Invasion of the boat people! Not to worry: the Carlyle Club will hold them off while you get help from French patriot Jean Raspail and The Camp of the Saints.
- Treason and colonization: They’re in the news again, masquerading as amnesty and immigration.
- Introducing The Camp of the Saints: Jean Raspail’s brilliant 1973 novel predicted the Third World’s colonization of the West.
- “It is later than you think…” Author’s introduction to the 1985 French edition of The Camp of the Saints.
- A turd eater in Calcutta: Where did it all begin?
- Traitors at the Belgian consulate: “You’ve gone too far! And on purpose!”
- The fleet sets sail: “We won’t be coming back.”
- Colonization in progress: Meanwhile, in the real world, Raspail’s vision continues to unfold, from Canada to Australia to France.
- Meet Clément Dio: “[M]ay I ask if the government has any plans to ease the plight of these poor, suffering souls? It’s reaching a point where we can’t sit idly by…” On a totally unrelated note:
- How progressive ideas spread: The elites have trained your children well. “Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail…” Plus:
- The South African threat: What happens when the Last Chance Armada meets the country everyone loves to hate? Plus:
- Dio’s revenge: The fleet is about to make landfall, and Dio wants to be there to witness his final revenge against the hated West.
- Dio’s end: The wages of sin is death.
- White guilt singularity: Progressives in Bangladesh have succeeded in fusing refugees to climate change, creating an inescapable black hole of white guilt.
- “Pure theater!”: “The ones who truly love their traditions don’t take them too seriously.” Plus:
- Recommended reading: As always, you can learn more about the topics covered in this issue with our extensive reading list.
- Happy Valentine’s day from Radish
Treason and colonization, better known as amnesty and immigration, are in the news again as progressives from both parties — ruling class Democrats and fake opposition Republicans — set aside their superficial differences and work together to complete the process of national suicide begun by the loathsome Ted Kennedy in 1965, flooding our country with tens of millions of Mesoamerican colonists — most of them on welfare, few of them loyal to or even particularly fond of their new country.
No, Mayor Bloomberg (you other loathsome traitor), national suicide does not refer to a lack of immigrants. America does not need more college students — no, not even STEM. We have plenty of STEM. It is not necessary to ransack the Third World for software developers, let alone unskilled laborers, and in the process reduce white people, who made up 90% of America in 1960, to a minority in their own country by 2043.
Of course, I’m not really speaking to our treasonous ruling class, who are beyond reason. For them, the rope. No, I’m speaking to all the basically decent Americans who can see their beloved country going horribly wrong in such obvious ways, but are so worn down by years of Democratic race-baiting and Republican stupidity that they need to be reminded that:
- yes, it is obvious that you must control* your borders;
- no, it is not your responsibility as Americans to feed and clothe and house and educate Haitians and Ethiopians and Cambodians; and most of all,
- no, there is nothing at all wrong with wanting to preserve your cultural and biological heritage.
Or, in the simplest possible terms:
To hell with equality, diversity and opportunity. This is our country, and you can’t have it.
So that is why I am here: to remind you of that stuff. To that end, I’ve brought a remarkable book: The Camp of the Saints (1973), by Jean Raspail, to which we now turn…
*A task, by the way, which could easily be accomplished with some barbed wire and the heavily armed patriots to patrol it, neither of which is in short supply — although for some reason most of your heavily armed patriots seem to be wandering around Muslim countries getting needlessly shot at, so how about bringing them home already?
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Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel predicted the Third World’s colonization of the West, today often referred to by euphemisms like “immigrants” and “refugees.”
(Above: UN “Refugee” Agency (UNHCR) photo of Third World invaders at sea in the Mediterranean.)
In recent times, France has produced a remarkable number of great reactionaries, including Guillaume Faye, the subject of Radish 1.2. This week, it is my pleasure to introduce another, Jean Raspail, through his prophetic 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.
“A perfervid racist diatribe,” shrieked the New York Times on the occasion of the first English translation. Time magazine declared the book “a bilious tirade” that merited a response only because it arrived “trailing clouds of praise from French savants” (including the famous dramatist Jean Anouilh, who called it “a haunting book of irresistible force and calm logic”). More recently, the despicable Southern Poverty Law Center smeared the book as “a racist fantasy.”
Now aren’t you just a little curious to see what Raspail actually wrote?
If not, we may turn to more favorable assessments: “remarkable” and “riveting” (Publisher’s Weekly); “sensational” (Wall Street Journal); “audacious and imaginative fiction” (San Francisco Chronicle); “will succeed in shocking and challenging the complacent contemporary mind” (Library Journal); “no reader will remain unaffected by the questions it raises” (Baltimore Sun); “as frightening as it is probable” (Weekender); “I cannot recall when, if ever, I have read a book of such stunning force and disturbing content” (Peninsula Living); “an exciting, superbly written book” (Pacific Sun Literary Quarterly); and so on.
Remarkably, in 1994, the now hopelessly progressive Atlantic made Camp the centerpiece of ‘Must It Be the Rest Against the West?’
The recovery of this neglected work helps us to call attention to the key global problem of the final years of the twentieth century: unbalanced wealth and resources, unbalanced demographic trends, and the relationship between the two.
… However the debate unfolds, it is, alas, likely that a large part of it… will have advanced little beyond the considerations and themes that are at the heart of one of the most disturbing novels of the late twentieth century… It will take more than talk to prove the prophet wrong.
Now that has to at least make you a little curious! Luckily, The Camp of the Saints is no longer hard to obtain: it’s available free of charge at the Internet Archive (albeit with a handful of typos).
We’re also fortunate that “one of the most disturbing novels” of our time happens to be exciting, suspenseful, and quite funny. So there really is no excuse not to read it.
In this issue, you’ll find excerpts from The Camp of the Saints interspersed with news and opinion from around the world. We’ll see just how much of Raspail’s dark vision has already come to pass.
But first: a proper introduction to the story…
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Author’s introduction to the 1985 French edition of The Camp of the Saints.
(Above: visual aid from the UNHCR’s ‘Rescue at Sea.’)
Published for the first time in 1973, Camp of the Saints is a novel that anticipates a situation which seems plausible today and foresees a threat that no longer seems unbelievable to anyone: it describes the peaceful invasion of France, and then of the West, by a third world burgeoned into multitudes. At all levels — global consciousness, governments, societies, and especially every person within himself — the question is asked belatedly: what’s to be done?
What’s to be done, since no one would wish to renounce his own human dignity by acquiescing to racism? What’s to be done since, simultaneously, all persons and all nations have the sacred right to preserve their differences and identities, in the name of their own future and their own past?
Our world was shaped within an extraordinary variety of cultures and races, that could only develop to their ultimate and singular perfection through a necessary segregation. The confrontations that flow (and have always flowed) from this, are not racist, nor even racial. They are simply part of the permanent flow of opposing forces that shape the history of the world. The weak fade and disappear, the strong multiply and triumph.
For example, since the time of the Crusades and the great land and sea discoveries, and up to the colonial period and its last-ditch battles, Western expansionism responded to diverse motivations — ethical, political, or economic — but racism had no part and played no role in it, except perhaps in the soul of evil people. The relative strength of forces was in our favor, that’s all. That these were applied most often at the expense of other races — though some were thereby saved from their state of mortal torpor — was merely a consequence of our appetite for conquest and was not driven by or a cover for ideology. Now that the relationship between the forces has been diametrically reversed, and our ancient West — tragically now in a minority status on this earth — retreats behind its dismantled fortifications while it already loses the battles on its own soil, it begins to behold, in astonishment, the dull roar of the huge tide that threatens to engulf it. One must remember the saying on ancient solar calendars: ‘It is later than you think…’ [...]
But, to go back to the action in Camp of the Saints — if it is a symbol, it doesn’t arise from any utopia; it no longer arises from any utopia. If it is a prophecy, we live its beginnings today. Simply, in Camp of the Saints, it is treated as a classic tragedy, according to the literary principles of unity of time, place and action everything takes place within three days along the shores of Southern France, and it is there that the destiny of white people is sealed. Though the action was then already well developed along the lines described in Camp of the Saints (boat people, the radicalization of the North African community and of other foreign groups in France, the strong psychological impact of human rights organizations, the inflamed evangelism of the religious leadership, a hypocritical purity of consciences, refusal to look the truth in the face, etc.) in actuality the unraveling will not take place in three days but, almost certainly, after many convulsions, during the first decades of the third millennium…
It’s enough to go back to the scary demographic predictions for the next thirty years, and those I will cite are the most favorable ones: encircled by seven billion people, only seven hundred million of them white, hardly a third of them in our little Europe, and those no longer in bloom but quite old. They face a vanguard of four hundred million North Africans and Muslims, fifty percent of them less than twenty years old, those on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean arriving ahead of the rest of the world! Can one imagine for a second, in the name of whatever ostrich-like blindness, that such a disequilibrium can endure?
For the West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level — nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles. It is only the soul that forms the weave of gold and brass from which the shields that save the strong are fashioned. I can hardly discern any soul in us. … They are content to just endure. Mechanically, they ensure their survival from week to week, ever more feebly. Under the flag of an illusory internal solidarity and security, they are no longer in solidarity with anything, or even cognizant of anything that would constitute the essential commonalities of a people. In the area of the practical and materialistic, which alone can still light a spark of interest in their eyes, they form a nation of petty bourgeois which, in the name of the riches it inherited and is less and less deserving of, rewards itself — and continues to reward itself in the middle of crisis — with millions of domestic servants: immigrants. Ah! How they will shudder! The domestics have innumerable relatives on this side and beyond the seas, a single starving family that populates all the earth. A global Spartacus…
But the petty bourgeois, deaf and blind, continues to play the buffoon without knowing it. Still miraculously comfortable in his lush fields, he cries out while glancing toward his nearest neighbor ‘Make the rich pay!’ Does he know, does he finally know that it is he who is the rich guy, and that the cry for justice, that cry of all revolutions, projected by millions of voices, is rising soon against him, and only against him. That’s the whole theme of Camp of the Saints.
So, what to do?
I am a novelist. I have no theory, no system nor ideology to propose or defend. It just seems to me that we are facing a unique alternative either learn the resigned courage of being poor or find again the inflexible courage to be rich. In both cases, so-called Christian charity will prove itself powerless. The times will be cruel.
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Where did it all begin? An excerpt from The Camp of the Saints, chapter five.
If any logic at all can be found in the way a popular myth gets its start, then we have to go back to Calcutta, to the Consulate General of Belgium, to look for the beginnings of the one we can call, for the moment, “the myth of the newfound paradise.” A shabby little consulate, set up in an old colonial villa on the edge of the diplomatic quarter, waking one morning to find a silent throng milling around outside its doors. At daybreak the Sikh guard had chained the front gate shut. From time to time he would point the barrel of his antique rifle between the bars, to urge back the ones who had pushed their way up front. But since he was a decent sort, and since there was really no threat to himself or the gate he was guarding, he would tell them now and again, nicely as he could:
“Look, maybe in a little while you can have some rice. But then you’ll have to go. It’s no use standing around. See the announcement? It’s signed by the Consul himself.”
