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171 of 178 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Prophet as Leper, July 31, 2000
This book is so politically incorrect that I admire Amazon.com for actually carrying it. Written in the early 1970s, this book looks beyond the cold war to a North-South confrontation in which European civilization is unilaterally morally disarmed. The thesis is simple: suppose a million starving people from the Ganges actually took Western rhetoric of compassion, explotiation, etc., to heart, and comandeered, en masse, shipping, with the intention of moving to the shores of France? (Raspail, of course, is French.) Would anyone stop them? The imagery employed is interesting. The title comes from Revelation, Chapter 20, and refers to the forces of evil laying seige to the camp of the saints, here meant to be the nations of the West. "The thousand years are over..." is chanted from Third World lips, harking to the millenial reign of Christ, as well as to the millenial domination of Europe over the globe. Raspail has the Vatican, World Council of Churches, and other organs of what he saw as Western liberal compassion try to feed the Armada, as it sails around the Cape. The bodies of their would-be benefactors are cast into the sea. The characters who oppose, with violence, the Armada are named with names like Constantine Drasages and Luke Notaras, namesakes of the last Byzantine Emperor and Admiral. They are portrayed as villans in the media; one of the more thoughtful leftists, fashionably in support of opening up France's shores, but cynical enough to see the potential results, reflects on the parallels between Byzantium's fate and that of the West. The author's point is that any who dare to say that 'white' civilization has a right to exist are branded racists and cast out of the pale of polite society. The narrative is set up as a flashback. The Armada is about to disgorge its human cargo in Provence as we begin. An old man, M. Calgues, awaits them, Mozart playing in the background, after setting what he expects to be his last supper among the living. From there, we go back to the beginning, in India, as a Western cleric preaches quasi-liberation theology to the masses. Along the way, as the news spreads over the world, we digress, looking at Manhattenites holing up in skyscrapers as the spectre of race riots beckon, and at Russian troops on the Manchurian border contemplating the human waves gathering to wash over them. The central question of the book is this: will the West (including Russia - more properly, the North), when (not if) confronted with de facto occupation of national territories by Third World people, coming to live, but not to assimilate, use violence to save itself? Is there left in Euro-American civilization a will to live that is strong enough to pull a trigger? The stark question is answered in one of two possible ways by the concluding chapter. This astringent book, whether you agree with Raspail's views or not, demands thoughtful attention to the questions posed. How will we deal with population/immagration issues? Is our culture and way of life worth fighting for? -Lloyd A. Conway
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104 of 108 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Courageous and Prophetic Polemic of a Novel, August 7, 2002
Jean Raspail was already a distinguished travel writer and novelist when he put his reputation on the line with this one - He had a lot to lose. To his credit, Raspail pulls no punches and manages to say just about everything there is to say about the threat that Third World immigration poses to Western Civilization.
I had heard about this book, but decided to read it for the first time only after boat loads of Kurds landed on France's Mediterranean beaches a couple of years ago. The sight of hundreds of ragged Kurds running through the streets of Cannes could have been a scene from the film version of this novel.
The story is about an invasion of France by boat loads of East Indians, and the small group of Frenchman who defend against them. But as Raspail notes in the Introduction, the story is a parable - A parable of the destructive Third World immigration in the West that has been going on since the latter part of the 20th Century, and the West's lack of will to resist it.
Immigration negatively impacts the environment, the economy, crime, and national security. This novel posits that it further threatens to destroy the relatively democratic, tolerant and civilized cultures of the West and the essential commonalities of the Western peoples. According to Raspail, the West "has no soul left" and "it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles."
To call the novel "racist" is unfair. Raspail includes an East Indian among the "Saints" who defend France, and portrays many White Frenchmen who welcome the invaders as their equals. The novel clearly states that being a Westerner is NOT a matter of race, but a "state of mind."
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47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A book that cannot be ignored, July 2, 2003
During my long-ago youth, I remember people discussing a coming war of the Haves against the Have-nots. Well, what if the Have-nots launched their invasion armed not with pathetically out-of-date weapons, but with empty, out-stretched hands? In this book, author Jean Raspail examines just such an eventuality.
When the termination of a Belgian project of adopting babies from Third World nations is announced, a wave of despair sweeps through the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. A crazed prophet announces that the West has forfeited its land, and leads a million of these impoverished people on a "last chance armada" towards France. The whole world holds its breath, as millions of others of the world's poor wait to see how the French (and as such the West) will react. But, sapped by a political-correctness that has preached self-hatred and self-sacrifice, can France fight a war against a group of poor, unarmed, emaciated souls, even if the cost is the loss of a thousand years of Western civilization?
In a word - No.
I first read about this book in the December 1994 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and was quite glad when a copy recently fell into my hands. This book racks the political Left over the coals, up one side and down the other, while at the same time trampling Christianity and its gospel of self-sacrifice and brotherhood under foot. It is Jean Raspail's belief that the West has lost its will to power, and that with declining birthrates, the West is doomed to extinction; submerged beneath a wave of invaders. "Many a civilization, victim of the selfsame fate, sits tucked in our museums, under glass, neatly labeled."
If you are looking for an uplifting book of a hope-filling future, then you will have to look elsewhere. But in this world, where explosive population growth is coupled with drastically unbalanced wealth, this is a book that cannot be ignored. Mass population movement from the Third World to the First is a fact of today, and the West is beginning to realize the significance.
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