The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail

...Even the hardened military man watches the mass desertion of his army with equanimity and admits that he, too, could probably not bring himself to pull the trigger against the "helpless invaders ." His moral dilemma depends entirely on his perceiving the invaders as individuals, for the invaders' humanity depends on their individuality . Thus, while the overall problem for those who might resist the horde is understanding why the West should be defended, their specific, essential problem is finding the moral justification for killing a single invader—man, woman, or child—marching forward, unarmed . To this problem Raspail offers no solution...

...But Raspail explains why . The Indochina refugees, like earthquake victims, are not mythical " underdogs " ; their suffering was caused by no Western "oppressor" (in fact, the very opposite : they have fled a regime which represents "the people" against "oppressors") ; therefore they are not a legitimate or interesting subject for compassion...

...They know something is fundamentally wrong, but nowhere can anyone say precisely what it is . In fact, they " know" what they must do...

...No eight hundred thousand voices could drone their chant to Mozart's notes . Mozart had never written to stir the masses, but to touch the heart of each single human being, in his private self...

...For a brief moment all of France is engulfed in crazed ecstasy . And then panic...

...After Mr . Marshall Frady described Bobby as "a protean revolutionary conscience [who] appeared in the form of a prince of the privileged orders," one even wonders what country the Kennedys supposedly lived in...

...Without an alternative vision, why should we care...

...I n our time, no lie once set forth on the pages of the New York Times and welcomed in certain other august sanctums can ever be put to flight . According to one theory, times of decadence are times of artistic vigor, and it is on the artistic barrenness of our time that I have always staked my innocent hope that all is not so THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS Edited with an Introduction by Edwin G . Dolan With many eminent economists seeking a more thorough explanation of the nature of market phenomena, many serious scholars have increasingly focused on analyses in the tradition of Carl Menger and the Austrian School of economics . Presenting the best introduction to the current Austrian paradigm,The Foundations of Modem Austrian Economics includes essays by Israel Kirzner, Ludwig Lachmann, Gerald O'Driscoll, Murray Rothbard, and others . The selections include papers on the nature and significance of praxeology and comparative statics, Austrian and neo-Ricardian capital theory, Austrian and neoclassical monetary and trade cycle theory, and other areas . This volume examines the main gallery of Austrian ideas and contrasts this tradition with more conventional economic approaches...

...More than anything else, The Camp of the Saints is a devastating attack on the cult of guilt-ridden Western idealism . The players are all there : emissaries from the Vatican and the World Council of Churches, the "young millionaire performers"— radical chic on a heroic scale...

...The result has been some of the steamiest fiction in recent years . One sees it being wept over in sorority houses and imitated by third-rate homosexual novelists, but surely no serious student of American politics believes in it . After slogging through countless passages about the boys' struggles with destiny, their lighter sides and their darker sides, their courage, their passion, their goddamned "laconic wits," and so on, one wonders : Is there any reality to the Camelot buncombe at all...

...This is most evident in Raspail's characterization of the invaders as a mob of "beasts," devoid of all humanity . He thereby defies the Left's understanding of the invaders as quintessential "underdogs" and victims whose condition—even inhumanity—is the West's responsibility, not their own . These days, to blame the "victim" is to be incomprehensible...

...As the armada approaches, he describes the "mercy" of this idealism, as practiced by the World Council: You never saw the pastors fly their missions of mercy when no radical issue was at stake . For an earthquake in Turkey, say, or a flood in Tunisia...

...there is more . The first Came lotian moments occurred in an hour of rare tranquility, yet Camelot's ministers saw only crisis . The rhetoric was menacing ; the policies reckless ; the aftermath unreason at home, a huge international arms race abroad, and America's longest, most misECONOMICS AS A COORDINATION PROBLEM: The Contributions of Friedrich A . Hayek by Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr...