“What does it say?” the crowd would yell, since none of them could read. “Tell us… Read it out loud…”
“Pursuant to the royal decree of such-and-such date, the government of Belgium has decided to terminate until further notice all adoption procedures presently under way. Henceforth no new requests for adoption will be accepted. Similarly, no Belgian entry visas will be granted for those children currently being processed for departure, even in those cases where a legal adoption and dates the present decree.”
A long moan ran through the crowd. [...] [T]he Sikh guard — a master at gauging mass distress — guessed that their number had doubled, at least, since the day before.
Up front, a woman stepped out of the crowd and started to speak. All the rest stopped to listen, as if she were speaking for each and every one. She was holding a child in her outstretched arms, a little boy, maybe two years old, thrusting his face so close to the gate that it made him cross his big, gaping eyes.
“Look at my son,” she cried. “Isn’t he pretty? Isn’t he solid and strong for his age, with his plump little thighs, and his arms, and his nice straight legs? [...] And his face. Not a scab, not a fly. [...] No, he’s a good, healthy child. Like the papers said he had to be. Because we fed him the best, we fattened him up just for that. From the day he was born. We saw how pretty he was, and we made up our minds we would send him. So he could grow up there, and be rich, and happy [...] And now you’re trying to tell me that we fattened him up for nothing, that his poor father slaved in the ricefields and worked himself to death, all for nothing, and that I’m going to have him on my hands for good, and keep him, and feed him? … No, it’s my turn to eat! And I’m hungry, you hear? [...]”
A hundred women pushed forward, each one with a child in her outstretched arms. [...] And the crowd howled, “Take them, take them! They’re theirs now! Take them!,” while hundreds of others pressed forward behind the ones up front, with armfuls of babes by the hundreds, and hundreds of bigger ones too, all ripe for adoption, pushing them up to the brink, to take the giant leap to paradise.
The Belgian decree, far from stemming the human flood, had increased it tenfold. [...] The dimmer the chance, the brighter the hope. And so, there they were, thousands of wretched creatures, hoping, crowding against the consulate gates, like the piles of fruit a crafty merchant heaps on his stand, afraid it might spoil [...].
The simpler the folk, the stronger the myth. Soon everyone heard their babble, believed their fantasies, and dreamed the same wild dreams of life in the West. The problem is that, in famine-racked Calcutta, “everyone” means quite a few. Could that be one explanation? …
Way back, behind the backmost women in the crowd, a giant of a man stood stripped to the waist, holding something over his head and waving it like a flag. Untouchable pariah, this dealer in droppings, dung roller by trade, molder of manure briquettes, turd eater in time of famine, and holding high in his stinking hands a mass of human flesh.
At the bottom, two stumps; then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted and bent out of shape; no neck, but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head, and a bald little skull, with two holes for eyes and a hole for a mouth, but a mouth that was no mouth at all — no throat, no teeth — just a flap of skin over his gullet. The monster’s eyes were alive, and they stared straight ahead, high over the crowd, frozen forward in a relentless gaze — except, that is, when his pariah father would wave him bodily back and forth.
It was just that lidless gaze that flashed through the bars of the gate and caught the eye of the Consul himself, staring in spellbound horror. He had stepped outside for a look at the crowd, to see what was going on. But it wasn’t the crowd he saw. And all at once he closed his eyes and began to shout: “No rice! No visas! No anything! You won’t get another thing, do you hear? Now get out! Get out! Every one of you! Out!”
As he turned to rush off, a sharp little stone hit him square on the forehead and left a gash. The monster’s eyes lit up. The quiver that ran through his frame was his way of thanking his father. And that was all. No other act of violence. Yet suddenly the keeper of the milk and honey, stumbling back to his consulate, head in hands, struck the crowd as a rather weak defender of the sacred portals of the Western World. So weak, in fact, that if only they could wait, sooner or later he was bound to drop the keys. Could that be one explanation?
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“You’ve gone too far! And on purpose!” An excerpt from chapter six.
(Above: another photo from ‘India Is Filthy.’)
“You and your pity!” the Consul shouted. “Your damned, obnoxious, detestable pity! Call it what you please: world brotherhood, charity, conscience… I take one look at you, each and every one of you, and all I see is contempt for yourselves and all you stand for. Do you know what it means? Can’t you see where it’s leading? You’ve got to be crazy. [...] You’ve got to be out of your minds just to sit back and let it all happen, little by little. All because of your pity. [...]”
The Consul was sitting behind his desk, a bandage on his forehead. Across from him, some ten or so figures sat rooted to wooden chairs, like apostles carved in stone on a church façade. [...] They all just sat there without a word.
“The trouble is,” the Consul continued, “you’ve gone too far! And on purpose! Because you’re so convinced it’s the right thing to do. Have you any idea how many children from the Ganges here have been shipped off to Belgium? Not to mention the rest of Europe, and those other sane countries that closed their borders off before we did! Forty thousand, that’s how many! Forty thousand in five years! And all of you, so sure you could count on our people. Playing on their sentiments, their sympathy. Perverting their minds with vague feelings of self-reproach, to twist their Christian charity to your own bizarre ends. Weighing our good, solid burghers down with a sense of shame and guilt. [...] And in two-faced times like these, you can bet the government won’t admit what’s really behind that racist decree. [...] You’ve gone and worked up a race problem out of whole cloth, right in the heart of the white world, just to destroy it. That’s what you’re after. You want to destroy our world, our whole way of life. There’s not one of you proud of his skin, and all that it stands for…”
“Not proud, or aware of it, either,” one of the statues corrected. “That’s the price we have to pay for the brotherhood of man. We’re happy to pay it.”
“Yes, well, we’ve gone beyond that now,” said the Consul. “Adoption isn’t the issue anymore, discontinued or otherwise. I’ve been on the phone with my colleagues in all the Western consulates. They tell me it’s just the same. Great crowds outside, milling around, quiet, as if they’re waiting for something to happen. [...] Wherever a Western flag is flying, there’s a crowd out there, waiting. Just waiting. And that’s not all. I’ve just heard that back in the hinterlands whole villages are swarming out onto the roads to Calcutta.”
“Very true,” said another of the statues [...]. “They’re the villages we’ve been working with, mainly.” [...]
“You mean you had the nerve…” the Consul began, leaving his question and thought in the air. “No! I don’t believe it! You wouldn’t go that far!”
“Quite so,” said a third statue [...]. “I wouldn’t have gone that far myself.”
“Are you saying you’ve lost control?”
“I’m afraid we have. But it doesn’t matter. Most of us are glad to go along. You’re right. There is something brewing, and it’s going to be tremendous. The crowds can feel it, even if they have no notion what it’s all about. Myself, I have one explanation. Instead of the piecemeal adoptions that these poor folk have hoped for and lived for, perhaps now they’re hoping and living for something much bigger, something wild and impossible, like a kind of adoption en masse. …”
“Nice work, Your Grace,” the Consul retorted, simply. “A lovely job for a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church! [...] You’ve been ‘bearing witness.’ Isn’t that what you call it? Bearing witness to what? To your faith? Your religion? To your Christian civilization? Oh no, none of that! Bearing witness against yourselves, like the anti-Western cynics you’ve all become. Do you think the poor devils that flock to your side aren’t any the wiser? Nonsense! They see right through you. For them, white skin means weak convictions. They know how weak yours are, they know you’ve given in. You can thank yourselves for that. [...] [T]hey see that your conscience hurts you for keeping it all to yourselves. You can dress up in rags and pretend to be poor, eat handfuls of curry to your hearts’ content. [...] It’s no use, they’ll always envy you, no matter how you try. [...] 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. Take 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… Well, thank God we still have an ocean between us!”
“Yes, an ocean. We do have an ocean,” a fourth statue observed, lost in reflection at the obvious thought.
“You know,” the Consul went on, “there’s a very old word that describes the kind of men you are. It’s ‘traitor.’ [...] It’s a species the West abounds in, and it seems to get richer and richer the smaller it grows. [...] But the mind decays, the spirit warps. And the traitors keep coming. [...] Well, that’s how it is, and no one can change it. I can’t, I’m sure. But I can tell you this: I may be wrong about your results, but I find your actions beneath contempt. [...]”
One of the statues stood up. [...] He was, in fact, the atheist philosopher, known in the West by the name of Ballan.
“Passports, countries, religions, ideals, races, borders, oceans…” Ballan shouted. “What bloody rubbish!”
And he left the room without another word. [...]
Outside the consulate gates, Ballan elbowed his way through the crowd, through the crush of monster children [...]. He reached into his pockets, always filled with sticky sweets, and stuffed their shapeless mouths. Then he noticed the giant, the turd eater… And Ballan called out: “What are you doing here, dung man? What do you want?”
“Please, take us with you. Please…”
“Today’s the day, my friend. We’ll both be in paradise, you and I.” [...]
And Ballan smiled a compassionate smile.
Could that be one explanation?…
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“We won’t be coming back.” Excerpts from chapters nine to eleven and thirteen.
The India Star, moored at her berth for over a year, was a sixty-year-old steamer, veteran of the India mail run back under the British. Old as she was, she had stood up fairly well to the early rigors of independence. [...] Of her five stacks, straight up, like pipes, four were lopped off at different levels, by time, by rust, by lack of care, by chance. … In such a state she hardly seemed fit for anything but one final act of heroic desperation. Perhaps that was what the captain had in mind when he ordered his tattered crew to put the rotting gangplanks down again, the same ones he had had them pull in just three days before, when the crowd seemed about to swell to precarious size.
Actually, the captain’s action would be quite hard to fathom, were it not for the strong likelihood that someone had put the idea in his head. [...] [T]o wit, a group of nameless Indians, whites, and a Chinaman, experts one and all in mob psychology. They were the movers, the undercover force. Acting on pure intuition, they knew precisely what to do. One of them stationed himself on the bridge, persuasive grenade in hand, while the others proceeded to question the captain. Just how much would it take — coal, water, supplies, the barest essentials — to make the trip to Europe?
“And back?” the captain had asked. “That is, if she’ll make it…”
“We won’t be coming back,” the one with the grenade had replied. [...]
The turd eater went on board before all the rest. As the monster totem’s rigid head traced its wake through the crowd, like a periscope poking up out of the water, they all fell still. [...] For the ones on the edge of the swarm — and those, even farther away, who couldn’t see a thing, but who heard the description passed back to the outer reaches from mouth to mouth — the prophet’s ascent became a god’s ascension. Now no one could doubt that the enterprise must be divine. No one, that is, but the little commando bands, instigators all, who at that very moment were visiting the other ships in port, as well as every other port along the Ganges. [...]
The rush that followed was peaceful enough, but it took its toll of dead: [...] time and again the narrow, teeming gangplanks spilled over like brimming gutters into the pitch-black water between ship and pier. And many a soul sank down beneath the wooden pilings, to join those others who had gone before, the first to win the newfound paradise. [...]
On that day and the days that followed, in all the ports along the Ganges, a hundred ships were stormed in the very same way, and not without a certain collusion by captains and crews. [...]
