The Pope’s Welfare-Migrant Message
Pope Francis is urging America to throw open her borders to thousands of impoverished migrants, in part to atone for the “sins” of the colonial era.
“We must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible,” he declared before a joint session of Congress. “Thousands of persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities…We must not be taken aback by their numbers.”
The call was not entirely unexpected.
“America Atone,” read The Drudge Report’s banner story upon the Pope’s arrival to the White House a day before his historic Congressional address.
The headline linked to a Bloomberg piece entitled, “Obama to Bask In Pope’s Aura, But Francis Wants Economic Justice.” The article predicted the Pope would aim to “exploit” his “moral authority” to “pressure his host” nation on issues including mass immigration and wealth redistribution.
Indeed, as the Pope addressed the nation today it is clear that the immigration issue has hit a boiling point. Headlines blare:
European Migrant Crisis: Austria, Germany Near Tipping Point… As Europe Grasps For Answers, More Migrants Flood Its Border… Pope Francis Urges Congress To Embrace Migrants… Western and UN Aid Falling Far Short… Five More Fleets On The Way, From Africa, India and Asia… Refugee Fleet Is Headed For Europe, For France…
The last three headlines, however, are ripped not from today’s papers, but from the pages of a controversial 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail, which many say has predicted with shocking accuracy the events unfolding today.
The novel, which has been translated into English, is entitled Camp of the Saints, and posits that the liberalism of the West would cause Western nations to throw open their doors to so many migrants that it would spell the doom of liberal society itself. Raspail’s thesis, quite simply, is that liberalism is inadequate to defend liberalism.
All around the world, events seem to be lining up with the predictions of the book. The novel features a new pope, born in Latin American, who is “in tune with the times, congenial to the press” who preaches “universal love” and calls on the Western world to open its borders to the world’s migrants. Now, as in the novel, prominent political officials are urging on ever larger waves; secular and religious leaders hold hands to pressure blue collar citizens to drop their resistance; media elites and celebrities zealously cheer the opportunity that the migrants provide to atone for the alleged sins of the West— for the chance to rebalance the wealth and power of the world by allowing poor migrants from failed states to rush in to claim its treasures.
Raspail argues that the inability of the Western conscience to erect walls, to “put her foot down,” to turn people away, will lead to the undoing of Western civilization itself.
As the world’s eyes turn to the U.S. arrival of the pope, many conservatives are arguing that Jean Raspail’s book has perhaps come to life.
As Pat Buchanan recently wrote
Will the West endure, or disappear by the century’s end as another lost civilization? Mass immigration, if it continues, will be more decisive in deciding the fate of the West than Islamist terrorism… Does Europe have the toughness to seal its borders and send back the intruders? Or is Europe so morally paralyzed it has become what Jean Raspail mocked in “The Camp of the Saints”?
The Hudson Institute’s John Fonte told Breitbart News:
It is not surprising that the confused response by European elites to today’s mass migration from the developing world has triggered new interest in Jean Raspail’s 1973 dystopian novel “Camp of the Saints,” in which feckless Western leaders are unable to respond to a fictitious mass migration from what was then called the “Third World.”
The novel begins with the Belgian government’s announcement that it is ending its Indian child adoption policy, originally instituted to aid overpopulated India. The program had to be shut down due to an influx of applicants: “babes by the hundreds of hundreds, all ripe for adoption, [their mothers] pushing up to the brink [of the Belgian Consulate gate], to take the giant leap to [Western] paradise.”
Shortly after the program is terminated, millions of impoverished men, women and children board a fleet headed to the West.
The majority of the novel takes place around Easter as the French government decides how to respond to the “unprecedented incursion”: whether to throw open its borders and receive the fleet, or defend their nation from the coming invaders. France’s response stands to dictate that of the rest of the Western World:
“With France the Enlightened glad to grovel on her knees, no government now will dare sign its name to the genocidal deed” of fighting off the helpless horde.
Throughout the book, Raspail is constantly grasping for an “explanation” as to what sparked the Third World incursion, and what has caused the West to thrown down her arms and thrown open her doors.
Raspail suggests that overly-generous immigration policies are, in part, to blame. This is not dissimilar to Republicans’ recent push for amnesty, which government data shows played a substantial role in encouraging the 2014 border surge of alien youths.