...240 Pages, Index $15.00 Cloth, $4 .95 Paper ($5 .50 in Canada) For free catalog please write: SH&EEMDc MANEDELR,E INWCS SLL 6700 Squibb Road/Mission, KS 66202 directed war . Nonetheless, to this day Camelot's faithful identify themselves adamantly and oleaginously as peacemakers...

...It is certainly not an omission Solzhenitsyn would have made...

...Foreword by F. A. Hayek This first full-length examination of Hayek's work in economics traces his contributions from his lectures on the business cycle to his papers on the pricing system...

...Does the Hon . Teddy exist today...

...They go right past him, oblivious, savage, determined to find milk and honey . When he realizes what has happened, he saves an old woman who has fallen beneath the mob, and clutches her to him, seeking a friendly soul—"his one remaining link with life ." Raspail strikingly dramatizes the extent to which the millenarian Left has come to control the vocabulary of idealism . Even the strongest of his characters, the men of greatest insight—a government minister, the publisher of a small political journal, a colonel in the army—are affected...

...After all, the sympathy for the armada so vividly portrayed by Raspail is noticeably absent from a real-life problem of apparently similar circumstances : the Indochina refugees...

...Similarly, the idealism of the West—that which stirs us to defend it—has nothing to do with its material riches ; it has to do with its commitment to individual freedom and dignity—a commitment which, by liberating individual creativity, makes material and other kinds of progress possible . Wealth is simply a by-product...

...The point is made dramatically toward the end of the book as the horde is coming up the beach, and a hippie called Panama Ranger rushes down to greet them, hands extended...

...284 Pages, Index $12.00 Cloth, $4 .95 Paper ($5 .50 in Canada) STUDIES IN ECONOMIC UI EORY Introducing a Distinguished New Book Series The American Spectator December 1978 37...

...Professor O'Driscoll places the significance of that work in the context of current debate . He shows that in Hayek's considering general equilibrium theory a mere starting point for economic analysis, Hayek rejected orthodox neoclassical theory as inadequate . To Hayek, the real economic problem was to describe how millions of people, each of whom knows little or nothing about the plans and resources of others, could remotely approach an equilibrium state . Instead, he approached the problem by masterfully describing the distribution of information as a dynamic process, coordinating the otherwise disparate plans of individual agents...

...Raspail' s defiance of conventional moral categories creates another problem : Many might dismiss the book as racist . Indeed, on the dust-jacket Max Lerner is quoted emphasizing (and disagreeing with) the racial implications of Raspail's story . But the book is not, essentially, about race at all...

...When applied to suffering, the Western ideal is love and concern for individuals...

...France collapses, and with it, presumably, the West, as other armadas form to make the same voyage...

...Raspail stops there, short of the next sentence, which transforms the paragraph utterly: "And fire from God came down from heaven and devoured them...

...Some may say the book is unrealistic...

...but in the end they cannot bring themselves to kill even a single invader as the horde begins its move toward the beach...

...As we observe his heroes, we begin to recognize the profound materialism in a vision without individual hope—while appreciating that the materialism suffusing Raspail's world makes all hope impossible...

...What a lovely symbol, really...

...Raspail makes this clear at the end when one of the final twenty who choose to resist (and die) turns out to be black . And of course multitudes of those who join the horde are white...

...While the horde's collective vision is rather explicitly materialistic, those who would hold out reveal in their inability to resist effectively that they, too, are infected by the materialism of the dying culture...

...a grandious metaphor based on a Broadway musical and enthused over by the employees of Harvard...

...Raspail's omission of an alternative vision of idealism is the book's most disturbing message...

...Scotch those snickers...

...Our ultimate problem lies in failing to repudiate the vision of an idealized whole...

...The Western world summed up in its ultimate truth...

...BOOK REVIEW The Camp of the Saints Jean Raspail / Charles Scribner's Sons / $ 8 .95 Though translated from the French in 1975, The Camp of the Saints has been largely ignored in this country, and the reason may be guessed from the one-line description on the front cover : "A chilling novel about the end of the white world"— which serves as a caption for the picture, just above, of a white hand holding up a globe, with a dozen colored hands grasping from below...