At the mouth of the Ganges, the delta’s reddened waters paled abruptly as they emptied into the vast Gulf of Bengal, and the hundred ships of the refugee fleet steered a sluggish southwesterly course toward the Straits of Ceylon. [...] On the lead ship, the India Star, the captain’s fancy cap had changed heads, and sat perched now on a bald, shapeless stump.
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Meanwhile, in the real world, Raspail’s vision continues to unfold, from Canada to Australia to France. These aren’t “refugees” or “asylum seekers” or even “migrants.” They’re colonists, invaders, armed with a single, deadly weapon: their weakness.
From left to right:
To France from Iraq (2001)
AP: “An aging freighter that ran aground early Saturday near France’s ritzy Riviera was carrying more than 900 people, most of them Iraqi Kurds, in what French authorities say was a scheme to smuggle immigrants into Western Europe. … ‘It’s a miracle that these people are here,’ said Dr. Jean-Jacques Raymond.”
AP: “Patrick Devedjian, spokesman for the conservative [!] Rally for the Republic party of President Jacques Chirac, said the refugees should be given a humanitarian welcome. … A number of Frejus residents were moved by the refugees’ plight, and started showing up Sunday with donations of clothing and toys.”
To Greece from… All Over (2008)
“The authorities in Greece detained 112,364 illegal immigrants in 2007. …
“Concerned islanders and church officials have offered to aid the children…
“Criticism of Greece was already mounting for its treatment of immigrants and for turning down applicants for political asylum. Last month, the [UNHCR] said the Greek system was so flawed that other European countries should not return asylum seekers to Greece.”
To Canada from Sri Lanka (2010)
CTV: “Preparations are being made to feed and house an unknown number of women and children onboard the Sri Lankan migrant ship approaching B.C.’s shores. …
“‘Think of a child who’s just fled a refugee camp… who’s suffered so much,’ Harsha Walia of No One is Illegal told CTV News.
“Canada’s former high commissioner to Sri Lanka believes that bringing women and children could be a calculated decision on the part of the people organizing the Sun Sea’s voyage.”
“‘They probably deliberately brought a lot of women and children along to elicit sympathy. …’”
To Italy from Libya (2011)
AP: “The U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday that Libyan authorities appear to be encouraging African migrants to board unseaworthy boats bound for Europe.” (It’s a lot easier to trick Europeans into believing foreign invaders are really refugees if their boats can barely float.)
“A spokeswoman for the [UNHCR] said the conflict in the North African country has opened up a route for migrants that was closed for two years because of an agreement between Libya and Italy.
“Already some 14,000 people mostly from sub-Saharan Africa have used Libya as a springboard to reach Europe…
“The [UNHCR (as usual)] has asked countries to consider permanently taking in up to 6,000 migrants.”
To Australia from All Over, Too (2012)
AP: “Four people are believed to have died and 130 others were rescued after a crowded boat carrying asylum seekers to Australia capsized and sank Wednesday.”
L.A. Times: “the country is agonizing again over how to handle asylum seekers who come pleading for help.”
AFP: “Canberra clinched a deal last year to send 800 boat people to Malaysia in exchange for 4,000 of that country’s registered refugees…
“But [the] fragile coalition government was unable to pass the required legislation through parliament and asylum-seekers have continued to risk the voyage, mostly via Indonesia.”
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We first encounter this popular young political commentator in chapter seventeen, at a press conference on the fleet held by Jean Orelle, France’s official spokesman.
“Monsieur Orelle, without jumping to conclusions as to their final destination, may I ask if the government has any plans to ease the plight of these poor, suffering souls? It’s reaching a point where we can’t sit idly by…”
The speaker was one Ben Suad, alias Clément Dio, one of the monster’s most faithful minions, concoctor in chief of the poisonous slops poured piping hot each Monday into the feeble, comatose brains of the six hundred thousand readers of his weekly rag, served up in its fancy sauces.
Citizen of France, North African by blood, with an elegant crop of kinky hair and swarthy skin — doubtless passed down from a certain black harem slavegirl, sold to a brothel for French officers in Rabat (as he learned from the bill of sale in his family papers) — married to a Eurasian woman officially declared Chinese and author of several best-selling novels, Dio possessed a belligerent intellect that thrived on springs of racial hatred barely below the surface, and far more intense than anyone imagined.
Like a spider deep in the midst of French public opinion, he had webbed it over so thick with fine gossamer strands that it scarcely clung to life. A cordial type all the same, given to great informative bursts if he chose, though always one-way, sincere enough to put his convictions on the line and draw the occasional fire of intelligent colleagues — of whom there were fewer and fewer, alas!, and whom people had all long since stopped reading.
In those topsy-turvy days the Left sprawled out in abundance, while the rightist press, in a hopeless muddle, languished alone in its trenches, deserted. The home front, meanwhile, true to form, fraternized high and low, unabashed and unrestrained.
Politically, Dio’s columns were something of a hash, whipped up with a proper dose of utopian pap. But most dangerous of all was his very special talent — unrivaled, in fact — for planting his mines through the waters of current French life, far and wide, just surface-deep, always finding those areas still intact, and larding them through with the deadly devices, spewed mass-produced from his prolific brain.
“Citizen of the world”
Jean Orelle, we should note, was one of his most devout readers, never missing the weekly pause in the journey along his ageing imagination, and confiding to his intimates, with a chuckle, that “this Dio chap” reminded him so of the fearless reformer he himself used to be, “Lots of nerve! Plenty of new ideas! And a real, burning passion for the everyday man, the citizen of the world!” Yes, this Dio chap’s citizen of the world, in all his glory! Ah, what a dismal, repulsive creature!
The journalist’s pen gave him many a size and shape, but one thing never changed: his contempt for tradition, his scorn for Western Man per se, and above all the patriotic Frenchman. Like a kind of anti-Joan of Arc, charged by King Dio with a thousandfold mission. To wit, to crush with the weight of shame and remorse the common, foot-slogging soldier of the Western World, lord of its ancient battles, deserted by all his generals to a man, but a powerful force all the same.
In column after column, the anti-Joan became, by turns, an Arab workman, snubbed and insulted; a publisher of smut, hauled into court; a black bricklayer, exploited by his boss; a theater director with a censored play; a young Madonna from some leftist slum; a rioter, beaten for ripping up the streets; a café tough, shot in his tracks; a student terrorist; a schoolgirl on the pill; the head of a people’s culture center, summarily fired; a marijuana prophet; a rebel leader dispensing guerrilla justice; a married priest; an adolescent lecher; an incestuous author; a guru of pop; a female dead from an overdose of love; a pummeled Egyptian, a poisoned Greek, a Spaniard, gunned down; a reporter, attacked and beaten; a protester crapping on the Unknown Soldier; a hunger striker, soft in the head; a Vietnam deserter; a big-chief thug from the wrong side of town; a faggot with a medical excuse; a sadistic schoolboy tormenting his teacher; a rapist, mind twisted by racks of hard-core porn; a kidnapper, sure of his righteous cause; an incurable delinquent, victim of his genes or society’s pressures; an abortionist butcher, screaming for his human rights; a Brazilian backwoods wench, sold into São Paulo salons; an Indian dying from a tourist’s measles; a murderer calling for prison reform; a bishop spouting Marx in his pastoral letters; a car thief, mad for speed; a bank thief, mad for publicity’s easy life; a maidenhead thief, mad for free and easy sex; a Bengali dead of starvation…
And so many more. So many crusading heroes, skillfully chosen to please and persuade. Which they usually did. And why not? When the heart gives way, it’s a Turkish bazaar. Freedom is all or nothing. With the likes of this would-be heartrending rabble, these pseudopathetic peons beating his battering rams against the gates, Dio knew that, in time, he was sure to smash them down. When freedom expands to mean freedom of instinct and social destruction, then freedom is dead. And all the slimy Dio-larvae teem on its corpse, ready to burst into great black moths, heralding angels of the antiworld.
The swimming pool at Saint-Favier
To appreciate the scope of Dio’s power, we could look to a hundred examples. One will suffice: the Saint-Favier swimming-pool scandal. Saint-Favier is a dull, sleepy town stuck away in the Jura, that decided one day to indulge its wild fancy and present itself with a gift sure to rouse an industrious populace lulled by the pipemaker’s lathes. Namely, a swimming pool. Olympic, Hiltonesque, covered in the winter, basking in mountain sun in the summer, a billionaire’s pool on a communal scale, a fabulous toy for the people, democratic to a fault, and always jam-packed (God knows how those French love the water!)…
Well, it just so happened that, in one of the weekly analyses required by law, a lab technician discovered a troop of bacteria — gonococci, to be precise — living on a corner of the metal plate marked “Saint-Favier Municipal Swimming Pool,” happy as could be with their new surroundings, and, in a word, thriving. So well, in fact, that the hospital, much to the doctors’ disbelief and indignation, found itself treating three youngsters with ophthalmic gonorrhea: two girls and a boy — not even related — and one of whom, it should be noted, was a pupil with the Sisters of Perpetual Help. Now, in France, no schooltot does anything much with her eyes but open them wide, agog at the wonders of the world. There had to be an explanation.
And it soon came to light in the files of the hospital, the national health plan, and the factory infirmary, where the records showed that a thousand Arabs — first-rate workers notwithstanding, and socially accepted if not socially absorbed — had been showing up time after time, to the tune of some ten percent, with the aftermaths of a stubborn case of North African clap.
To be utterly fair and unbiased, the authorities proceeded to check through the files of all the Jura natives too. A time-consuming task, but one which the West, personified there in Saint-Favier, felt obliged to perform in the worthy effort to subdue its prejudices. The result, unhappily, merely confirmed them. They turned up a total of two rich young brats, both terribly spoiled, who wouldn’t have dreamed of using the public pool, and one dirty old derelict, who never bathed and didn’t know how to swim. What a blow for the poor town fathers! Such fine folk, too, these laborers, pensioners, railroaders, politicized peasants, placing their leftist ballots in the box, like Eucharists laid on the communion plate, and scratching their chins, deep in thought…
One of them, a delegate from the Communist trade-union party, in a highly emotional search through his papers, brought out a mimeographed document proving that the Arabs were essential to the economic well-being of the nation, and that the sudden resurgence of racism had to be nipped in the bud. Of course, they all agreed. The point was well taken. They were all for the worldwide solidarity of the masses. But still! If their kids’ eyes were going to catch the clap, after all — and in their nice new pool, to boot, that they scrimped their pennies together to pay for — and a dose like you wouldn’t pick up from some army-camp whore, well, Arabs or not, they couldn’t just let the thing get out of hand, and besides, doesn’t everyone know it’s an Arab disease?…
The fine folk believed it was only common sense to vote as they did, and to reach their unanimous decision: namely, that thereafter the only Arabs to use the municipal swimming pool at Saint-Favier would be those with a medical certificate proving that they had no contagious diseases that might be spread by water.
