by 
force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle 
among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the 
left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people 
literally overrun Western civilization.

 
Photo: Sphere
Members of the latter-day anti-immigration movement and the alt-right alike 
have adopted the book as a sort of bible, as Sarah Jones noted earlier this 
year:

The Camp of the Saints is a veritable fixture on alt-right forums across 
the internet. It stars in Stormfront threads and appears on reading lists 
disseminated on 8chan’s /pol/ board. At VDARE, white nationalist writer 
Chris Roberts compared it to George Orwell’s 1984. The Camp of the Saints 
appears frequently on Reddit, in r/Europe and r/New_Right and 
r/DarkEnlightenment and r/The_Donald, where eager Trump fans even launched 
a live reading series. Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist 
Worker’s Party, recommends the novel to his followers; so does Jared 
Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, which bills itself as “the 
internet’s premier race-realist site.” 

But more respectable people with access to real political power view the 
book as foundational, too. These include most notably former Breitbart 
chairman and presidential counselor Stephen Bannon:

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then 
Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.



“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 
2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”



“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an 
invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”



“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 
2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the 
Saints, isn’t it?”

Shortly before the 2016 presidential contest began, Bannon’s young 
Breitbart protege Julia Hahn, who is still serves in the Trump White House, 
penned a long tribute to the book’s prophetic nature, noting Pope Francis’s 
advent as a migrant-loving Latin American pontiff; comparing Marco Rubio to 
Raspail’s great villain, the French traitor Albert Durfort; and accusing 
media elites of failing to warn Americans and Europeans of their imminent 
demise.

Nativist congressman Steve King touted the book in an Iowa radio interview 
last year as a sort of cultural antidote, as Slate reported:

Mickelson: If we don’t raise godly children to take our place … that vacuum 
will be filled by whatever washes up on our shore and makes a claim on our 
territory. Civilization has to be on purpose. Isn’t that correct, 
Congressman King?



King: It has to be on purpose and I would recommend a book to your 
listeners, and the title of it is The Camp of the Saints. And it’s written 
by a Frenchman, Jean—J-E-A-N—Raspail—R-A-S-P-A-I-L.

Even some conservatives who are repelled by the racism and brutality of 
Camp of the Saints believe it raises questions that must be asked, as Rod 
Dreher observes today, after he, too, recognized the “caravan” as an 
analogue:

The book is a kind of alt-right pornography, and I found it frequently 
repulsive to read. Yet looking at that migrant caravan heading north, that 
“numberless disinherited people of the South” who like a tidal wave, are 
marching north toward our fortunate country’s wide-gaping frontier — it’s 
impossible not to think about Raspail’s ugly prophetic work.



How far, ultimately, are the United States and Europe willing to go to 
control their own borders in the face of people who believe they have 
nothing to lose by trying to cross the frontier? And: at what point do most 
of us cease to believe that we have anything worth defending — and a 
majority of us come to believe that those numberless disinherited people 
from the South are “a kind of solution”  to our terminal malaise?

Obviously, the fact that the “caravan” and the lurid way in which Trump is 
describing it resembles the migrant flotilla Raspail wrote about does not 
mean the novel’s apocalyptic clash on the shores of France will be brought 
to life on the Rio Grande. And perhaps Trump’s pledge to use the military 
to repel migrants is just another base-energizing gesture to conflate 
immigration with terrorism, or to pretend migrants are thoroughly marbled 
with ISIS members and other purveyors of violence.

But at some point, we have to take people seriously when they treat 
migrants as an existential threat to civilization, and the use of force 
against them as a sad but necessary measure of self-defense. Yes, it 
requires an unusual combination of paranoia and racism to view a few 
thousand poor people fleeing violence as justifying a panic. But the 
president of the United States has no compunctions about it:


Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
 Sadly, it looks like Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the 
Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and 
unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and 
Military that this is a National Emergy. Must change laws!

8:37 AM - Oct 22, 2018
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What’s a little excessive violence when it’s needed to make a point and win 
an election?
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/is-the-caravan-panic-a-reenactment-
of-a-racist-novel.html