...The story concerns an immense Third World armada of 100 ships, bringing one million starving, diseased Indians from the Ganges to settle in the promised land of Europe...

...But turn the situation around...

...Did Bobby Kennedy ever really exist...

...Raspail's unremitting negativism appears even before the story begins, in the first of three epigrams (from Apocalypse XX, Lawrence Durrell, and Solzhenitsyn): And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison, and will go forth and deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and will gather them together for the battle ; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea . And they went up over the breadth of the earth and encompassed the camp of the saints, and the beloved city...

...They show up in sad hovels in the Mississippi Delta, at celebrity tennis tournaments, at remote Eskimo villages...

...While we have received large numbers of them, almost no public concern has been expressed about them...

...The book has been poorly received by the establishment press because it brutally defies the conventional categories of intellectual and moral discourse...

...their suffering has stirred nothing but indifference from our professional moralizers...

...When the horde arrives in southern France it meets virtually no resistance, and France collapses in a matter of weeks...

...For year the Kennedys have been America's ceremonial Catholics, always turning up in the front pew of some stately cathedral whenever the occasion called...

...But unlike Tom Wolfe's satire, Raspail's attack is merciless and without humor...

...And then there are the untimely accidents —and, thank God, no cameras...

...Here we were more than halfway into the twentieth century . It was the end of American innocence . For several decades the profs and the pundits had been assiduously delousing us of our accumulated jingoistic myths, and suddenly they turned and slammed down on us the most elaborate myth of all : the myth that a wheeler-dealer vulgarian, as rich as he was brutal, sired a family of archangels, fairy godmothers, and three genius sons who, despite private lives of sham and shallowness beyond belief, would somehow pull America—then the richest and freest nation on earth—out of a mysterious torpor into an Augustinian Age . How this would be accomplished has never been made clear, for the fabulists of Camelot spend very little time talking about ideas or policies . Rather they devote most of their wind to elucidating the boys ' mesmerizing personalities and their good intentions...

...One looks at the mountains of books dedicated to spreading the Camelot buncombe and one sees a Himalayan range of improbabilities: a legend of endless youth and exquisite romance spread by chelonian profs...

...make the refugees inspired by hatred of everything Western . In such circumstances, it is certain that the merciful and idealistic would react very differently...

...Without an alternative vision, it is little wonder that the West falls...

...The Left's concern about suffering is a concern not for individuals, but for collectives . Not just any collective : only those engaged in open protest against the core values of Western society . The tension between the individual and the collective is a dominant theme in the book . In this regard, Raspail finds the essence of the West in Mozart: What was there in the world more Western than Mozart, more civilized, more perfect...

...Materialism has never been—and cannot be—the animating purpose of a 36 The American Spectator December 1978 society, or its underlying justification...

...What pious thoughts are on their minds when the cameras click, I have wondered .) Then they are off to the dance floors, the ski slopes, the Via Veneto, and the Champs Elysees—always the cameras are there...

...But they would always be there to answer the call with supplies for the Palestine refugee camps, the Angola freedom fighters, the Bantu liberation armies—in fact, wherever A . Lawrence Chickering is executive director of the Institute for Contemporary Studies . A. Lawrence Chickering the voice of hate was as loud as the voice of distress...

...It is a vision which, in avoiding individual choice, rests ultimately on coercion and thus serves only to camouflage—and then intensify—aggression and hate . In circumventing individual choice and freedom, this vision loses all contact with true idealism— which rests on the hope that individuals, left free, will choose the good . This insight is critical to an understanding of what makes the West worth defending...

...The Camp of the Saints dramatizes the problem we face, but in its omissions also exemplifies it . q EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) Think of it...

...Not "love of mankind," but love of individual men...