The decree was posted at the entrance to the pool, and in all the Arab cafés and haunts in town. It was, in fact, rather clumsily worded. But that’s hardly a surprise. In times when a spade has ceased to be called a spade, it’s no wonder that thirty-two town fathers — each one a family man, but none with an excess of schooling — should let themselves be trapped by the subtleties of language. …
Dio rubbed his hands with glee, and proceeded to use the Saint-Favier edict as his cover of the week, spread over the newsstands in all its glory (by ultracapitalist distributors, no less), with a big title splashed across, proclaiming: “Anti-Arab Racism Alive and Well!” Six hundred thousand copies. Rather hard to miss! …
In Paris, His Excellency the Algerian ambassador demanded an audience and got it on the spot. The North African press let loose volleys of hate, and the French press picked up the tune, albeit in a minor key. Somewhere there was even the observation that plenty of Frenchwomen jumped into bed with those poor, slandered Arabs, without once insisting to see their bill of health. …
Retaliation took many forms. Oil, for example, was an issue again, as three tankers returned bone dry. And a hundred nice French girls, teaching school in Algeria, were suddenly hauled into the hospital and spread on the stirrups to be plumbed and explored by a squad of medical student commandos, whipped up to a frenzy. Two of them died as a result, but the inquest didn’t last.
On his minister’s orders, the prefect of the Jura quickly reversed the Saint-Favier decree, first for certain technical flaws, and also for its breach of human rights. Dio was exultant, crowing his triumph in one of his best editorials. Because, when all was said and done, he was right. And any time that man was right — which he often was, since he chose his pretexts with diabolical skill — the walls of the ancient citadel were sure to crumble. So the Arabs of Saint-Favier returned en masse to the pool, victorious.
And they had it all to themselves. No townsfolk were seen there again. There wasn’t even talk about building another one, separate from the first. What would be the sense? … And all at once whole sections of New York are deserted, a score of American cities watch the flight to the suburbs — and half the historic Paris pavement too — American tots in their integrated schools fall five years behind, tubercular Gauls flee in droves from our open-air clinics. …
Tally-ho! Tally-ho! Just listen to that battering ram smash at the southern gate!
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On a totally unrelated note, meet the popular young political commentator Touré. (Note his “elegant crop of kinky hair,” not to mention that “swarthy skin”…) Here he is discussing the Republican Party:
It’s an all-white Party. If you just have a bunch of white people, you’re gonna come up with alternate realities that don’t make any sense.
And here he is on Romney describing Obama’s campaign as angry:
You notice he said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the otherization, he’s not like us. … this is niggerization.
On other ordinary words, like welfare and crime:
These code words are ancient racial stereotypes… sliding in covertly, aiming to kill black political viability … Do Democrats use racial code? No. The Democratic party is a racially diverse coalition. There would be no value to playing this game.
On why Americans must vote for Obama despite his first-term failings: to prove they aren’t ‘racist.’
Anyone would vote for a superhero… But… to embrace a nonmagical black person who cannot promise anything but hope, intelligence, sweat and experience, now that comes closer to equality.
On Romney addressing the black supremacist NAACP:
He wanted to be booed by that black audience so that white conservatives [and] undecideds would see that he’s unafraid to talk down to black people…
On racial preferences, from which he (clearly) has benefited his entire life:
I cannot be seen through a color-blind lens and do not wish to be. [No kidding.] Race is an important factor of who I am… many white people have somehow come to view their race as the object of discrimination. … how many black and Hispanic students will it take to satisfy the goal of diversity? … we are nowhere near that point.
On being ‘racist’ against black people, without actually hating black people:
… not hating all [black people] may serve as a valuable safety valve, releasing pressure and proving to the mind itself that it is not racist [i.e., “bad or evil”].
Does any of this seem eerily familiar?
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Albert Dufort takes to the airwaves to sell out the West in chapter eighteen.
(Above: the younger they are, the easier it is to brainwash them with progressive ideology. Leave no child behind!)
Albert Durfort was full of the milk of human kindness. [...] Constant crusader, he would gallop through radioland to the rescue, looking for supposedly desperate causes, barely taking the time to change horses between two campaigns, always panting for breath as he came on the scene just in time to deliver the downtrodden victim, expose a scandal, and lash out at injustice. [...] But no one, not even Durfort himself, could see that our Zorro was flogging dead horses, flying off to the rescue of issues long since won.
Something else, strange but true: he was looked on as the model of the free, objective thinker. He would have been shocked and surprised to learn that he was, in fact, a captive of fashion, bound by all the new taboos, conditioned by thirty years of intellectual terrorism; and that, if the owner and general manager of the station that employed him entrusted ten million good Frenchmen to his care each night, it certainly wasn’t to use his talents to tell them the opposite of what they supposed they believed in. [...]
And so, as he spoke of the armada, sitting astride his branch already sawed more than halfway through, Durfort was his most convincing self, finding just the right words to hit home, to sink into the muck of each heart with a soft little plop. [...]
“You, my faithful supporters and listeners, know that I never mince words. There’s no compromise with despair. There’s no compromise with evil. So I’m sure you won’t mind if my talk gets rough. [...] the time has come now for me to bring into your homes, with the sound of my voice, a million more deported, exiled souls, exiled this time of their own free will, but victims no less of the worst, most heinous miscarriage of justice since the world began. [...] If you want to eat supper in peace, good friends, I suggest you turn your radios off for the next five minutes!” [...]
Three thousand two hundred sixty-seven priests started frantically scribbling with an eye toward the following Sunday — ready-made sermon, delivered to the door, nothing to do with the gospel for the day, but who worries anymore about such minor details? [...]
At the very same moment thirty-two thousand seven hundred forty-two schoolteachers hit on the subject for the next day’s theme: “Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail, by imagining, for example, that one of the desperate families comes to your home and asks you to take them in.” Irresistible, really! And the dear little angel — all simple, childish soul and tender heart — will spread four pages’ worth of infantile pathos, enough to melt a concierge to tears, and his paper will be the best, the teacher will read it in class, and all his little friends will kick themselves for having been much too stingy with their whines and whimpers.
That’s how we mold our men nowadays. Because even the tough, hardhearted little brat, the one with all he needs to succeed in this life, is forced to take part, since children abhor standing out from the crowd. So he’ll have to play along too, and work himself into a hypocritical sweat over the same philanthropic rubbish. And he’ll probably write just as brilliant a theme, clever child that he is, and he may even wind up believing what he writes [...].
Then he’ll go home, like his classmate, both of them proud of their fine compositions. And father, who knows what life is all about, will read the A-plus masterpiece, terrified (if he has the slightest imagination) at the notion of that foreign family of eight coming to live in his three rooms and kitchen, but he’ll sit back and keep his big mouth shut. Mustn’t frustrate the little angels, mustn’t shock them, mustn’t sully their innocent thoughts and risk turning them later into hopeless prigs. No, he’ll wallow, ensnared, in his gutless affection, and chuck his little angel on a cheek flushed with pleasure, telling himself that he’s really a dear, and besides, “out of the mouths of babes,” isn’t that what they say?… The mother will snivel in her handkerchief, eye moist with maternal affection rewarded.
But let the famished Ganges horde show up some morning at their door — assuming, of course, that such a thing could happen — and there’s one damn family that’s bloody well had it! Perhaps instead of an open-armed welcome, despite the prophetic prose of the little remote-controlled angel, they’ll take to their heels. The Western heart, down deep, is all sham. In any event, they’ll have lost the strength and the will to say no! Now, multiply that by a million mindless themes, applauded by a million milksop fathers, and you get some idea of the climate of total decay.
Could that be one explanation?…
At the very same instant, some seven thousand two hundred and twelve lycée professors decided to begin their next day’s classes with a discussion of racism. It didn’t make the slightest difference what they taught: math, English, chemistry, geography, even Latin. After all, whatever his field, isn’t the professor’s role to develop his students’ minds and force them to think?
And so, they would have them speak their piece. The subject was there, ideal, made to order, too good to pass up: the fleet and its mission to cleanse and redeem the capitalist West! A fine topic, politically charged, with something for everyone, a limitless script in that ongoing cinema of the masses, spontaneous and unrehearsed, whose feeble and trite ideas, hashed over again and again, swallowed up any sense of reality, any notion of personal obligation. [...]
Well, there’s no need to go through and count up the millions and millions of Durfort’s faithful listeners. The whole of France gulped down the narcotic: when the time would come to cut off her legs, she was sure to be ready for the operation.
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Our old friend, the UN “Refugee” Agency or UNHCR, offers a unit plan for geography students aged 9–11. How nice of them. Under “Unit Objectives,” we find:
- To encourage in the students empathy for children similar to themselves, who have lost their homes and homelands
- To foster open-mindedness and respect for others
Since when it is a geography teacher’s job to encourage children to empathize with foreign invaders? Anyway, the first image from the unit plan, above, is captioned:
A perilous journey ends in New Zealand citizenship. The Tampa Boys, rescued from the Norwegian freighter off the Australian coast in 2001, at the ceremony in Manukau, NZ.
Very open-minded and empathetic! This next photo, which was not included in the UNHCR lesson plan, shows the other hundreds of (perhaps less photogenic) colonists New Zealand would receive.
The Guardian offers a revealing footnote to the “perilous journey” narrative:
Once on board the MV Tampa the refugees told [60-year-old Captain Arne] Rinnan, one of Norway’s most respected seamen, to change direction. “A delegation of five men came up to the bridge. They behaved aggressively and told us to go to Australia. They said they had nothing to lose,” Rinnan said. …
Now, some people would call that a hijacking. But those people are racists. Here is Captain Rinnan himself, in a 2001 interview:
“… they were behaving in a very aggravated, highly excited manner. Then the body language was kind of threatening and was all up in my face.”
Not to worry! According to a UNHCR press briefing, the “refugees” are adjusting well, in some unspecified way:
… New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark… said… that the lives of New Zealanders had been enriched by having them here.
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“It’s a pretty white-washed world,” Rappoport says of the small city of Ridgefield. “I try to confront students’ limited perspectives.”
Bear in mind that Mindi Rappoport teaches English.
For Rappoport, the mission is personal. Jewish, she grew up in predominantly Christian Fairfield, Conn. … Her husband… was born in Guatemala and was brought to the United States as a child…
“Then the received notions start coming out,” Rappoport says, as students begin to repeat what they’ve heard. “They’re taking jobs.” “They’re terrorists.” “They bring crime and a lot of them belong to gangs.” …
Rappoport says it’s important not to correct students or shout them down [!] when they make these kinds [!] of statements. Instead Rappoport challenges students calmly. “How do you know that?” she asks.
Sounds reasonable: expecting children to cite their sources, then enforcing your own unsourced “received notions.”
The next day, students share some of their entries. Few have changed their minds. That’s when Rappoport shows them an episode from the Morgan Spurlock reality show 30 Days. … In the episode, Frank is strongly opposed to illegal immigration. … The turning point comes when he visits the father’s brother in Mexico and sees firsthand the squalid conditions under which the family lived.
It’s a revealing scene for students, too, that “brings understanding and empathy,” according to Rappoport. … The next day, she says, it’s clear that “the factual experience has enlightened them.”