“Once we had opened the door and shown how weak we are, others would come. Then more, and more. In fact, it’s already beginning,” Raspail wrote.
However, Raspail ultimately concludes that generous immigration policies are merely a symptom of a greater force at play. Raspail argues that the West has become enslaved to what he terms as the “Beast” that is Western consciousness, which bears the heavy weight of its guilt and feels it must atone for its alleged sins.
The Third World, Raspail writes, “see[s] right through you… They know how weak your [convictions] are, they know you’ve given in. You can thank yourselves for that… The one thing your struggle for their souls has left them is the knowledge that the West—your West—is rich. To them, you’re the symbols of abundance. By your presence alone, they see that it does exist somewhere, and they see that your conscience hurts you for keeping it all to yourselves.”
Raspail continues, “After all your help—all the seeds, and drugs and technology—they found it so much simpler just to say, ‘Here’s my son, here’s my daughter. Taken them. Take me. Take us all to your country.’ And the idea caught on. You thought it was fine. You encouraged it, organized it. But now it’s too big, now it’s out of your hands. It’s a flood. A deluge. And it’s out of control.”
No amount of immigration will ever make a dent in the global poverty. However, the facts, in Raspail’s vision, simply do not matter— the West is ruled by emotion and its guilt. The West, Raspail argues, is powerless against the powerless—entirely proselytized by the refugee’s apparent desperation and helplessness.
As the defenseless horde cries: “You see here before you our women, our children, our peasants, helpless and unprotected, your brothers and sisters, here to open your eyes, to show you the truth. Soon we’ll stat to cross the river. Please don’t shoot. We have no arms. We’re just poor, humble folk trying to make our way…”
Raspail writes that the fleet’s, “only arms are weakness, misery, a faculty for inspiring pity, and its strength as a symbol in the eyes of the world. A symbol of revenge.”
The book also suggests that many of the new arrivals will see some of the fineries of the West— elaborate wooden doors, rustic chests, silver cutlery bearing “some maternal ancestors’ initials,” tablecloths, pillow slips and fine linen— in a far more utilitarian light.
“Your world doesn’t mean a thing. They won’t even try to understand it… they’ll build a fire with your big wooden door… all your things will lose their meaning.”
To the Western conscience, the refugees “whose race, religion, language, and culture are different from [its] own” (set to arrive symbolically on Easter) represents an opportunity to “cleanse and redeem the capitalist West!”
As such, Raspail declares, it is, “to the blare of justice, Jericho’s worm-eaten walls will come tumbling…”
The religious community plays a vital role in the West’s demise. Religious figures—“bleeding hearts puking out gospels galore”—encourage the incursion. A global ecumenism receiving a new gospel of “a world reborn, one race, one religion, no more exploitation of man by man, death to Western imperialism, universal love and brotherhood, and a thousand other goodies of the same confection.”
No one plays so central a role as the Papal figure in the book who bears several surprising similarities to Pope Francis.
In the book, the fictional Pope, who hails from Latin America, represents a “new-style church.” The Cardinals chose him as a symbol “for the universal church”.
The media relishes every opportunity to describe the humble and wealth-eschewing pope, “living on a can of sardines, eating with a plain tin fork, in a makeshift kitchenette up under the Vatican eaves… What a fine front-page story!” Raspail writes.
When Western leaders confront the pope and warn him that his fanaticism for redistributing wealth would hurt many members of his flock, he passionately replies that, “poverty is all there is worth sharing.” Whenever global crisis demanded it, the pope would sell his tiara and his Cadillac, which “morally… only proved how rich he really was, like some maharaja disposed by official decree.”
Similarly, today’s media has found itself in a love affair with the “people’s pope.” Just this week, CNN fawned: “A master of symbolism, Francis quickly dispensed with the fancy red slippers that popes wore. He moved into a small apartment in the Vatican and put the papal Mercedes in the garage, favoring a 20-year-old Renault with 190,000 miles on it.”
Bloomberg writes of the Pope’s visit to the U.S.: “In one small symbol, Francis chose a humble Fiat 500L to travel from Joint Base Andrews outside Washington, where his plane landed, to the Vatican envoy’s residence in the city. The compact car was dwarfed in his motorcade by the Secret Service’s hulking sport utility vehicles.”
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