No, Mindi, a factual experience would involve facts, like the staggering crime and welfare rates for Mesoamerican colonists, or the number of jobs lost to them. What Rappoport subjects her young charges to is emotional battery.
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Pro-colonization propaganda isn’t just for little kids. You never know when a young European-American is going to start thinking terribly racist thoughts about preserving his cultural and biological heritage. We must be vigilant!
Thankfully, we have college professors like Gabriel Chin and Marc Miller to write charming little pieces like ‘A Long American Tradition — Amnesty for Immigrants’ (2012).
Opposition to immigration today is inseparable from immigration’s contribution to the racial transformation of the United States. Michael M. Hethmon, the head of the influential Immigration Law Reform Institute, which has opposed any form of comprehensive immigration reform and helped draft Arizona’s now-weakened SB1070 and other state-level immigration laws, noted that immigration was “on track to change the demographic makeup of the entire country. You know, what they call ‘minority-majority.’”
It is the demographics of the future rather than the jurisprudence of the past that fuels hostility toward undocumented immigrants and the wisdom of occasional amnesty.
At its best, U.S. immigration policy has honored the rule of law through pragmatism, rejection of racial discrimination, and a recognition that all immigrants are members of the human family. A wise and carefully constructed amnesty based on this history is not a dirty word, but a crown jewel.
In other words: yes, mass immigration is going to reduce white people to a minority in the United States in a matter of generations. If you oppose or even question the wisdom of this unprecedented transformation, then you are an evil racist. Just like Hitler. You don’t want to be like Hitler, do you? Good, then listen closely to your Asian and Jewish professors:
Japan is 99% ethnically Japanese, and that’s okay. Korea is about 98% ethnically Korean, and that’s just fine. Israel is a Jewish nation, and let’s keep it that way. (That’s not “racial discrimination,” of course. It’s more like a special club — Chosen People only!)
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What happens when the Last Chance Armada meets the country everyone loves to hate? “Shame of the human race!” An excerpt from chapter twenty-three.
(Above: Cape Town, South Africa.)
The fleet was crossing the Tropic of Capricorn, into the waters off the Republic of South Africa, when certain moderate Western papers, most likely at the instigation of their respective governments — in France, it was a well-known evening daily — came up with an observation of geographic and economic import hitherto unnoticed.
The Ganges fleet had been looking for a paradise. Fine! We were waiting with open arms, ready and willing to help. We weren’t heartless, after all! But why should they take such risks, why bear the martyr’s cross from sea to sea, with torments untold, when, after all, just one look at the map would show that paradise was a stone’s throw away: South Africa, of course! [...]
Such being the case, why ask poor old Europe, far away as she was, to come to the aid of the armada, when certain basic climatic and demographic problems — not insurmountable, perhaps, but no less real — might very well prevent her, despite her best intentions, from offering adequate assistance? [...]
Then came the flood of figures, assessments, statistics, plans of all kinds: the computers can answer whatever we ask them. Financing? No problem. Europe would foot the bill. We would send them money, machines, technicians, entrepreneurs, doctors, teachers — whatever the South Africans thought they would need! (Notice: the first signs of panic. “Whatever you want, only keep them away! Away from us!” But panic isn’t the same as that good, healthy fear. It turns you to jelly, it melts you to nothing, as we’ll see before long…)
At the end of his column, our editor had dispatched utopia southward, with a few flicks of the pen. A plausible hypothesis. Reasonable, humane, full of hope for the future. Of course, the first thing was to consult the South African government, and put out some feelers to the leaders of the fleet. Perhaps the International Ganges Refugee Commission…
What a hue and cry!
The servants of the beast flew into a rage. Apartheid! Blacks with passes! Racist dictatorship! Shame of the human race! The whole verbal barrage. With South Africa, that limitless scapegoat, that convenient target for the self-righteous conscience, the world had stopped wearing kid gloves long since. Entrust a million poor dark-skinned devils to protectors like that! Slavery, no less! Avast, you wishy-washy moderates! The Ganges rose up of its own free will, of its own free will it’s going to choose its fate! …
There was only one danger: that the constant cries of welcome to our shores might frighten public opinion, and force it to take sides too soon. Better to do what was done in the past, get it softened up slowly, little by little, for its ultimate, fatal surrender. The prima-donna pros had sensed the danger. Following Clément Dio’s example, they shut their mouths, calmed down their rash and overanxious troops — another feeble chance that the Western World missed! — and bet on a violent South African reaction that had to pay off in their favor. Which is just what happened. [...]
South Africa speaks
Under siege in their rightful homeland, the Afrikaners had turned their backs on Britain and the Commonwealth, and burned all their bridges behind them. With the buffer state of Rhodesia washed away in a sea of blood, with the weight of Africa pressing against their gates and the weight of world scorn bearing down on their conscience, sapped from within by armies of pastors and priests, singers and writers, the Afrikaners had stopped wearing kid gloves too. As the twentieth century wore itself out in an unremitting hatred of white supremacy, they persisted in offering up one atrocity after another.
And they did it on purpose. They seemed to enjoy it. As long as they were going to be heaped with insults, they might as well deserve them! A planet apart, no question! …
As for their reaction to the plan, no official communiqué was forthcoming, but the President did hold a brief news conference in person. We can only quote the highlights of it here. From the outset he was plainly on the offensive, as he spoke to the tightly packed crowd of foreign correspondents from the Western press:
“As always, gentlemen, I know that you’ve come here as enemies. In a few moments our telephones and teletypes will be at your disposal to let you spout your usual loathing of us to the rest of the world.
“Just let me make one thing clear: the Republic of South Africa is a white nation with eighty percent blacks, and not — as the world would like to think of us, in the name of some mythical equality — a black nation with twenty percent whites. That’s the subtle difference. And it’s one that we insist on. It’s a question of background, of outlook. You’ll never understand… But let’s get to the point.
“At this very moment there’s a fleet of Third World invaders heading for the Cape, a hundred miles off our shores. Just off Durban, to be exact, according to last reports. Its 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.
“What puzzles us Afrikaners is the masochistic way the white world seems bent on taking revenge against itself. … No, I take that back, we’re not puzzled at all. It’s only too clear. That’s why we reject this symbol out of hand, because that’s all it is: a symbol …
“Gentlemen, not a single refugee from the Ganges will set foot alive on South African soil, under any pretext whatever. Now I’ll take your questions…”
Question and answer
Q. — “Are you suggesting, Mister President, that you won’t hesitate to open fire on defenseless women and children?”
A. — “I expected that question. No, of course we won’t hesitate. We’ll shoot without giving it a second thought. In this high-minded racial war, all the rage these days, nonviolence is the weapon of the masses. Violence is all the attacked minority has to fight back with. Yes, we’ll defend ourselves. And yes, we’ll use violence.”
Q. — “Supposing the fleet has decided, in fact, to land en masse on the shores of your country. Will you give orders to have it blown up?”
A. — “I think that the threat will discourage an invasion. Frankly, gentlemen, it’s my impression that the fleet is heading for Europe, and that you’ll have to be asking yourselves that question in just a few weeks. But I’m willing to answer in principle, since I’m sure that’s what you want. … Yes, if need be, we would bomb the fleet out of the water.
“Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Hamburg… Think of all the cities razed to the ground back then. … Who cared what it cost to pry victory loose? Who worried then about the price, the millions of unarmed civilians — yes, women and children then, too — burned, dismembered, buried in the rubble! War was war! I was only a baby, but I remember. Everyone cheered! … Well, today it’s still war, just a different kind! All I can say is, if we have to do it, we won’t enjoy it, believe me …”
The ‘international community’ responds
That last was probably the one spontaneous comment the President let slip, once his temper had cooled. And he meant it sincerely. Like the sensitive man complaining that he’s going to have to kill his rabid dog.
The phrase circled the globe. Clunch, the satirical English weekly — especially nasty — published its best cartoon in years. It pictured a dungeon cell, and in the middle, the President, butcher knife in hand, bending over a naked Hindu, all skin and bones, stretched out on the rack. On the walls of the cell, an array of giant pincers, cat-o’-nine-tails, spiked collars, thumb-screws, an electrical device, and a soldering iron. On the ground, a tub, a wheel, and an iron cage crawling with rats. The prisoner, dripping with blood, his one good eye staring in terror at the knife-wielding white. Tears streaming down the President’s face. And underneath, the caption: “Tsk, tsk, poor thing! War is war! Now I’ve got to kill you, but believe me, I won’t enjoy it. [...]” Reprinted in color, the Clunch cartoon spent a week spread over every newsstand in France, on the cover of La Pensée Nouvelle.
La Grenouille went one better, with a cartoon plastered across page one. The President appeared as a jaunty, bearded peasant, in a Boer general’s uniform, potbelly spangled with cartridges and loaded down with guns, pipe between his lips, brimmed hat turned up on one side. Sitting by the ocean, looking out at the water. All around, behind him, the landscape strewn with corpses. Bodies hanging from gallows galore. Black figures huddled behind barbed-wire fences. The President, big and fat, sitting on a mound of living creatures, smothering them under his bulk. In the background, off in the distance, the Ganges fleet sailing by, caricatures of ships, with human arms stretching toward the shore. And the caption: “So sorry we can’t let you in. But we already have our share of happy blacks!”
Enlarged and put on posters, the two cartoons made the rounds of the South African embassies in all the capitals of the Western World, draped in black crepe and held up by demonstrators who, this time, added silence to their nonviolent arsenal. No slogans, no shouts. Just long lines, filing past, slowly, without a word. Some had even tied up their arms and legs, like the chaingangs of years gone by.
In Paris, at an official reception, Jean Orelle refused to shake hands with the South African ambassador, and made quite a point of turning his back. …
Boris Vilsberg, of course, tossed in his two cents’ worth: “Our faces will always be white with shame!” (“White?” Marcel objected. “He means red! Doesn’t that guy know how to talk?” “No, no,” Josiane explained a moment later, “that’s what he means. White with shame. Because after a terrible thing like this, we should all be ashamed that we’re white!” And that’s that…)
Clément Dio returns
Even old Esther Bacouba sprang up fully armed from the depths of her bygone vogue. By now she no longer sang, only warbled, her golden voice cracking with age. But her head of tight white ringlets, and her handsome, stately face worked miracles. At the Palais des Sports people came in droves to hear her.
Just for her, Clément Dio came out of artistic retirement. Known once upon a time for his lyrics of a certain social bent, he had written such popular ditties as “Paris, You’re a Bitch!” or “I’m the Guy They Call Dirty Old Ahmed,” not to mention the lilting little samba “My Milk-White Breasts, Your Coffee-Brown Thighs”…
For Esther Bacouba’s return, he penned “The Ballad of Man’s Last Chance,” set to a three-note melody by a certain Indian sitarist. Twenty-five verses. A good fifteen minutes, beginning to end… A Palais des Sports gripped in silence, stock-still with emotion, plunged in darkness. And, standing alone on the platform, as if suspended in a thin beam of light, the aged black singer, eyes closed, hands joined together, warbling:
Buddha and Allah went off to visit
The nice little god of the Christians
Pulled out the nails
Took him down from his cross
Mopped his disappointed brow
Sat him in their midst.
‘You owe us your life, you nice little god
What will you give us in return?’
‘In return I’ll give you my kingdom
For now the thousand years are ended
Yes, the thousand years are ended now…’
The beginning of the end
And so the thousand years ended, and the Ganges armada wafted its way on the hoarse three-note twang of a sitar, and a broken, breathy, once-great voice, through a hundred thousand jukeboxes, prize-winning song, number-one record all over the world, ingenious (and infamous) hit, sailing out in the neon glare of supermarket drugstores and over the hi-fi’s of weary bourgeois, chanted in vaulted cathedrals by choirs of guitar-strumming pagans…, danced to the nighttime rhythms of melancholy love, smoked to the puffs of hashish and pot, droned by young beggars haunting streets and subways, floating the airwaves’ prevailing winds ten times a day, and at night hummed along on the lips of long-distance truckers, of children about to fall asleep, of couples undressing without a glance: “Yes, the thousand years are ended now…” Ah! The power of a beautiful song! Lyrics by the Great Unknown, as set down by the inspired pen of our own Clément Dio. That could be one explanation…
What chance, after that, of ferreting out from some inner recess of the self, from the deep maze of ready-made thoughts and emotions, some hateful remnant of a dauntless courage to throw against pity? [...]
But the beast is careful to keep hands off, and not jostle public opinion unduly. Just let it go on, content with itself, in passive acceptance. If it grows too active and lets itself think, who knows how it might be shocked into panic? The South African affair has played its role, doctored up and deformed like the ones before it, wrenched out of its context. The monster’s minions gloat behind the scenes. Now everything is ready for the final act…
And yet, well oiled though it was, the machine did misfire. But only once, and with no real damage. Which shows how clever the beast can be when nasty little obstacles spring up in its path. After their President’s violent declarations, what on earth made those same Afrikaners, a few days later, try to pass for Sisters of Charity, out of a clear blue sky?
The fleet was rounding the Cape of Good Hope, heading north-northwest up into the Atlantic, leaving the coast behind, when all of a sudden it was peacefully intercepted by a flotilla of barges from the South African navy. At the government’s invitation, reporters and photographers were watching the maneuver. It lasted no more than a quarter of an hour. On strictest orders from the South African admiral, not a soul set foot on the ships of the armada, not a word was exchanged. (And besides, the apathy of the refugees, and their unbending silence, would have doomed any contact from the start.) No, South Africa, quite simply, was furnishing the Ganges fleet with provisions!
The operation had been worked out to the letter: sacks of rice hoisted up in great loads, giant tanks of fresh water, crates full of medical supplies — all placed on board in record time. After which each side proceeded on its way, the armada out to sea and heading toward Senegal, the South African craft back to port on the Cape…
And then the incredible happened. It took every officer, every reporter, training all their binoculars on the Ganges fleet, to admit the impossible: the armada was dumping everything into the water! The anthill, suddenly roused, had been stirred up to almost a frenzy. On deck the crowds formed human chains. Sacks of rice passed down the line, from hand to hand, and plunged into the sea, one after another. Groups of men by the dozens pitted shoulders and crowbars against the huge tanks, and toppled them overboard, one by one. And everything sank to the bottom, except for the crates of medicines, lighter than the rest, bobbing along on the waves like a dotted line marking the wake of the fleet. Then the dotted line stopped. There was nothing left to dump. …
On board the South African craft, jaws dropped and hung agape in disbelief. Was that any way for a starving mob to act? Of all the explanations offered on the spot, the South African admiral’s probably made the most sense. Landing at the Cape, surrounded by a pack of reporters bombarding him with questions, the admiral, hands in pockets, could only shrug his shoulders with a look of profound disgust…
But you have to give the beast credit. You have to admire its cleverness and skill! All at once it gets wind of something unpleasant, something barring its route. An act of charity, of all things! Conscience money? Long overdue? Ulterior motives? Say what you like, it was still a humane gesture. With some kind of contact, or at least an attempt. A helping hand held out, in the flesh. Enough to risk making those Afrikaner types seem like downright nice people to a flabby world opinion! … Those racists, nice people? Careful now! Enough is enough! After fifty-odd years of flimflam and claptrap, the West could slide back to its racist past, throw up new defenses against the present peril…
The beast smells disaster, sees its prey escaping! … The whites could wake up, surprised and relieved to find themselves drawn to those once loathsome racists, so much like themselves! … Oh no, not a chance! Wouldn’t that be just lovely! … But the West is no phoenix rising from its ashes. Hardly more than a fragile fly, buzzing on the loose. With one flick of its claw, the beast catches it, crushes it to death. South Africans? Nice people? … Just enough for one gulp! …
The Western press, at its eloquent best, makes sure we get the word. No need to read through all the small print. The headlines will suffice: “South African Generosity, True or False? Five Questions and Answers” (moderate, London). “Bon Voyage, Pretoria! Goodbye and Good Riddance!” (moderate, Paris). “Blackmail in Human Despair” (left of center, The Hague). “Was Poison Their Real Motive?” (lurid left, Paris). “Handouts Won’t Help” (moderate, Turin). “Charity South African Style: A Slap in the Face” (far left, Paris). “Go Peddle Your Stuff Somewhere Else!” (left of center, Frankfurt). “Armada: Poison Plot Fails” (far left, Rome). “Lunch à la Pontius Pilate” (moderate, Brussels). “Armada Dumps South African Rice, Keeps Self Respect” (moderate, New York). “No Compromise for the Ganges Refugees” (Paris, far left)…
The last was the headline over Clément Dio’s column. Not a word in his paper about the poison nonsense. That wasn’t his cup of tea. But he didn’t mind a bit if, through no fault of his own, it sent shockwaves through the low-rent flats. As usual, he hewed pretty close to the truth. (Though, of course, not too close. The unvarnished truth isn’t something you publish. Just enough to keep his reporter’s conscience all in one piece. A delicate balance that he played really well, and that made him so deadly whenever he turned his sincerity loose…)
He had hit on the truth. He alone, or almost. He had flushed it out with no trouble at all, since it sprang from the very same source as his hatred. Yes, that was it. The Last Chance Armada, en route to the West, was feeding on hatred. A hatred of almost philosophical proportions, so utter, so absolute, that it had no thoughts of revenge, or blood, or death, but merely consigned its objects to the ultimate void. In this case, the whites.
For the Ganges refugees, on their way to Europe, the whites had simply ceased to be. They no longer existed. Paradise had already changed hands, and hatred made faith all the stronger. Which was what Clément Dio was trying to suggest, without showing his colors or theirs:
“No Compromise for the Ganges Refugees…”
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From ‘South Africa after Apartheid’ (2002), by black American economist Walter E. Williams:
Moral crusaders have the habit of heading off to their next crusade without bothering to see whether anything went wrong on their last one. … There’s no longer apartheid and there’s black rule in South Africa but what’s the story there now? …
Each South African day sees an average of 59 murders, 145 rapes and 752 serious assaults out of its 42 million population. The new crime is the rape of babies; some AIDS-infected African men believe that having sex with a virgin is a cure. Twelve percent of South Africa’s population is HIV-positive but President Mbeki says that HIV cannot cause AIDS. In response to growing violence, South Africa’s minister of safety and security, Steve Tshwete says, “We can’t police this; there’s nothing more we can do.” South Africa’s currency, the rand, has fallen about 70 percent since the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994. Emigration from South Africa (mainly of skilled people) is now at its highest level ever. …
The tragic fact of business is that ordinary Africans were better off under colonialism. Colonial masters never committed anything near the murder and genocide seen under black rule in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Somalia and other countries where millions of blacks have been slaughtered in unspeakable ways that included: hacking to death, boiling in oil, setting on fire and dismemberment. …
Andrew Kenny says that whites treat blacks like animals. When a dog misbehaves, we don’t blame the dog; we blame the owner for improper training. In Africa, when blacks behave badly, Kenny says colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, globalization or multi-nationalism is blamed for not bringing up blacks properly. Liberals saw South Africa’s, apartheid and other human rights abuses as unjust because blacks were suffering at the hands of whites. They hold whites accountable to civilized standards of behavior. Blacks are not held to civilized standards of behavior. From the liberal’s point of view it might even be racist to expect blacks to adhere to civilized standards of behavior. …
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From The Telegraph (2012): ‘British engineer hacked to death on his South African farm.’
Christopher Preece was stabbed to death in his kitchen by men with machetes who left with just a few mobile phones and a small amount of cash. The 54-year-old’s wife Felicity was also seriously injured in Saturday night’s attack, which happened on a farm the couple were turning into a nature reserve. Mr Preece’s daughter-in-law has told how a gang of three robbers poisoned the couple’s large pack of guard dogs before breaking into the house. …
Mr Preece’s death is the latest in an alarming trend of brutal murders on remote farmsteads in post apartheid South Africa. Since the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994, more than 3,000 white, mainly Afrikaans, farmers have been killed in their homes. The so-called “farm attacks” are part of the wave of criminality that has engulfed the country in recent years, something criminologist blame of a number of factors, including inept policing and widening social inequality. But in the case of “farm attacks” — which occur far from the crime-ravaged townships — academics also blame a breakdown in the traditional social contract between employer and employee.
Which was, of course, white supremacy (specifically, apartheid) — historically, the most humane and effective form of African governance.
Police research shows that the murders are normally carried out by drug-addicted, unemployed black men. Often they have some connection with the targeted farmstead. Local police said the attack at Mr Preece’s farm — called Fleur de Lys — is the fifth such attack, and the second murder, in the district over the past month. Yesterday Jeanne Preece told the local Volksblad newspaper how Mr Preece had moved to South Africa in 1995 for work, after which he had “fallen in love” with the country. …
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other things amanzi is the journal of a surgeon in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. (Forbes has called it “the best doctor blog on the internet.”) The victims in this 2008 account are all undoubtedly white:
i recently watched the movie capote. i enjoyed it. but, being south african, i was interested in the reaction… of the american community… their reaction was shock and dismay. …
but in south africa there is a similar incident every day. i don’t read the newspaper because it depresses me too much. you might wonder why i, a surgeon, am posting on this. one reason may be because i often deal with the survivors (two previous posts found here and here). at the moment i have three patients who are victims of violent crime. one is the victim of a farm attack. an old man who had his head caved in with a spade. why? just for fun, it seems. but maybe the reason i’m writing this post is because i’m south african. this is my country and i’m gatvol.
just three recent stories. some guys broke into a house. they gagged the man. it seemed that whatever they shoved into his mouth was shoved in too deep, because as they lay on the bed violating his wife, he fought for breath and finally died of asphyxiation.
then there is a woman alone at home. some thugs broke in and asked where the safe was. they were looking for guns. she told them she had no safe and no guns. they then took a poker, heated it to red hot and proceeded to torture her with it so that she would tell them what they wanted to hear. because she could not, the torture went on for a number of hours.
then there is the story of a group of thugs that broke in to a house. they shot the man and cut the fingers of the woman off with a pair of garden shears. while the man lay on the floor dying, the criminals took some time off to lounge on the bed eating some snacks they had found in the fridge and watch a bit of television. …
yes, you americans were right to be horrified by the story upon which capote is based. we south africans, through the leadership of possibly the worst leader of a country in the world today, well we just get used to it.
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The fleet is about to make landfall, and Dio wants to be there to witness his final revenge against the hated West. Excerpts from chapters thirty-two and thirty-six.
(Above: Pointe du van, France.)
Hurtling southward goes Clément Dio, fast as his powerful car will take him. He speeds past long infantry convoys, truck after truck, their canvas flaps open in back, and sitting inside, young soldiers lined up on benches. The army has certainly changed. It reeks of gloom. The soldiers don’t even lean out to admire his magnificent, sleek red bomb, with its endless hood. And Iris Nan-Chan, that beautiful lady… Why, they don’t even blow her kisses, or laugh to catch her eye, or slap their thighs in a flurry of off-color comments. Not so much as one dawdling private flashing an obscene gesture, as that strictly untouchable ivory flesh passes close to his truck.
“The army looks good!” says Dio. “Not exactly singing their way to the front!” He’s delighted. His handiwork, partly. How well he remembers his noble battle, dragging the army through the courts, forcing it to lift its ban on publications of a certain persuasion. And winning the case, hands down!
For ten years now La Pensée Nouvelle, La Grenouille, and the rest, had been read in the barracks of every French regiment under the sun. Prisons, too, for that matter. They had taken advantage and gotten into the act.
Our friend Ben Suad, alias Dio, had had his revenge. Revenge for that bill of sale, found in his family papers. The one that showed his grandmother, a black harem slavegirl, sold to a brothel for French officers in Rabat. Why on earth had his Moroccan father, mild-mannered civil servant under the French, held on to that odious proof of his past? To keep his hatred alive, that’s why! …
At the tollbooths, squadrons of security police in black, helmeted and massive, and not in too good a mood either: “I wouldn’t go south if I were you.” “You wouldn’t? What do you mean, Lieutenant?” “Just what I said!” growls the bemedaled lieutenant, eyeing the long red hood, the beautiful Eurasian, the driver’s swarthy skin and elegant crop of kinky hair. “Back where you came from, and on the double!” “You wouldn’t be a racist, would you, Lieutenant?” “Me? A racist? You’ve got to be kidding!” No, no one is a racist today anymore. That’s the official word, everyone agrees. The police even less so than the rest. They’re paid to remember… A glimpse of the press card, and open sesame: “Go ahead, monsieur. Sorry for the trouble!” [...]
On the outskirts of Lyon, Dio takes the boulevard circling the city — deserted in these wee, small hours, while convoys of army trucks rattle along the river, through the heart of town — and turns left on the road to Grenoble. Via the “Tourist Route,” as a sign announces. Toward Nice, on the road Napoleon took when he came back from Elba, and marched up to Paris. Iris Nan-Chan finds it rather amusing, and drawls out a long, exultant laugh. “Napoleon Dio! My own little eagle! Flying in triumph from steeple to steeple. Only we’re going to land in the plush Negresco towers!”
When they reach Grenoble, one of the suburbs by the banks of the Isère is aglow with flames. “Press!” declares Iris Nan-Chan’s little eagle. “What’s up?” A captain of the security police is standing in the highway, in front of a roadblock of trucks, lined up zigzag. “The prison. It’s on fire.” “And the prisoners?” “Escaped, every damn one. At least two thousand. If you folks are driving farther down, watch out. From Grenoble on we can’t be responsible.” [...]
At the La Faye Pass, another stop. More trucks blocking the road. The army this time. Dio recognizes the insignia of the marine commandos. A unit never seen in France, but one that the reporters of La Pensée Nouvelle follow step by step all over the world, like a dung beetle sticking to the bull that feeds it. An uprising to put down in Chad, or Guiana, or Djibouti, or Madagascar? They’re the spearhead sent on loan overseas, to those presidents beset by the hatred of their people…
An officer steps forward. Elegant and polite. [...] “Your press card, please,” the officer asks. “Well, well!” he exclaims, “Monsieur Clément Dio! After loathing you all these years, I finally get to meet you in the flesh!” Some paratroopers come over. They surround the red car and stare silently at Dio. They haven’t forgotten that such creatures still exist, but off on their distant campaigns they’ve never seen one in person, that’s all.
“Take a good look, men,” the officer tells them. “If you’ve never seen a swine close up, here’s your chance. Now maybe you can see why we’re crawling with assholes.” [...]
Meanwhile, Iris Nan-Chan has turned toward the officer, trying to taunt him in her most honeyed tones: “Why, Monsieur Brontosaurus! We thought your breed died out eons ago, and now here you are. And you can even talk! My, my!” But the confrontation doesn’t last long. Strangely enough, it’s the soldiers who lose interest, like a living organism that begins to reject a foreign body.
“You see?” says the officer. “They don’t give a damn about you. All right, you can go. I have no orders to do anything with you. In fact, I have no orders at all, and that’s how I like it. My unit is all alone in the world, and that suits us fine. Just one word of advice. From here south the country is dead. The people who should have stayed, left. And the ones who did stay, or the ones who are coming, shouldn’t be here at all. You’ll find plenty of friends in Saint-Vallier, down over the pass. But I’m not too sure you’ll like them. Especially Madame Nan-Chan. There’s a little bit of everything. The whole of the Draguignan prison, in fact. Sex criminals and baby-killers included. [...] You can’t miss them all. They’ve taken over the Hotel Préjoly—forty rooms, baths and toilets, bar, elevator, grill, phone in every room, heated pool, tennis courts. At least, that’s what it says in the Guide Michelin. Of course, now…” (He gives a doubtful shrug.)
“Well, at least I can tell you that your friends are nice and clean. With my glasses it’s easy to see the pool. They’ve all been bathing, and the water is filthy. I should really go in there and clear them out, so my men can move on. … Oh yes, I forgot to tell you: they all have sawed-off shotguns. There isn’t a gun store for miles around that hasn’t been broken into. … But I’d rather wait until they’re all dead drunk. It won’t take long. You can hear them from here. … Well, my friends — monsieur, madame — so much for our chat. I hope you have a delightful trip!” [...]
Plenty of friends in Saint-Vallier
Clément Dio looked at his watch for the hundredth time. Ten minutes to midnight. It was five hours now since the last drunken songs had died down, petering out to the frequent thump of a body laid low by liquor and fatigue. But one of the thugs must have held out much longer, because at ten o’clock, or thereabouts, Iris Nan-Chan had uttered another feeble groan.
At first, when it all began, she had let out a few quick screams, moments after her husband had been locked in that fourth-floor toilet where he lay now for more than a day and a half, in a state of exhaustion bordering on stupor. Then she had cried out again and again, but her cries couldn’t cover the raucous guffaws of the men ganging round her, downstairs in the bar. Then she had begged, and snatches of her pleas had reached Dio’s ears whenever the chorus of vile, drunken voices would stop for a moment. As time went by, she had started to laugh — no doubt they had forced her to drink — and the strange, unearthly sound of her laughter had stabbed Dio square in the heart, transfixed him, all but lifeless, on the cold toilet floor, eyes dry, no tears left.
During the last few hours of the nightmare, her laughter had died away, gasp by gasp, and had turned to that low, plaintive groan that Dio could hear so clearly once the din had subsided. Like a hurricane, blown out, at last, from its savage excesses. And no other sound had troubled that deathly silence. Except for a column of trucks, rumbling by toward eleven, speeding down to the sea. (Most likely those marine commandos from the La Faye Pass, heading south to take up their positions…)
Ten minutes to midnight. Dio heard footsteps on the stairs, then in the corridor leading to his prison…
And yet, things had all started out so well, despite the sarcastic warnings of that commando captain. To be sure, in Saint-Valuer their car had been stopped in front of the hotel. But only because it was red and shiny, covered with chrome, all studded with lights and bristling with antennas, and upholstered in leather. An elegant object, something the poor unfortunate prisoners could feast their hands on, too long deprived of all contact with refinement.
Dio had introduced himself. Many knew who he was. His radical penal reform campaigns, waged with so much success, had made him a rather well-known figure in most prison circles. They had even recalled his famous editorial, the one that had shaken penology to the roots:
“From my point of view, our civil offenders are really no more than political prisoners, innocent victims of a social system that first destroys them, then refuses to save them, turning its back as they languish in disgrace. No one of us can be sure that he won’t land in prison. Today more than ever, as the police web tightens its hold on our lives. We’re told that the prisons are all overcrowded. But isn’t the worst prison really our life outside?”
After cheers and hurrahs, they had offered him a drink, a toast to their freedom. He and his wife had played right along. It was all quite amusing. Of course, a few of the men had already drunk too much, especially some of the Arabs and blacks, and the bar was a mass of puddles and stains, strewn with broken glass and bottles. But the mood was good-natured, like a Bastille Day of sorts, only this time a Bastille had really been taken.
“Tell me,” Dio had asked, glass of rum in hand, “how did you manage to take the place over?” It was easy to explain. The Ganges fleet was the why and the how behind the operation. It was all they had talked about while they were in prison. They had read every line. They had stuck their pin in the map every night. And sometimes the chaplain would join them, and lead the discussion, which was part of his job. For him the fleet was something of a symbol, “a kind of mass messiah with a million heads,” he called it. A symbol the prisoners could readily accept, set apart as they were, and easily moved. In time, the atmosphere seemed almost devout. So strange, in fact, that the poor, confused guards, superstitious at best, hardly stirred from their lairs, skulking out like frightened shadows to tend to the barest essentials.
It was then that it happened. And all terribly simply. At the end of the Good Friday vigil, while the guards were still sleeping in their quarters, letting their worthy charges do likewise, none other than the chaplain had flung open the gates, with the comment that Christ may have died for all men, but for thieves first and foremost…
“He always said he would do it some day, but it still sure was a surprise! God knows where he is right now! I’ll tell you one thing though. If that crowd ever lands, there won’t be one prisoner behind bars, believe me…”
Then they had chatted. About this and that. About society, for instance, and how “fucked up it all is.” About “filthy rich bourgeois pigs,” and workers brutalized by their machines. And the more the men drank, the louder they got. But why not? They had been reborn, and a little excitement seemed perfectly in order.
“Take me, for instance,” one fellow explained. “I had to make a choice. Either bust my balls on some job for forty more years, or take a chance on three minutes in the big time, and maybe hit the jackpot. Well, I gave it a try and I lost, so I got put away. Damn right society’s all fucked up!” And the same one, an hour later, drunk and ugly: “Come on, guys, what do you say! This is no goddamn fun. Too damn much talk. Let’s have a ball. You know what I mean, guys? Let’s have a ball! Like, first we’re going to dance!” He leered at Iris Nan-Chan. “Right, baby?”
It was hardly the moment to beat a retreat. She was caught in the middle, with pairs of groping hands all fighting for her favors. They tugged her between them. Her dress was ripped to shreds. Dio struggled to reach her, tried to elbow through the pack.
“Listen, you!” one of them shouted. “Talk about filthy bourgeois pigs! Did you guys see the car this bastard was driving? You think he gave a damn about us? Bullshit, he did! He was selling his goddamn paper, that’s all. Just using us to fill his pockets. Now it’s our turn, right? Come on, baby, one at a time!” A few of the men tried to stem the tide. But the rest of them beat the “revisionists” back. Maybe because there weren’t very many. At which point Dio was kicked up four flights, and dragged into the toilet…
The footsteps stopped in front of the door. Dio heard the key turning. The man standing there still seemed drunk, but at least he was awake. “You can come out of there,” he mumbled, none too sure of himself. “The party’s over.” Then he thought for a moment, and added: “I guess maybe I should say we’re sorry. We shouldn’t have locked you up like that. Not guys like us, I mean, who know what it’s like. But you’ve got to understand. When the shoe’s on the other foot, like they say… Anyway, your wife’s downstairs. I guess maybe we were kind of rough at the beginning. But she’s still in one piece, don’t worry. She’s sleeping. We gave her a good stiff drink. After that things calmed down… Well I mean, I never touched her myself…” And he left.
The hotel reeked of wine and tobacco, and stank of stale vomit. Most of the windows were smashed, no doubt by the bottles thrown through them. In the rooms, doors flung wide, men were flopped on the beds, on top of the covers, snoring, dead to the world.
Dio picked his way over the landing, over bodies lying asleep where they had fallen. A radio still blared out a concerto. The last drunkard to fall hadn’t thought to turn it off before biting the dust.
Dio found Iris Nan-Chan at the bar, just where he had left her. She was sleeping, naked, stretched out on a bench. Someone had thrown up all over her chest. Someone else must have covered her, waist down, with a cloth from a dining-room table. She was sleeping very soundly. As if she had swallowed a whole bottle of pills. Which, in fact, was just what she had done. The vial of barbiturates lay empty at her feet…
All of a sudden, the concerto stopped short. In the studios no one cared much anymore about smooth transitions. Then a voice:
“We bring you now an address by the President of the Republic …”
Midnight. And that was how, on Easter evening, Clément Dio found himself listening to the message that the whole world was waiting to hear.
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The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). An excerpt from chapter forty three.
(Above: a lavender field in France.)
After the address by the President of the Republic, he had left the Hotel Préjoly, in Saint-Valuer, and wandered off into the night, like a man in a trance. Somehow his feet led him down to the coast. But his eyes saw only one endless image, burned into his brain: his wife, Iris Nan-Chan, and his fruitless attempts to wake her, lying there suddenly limp in his arms, very dead. Sitting on the beach close by Dragasès’s villa, he had witnessed, in his daze, a whole series of scenes that, just the day before, would have thrilled him through and through. He had thrived, after all, on always being right, and had spent his whole life avenging one Ben Suad, alias Clément Dio. But today, as his vengeance was about to triumph, he felt nothing whatever. [...]
As the Ganges refugees stormed ashore, he wavered for a moment, as if he were wondering why he was there, and what he was doing. Then he got up, and all at once something came back to him. Something important. Bits and snatches of things he had said once before: “Monsieur Orelle… Do you think they have a chance?… It’s the Last Chance Armada…” He broke into a smile. “Damn good!” he thought. “I really told it straight! Now here they are, and they’ve got me to thank!” That realization set his blood atingle. “Look, it’s me! It’s me! Dio!” And he waved his arms wildly, called out to the horde: “Let’s tear down this mess! Let’s begin all over!” But being rather small and swarthy — with his elegant crop of kinky hair, and a shifty look in his baggy eyes — and wearing a much too elegant jacket, he looked for all the world like one of those doormen who hang outside nightclubs to huckster the tourists.
Death came in the form of a gigantic black, carrying a monster child on his shoulders, with a huge throng following after him, singing. He stopped in front of Dio, grabbed him off the ground, lifted him bodily so the twisted dwarf could see him. The creature, cap on head, took one look and gave a cry. For the third time ever. Our friend Dio, or Ben Suad, knew that he was done for, though he had no time to comprehend the verdict. The turd eater’s fingers tightened around his throat, and his body was flung out over the sand like a limp rag doll. In no time, the trampling feet of the mob made it look like one of those mangled, bloody goats, swatted hither and yon in a game of Afghan polo… If, indeed, we can speak of a verdict, we can look for the reasons behind it. Here are two men, each in his own way an instrument of fate. One crosses the oceans, finds the other, and kills him, in a flash of inspiration, as if he knew precisely who he was. The one deliberate act of murder that the horde was to commit. Utterly senseless, by all logical standards.
But if we choose, rather, to swim in a sea of symbols, deep and profound, a kind of logic begins to take shape. Namely, the Third World’s staunch refusal to admit any debts, to dilute the radical meaning of its triumph by sharing its glory with alien beings. To thank them, or even accept their existence, would merely prolong a form of subjection. [...]
Or perhaps there’s another, more natural, explanation, and one that, frankly, we find easier to accept. To wit, that the monster couldn’t stand Dio’s looks. No, he simply couldn’t stand them! …
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In 2009, progressives in Bangladesh succeeded in fusing refugees to climate change with the power of fake science, creating an inescapable black hole of white guilt.
(Above: Himalayan glaciers and Mount Everest.)
From The Guardian (2009): ‘UK Should Open Borders to Climate Refugees, Says Bangladeshi Minister.’
Up to 20 million Bangladeshis may be forced to leave the country in the next 40 years because of climate change, one of the country’s most senior politicians has said. Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, Bangladesh’s finance minister, called on Britain and other wealthy countries to accept millions of displaced people. … “We are asking all our development partners to honour the natural right of persons to migrate. We can’t accommodate all these people — this is already the densest (populated) country in the world,” he said.
He called on the UN to redefine international law to give climate refugees the same protection as people fleeing political repression. “The convention on refugees could be revised to protect people. It’s been through other revisions, so this should be possible,” he said.
Oh, I’m certain the UNHCR will oblige. Anything to increase the flow of “refugees” into the West.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said the Bangladeshi migration proposal should be taken seriously. “This is clearly a warning signal from Bangladesh and similar countries to the developed countries. And I think it has to be taken very seriously. If you accept that those countries that have really not been responsible for causing the problem, and have a legitimate basis for help from the developed countries, then one form of help would certainly be facilitation of immigration from these countries to the developed world,” he said.
Rajendra Pachauri — where have I heard that name before? Oh, that’s right: lying for profit about the supposedly catastrophic effects of climate change.
From The Telegraph (2010): ‘Pachauri: The Real Story Behind the Glaciergate Scandal.’
… Last week, the IPCC, led by its increasingly controversial chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to issue an unprecedented admission: the statement in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis, and its inclusion in the report reflected a “poor application” of IPCC procedures.
What has now come to light, however, is that the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr. Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim — now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC — has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America’s leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU.
At the same time, Dr. Pachauri has personally been drawn into a major row with the Indian government, previously among his leading supporters, after he described as “voodoo science” an official report by the country’s leading glaciologist, Dr. Vijay Raina, which dismissed Dr. Hasnain’s claims as baseless. Now that the IPCC has disowned the prediction made by his employee, Dr. Pachauri has been castigated by India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, and called on by Dr. Raina to apologize for his “voodoo science” charge. At a stormy Delhi press conference on Thursday, Dr. Pachauri was asked whether he intended to resign as chairman of the IPCC — on whose behalf he collected a Nobel Peace Prize two years ago, alongside Al Gore — but he refused to answer questions on this fast-escalating row.
To understand why the future of Himalayan glaciers should arouse such peculiar passion, one must recall why they have long been a central icon in global warming campaigners’ propaganda. Everything that polar bears have been to the West, the ice of the Himalayas has been — and more — to the East. This is because, as Mr Gore emphasized in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, the vast Himalayan ice sheet feeds seven of the world’s major river systems, thus helping to provide water to 40 per cent of the world’s population. …
Dr. Pachauri’s first response to these revelations was to claim that he had “absolutely no responsibility” for the blunder, that it was “the work of independent authors — they’re responsible.” …
Bear in mind, this isn’t about climate science per se. It’s about $500,000 grants. It’s about Nobel Peace Prizes. It’s about influence (the progressive word for “power”) and fancy titles and especially those 20 million Bangladeshi colonists waiting for their spot on their country’s version of the India Star.
Calling yourself a “climate scientist” doesn’t mean you do science for a living. Rajendra Pachauri, for instance, actually owes his livelihood to promoting the progressive doctrine of Climate Change™.
Not climate change, as in: ‘the climate is changing,’ or ‘human beings are changing the climate,’ or even ‘human beings are making the climate worse.’ With those, we are still plausibly doing science. I’m talking about Climate Change™, as in: “the cost of inaction… is the extinction of the human race. Period” (New York Times, 2009). This is not science, and never will be.
As The American Interest put it:
The lack of judgment is staggering; the careless disregard for the truth, the intellectual incompetence and the cavalier disregard for basic fact checking before making the wildest predictions of horrifically impending catastrophe are quite simply breathtaking.
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Raspail on tradition, and the difference between Left and Right.
Here we see some very serious-minded Occupy Wall Street protesters (‘Occutards,’ for short) doing their part to put “people before profit” and make education and healthcare “free” (presumably by enslaving teachers and doctors) and explain how “9/11 was an inside job” and also many other great things, while normal people (eugh!) are at work — making bombs to blow up starving African lesbian abortionists, no doubt!
Anyway, a key step in the social justice process is the progressive stack, in which women speak before men, Euros yield the floor to non-Euros, heterosexuals go after the full assortment of LGBT-XYZ-etc., and so on. This principle is called equality, for reasons that escape me. So “step up, step back,” and let the marginalized speak — or else…
Back to The Camp of the Saints. In this scene from chapter thirty nine, Colonel Dragasès, commander of the French military forces on the beach where “refugees” from the Last Chance Armada will soon be disembarking, has just ordered a round of music for the few soldiers who haven’t yet deserted:
They stood by the five tanks of the Second Hussars, Chamborant Regiment, lined up in the garden outside the villa, under the pines. Two drummers, two buglers. Not much of a band. But there in the darkness they were loud as an army. Picture the scene. Moments after midnight, taps blaring out by the light of the moon. Pure theater!
“Oh, that tugs at the heart!” moaned Undersecretary Perret, half in jest. The colonel was smiling too. A big, broad grin. Jubilation all around.
The ones who truly love their traditions don’t take them too seriously. They march to get their heads shot off with a joke on their lips. And the reason is that they know they’re going to die for something intangible, something sprung from their fancy, half humor, half humbug.
Or perhaps it’s a little more subtle. Perhaps hidden away in their fancy is that pride of the blueblood, who refuses to look foolish by fighting for an idea, and so he cloaks it with bugle calls that tug at the heart, with empty mottoes and useless gold trim, and allows himself the supreme delight of giving his life for an utter masquerade.
That’s something the Left has never understood, and that’s why its contempt is so heavy with hate. When it spits on the flag, or tries to piss out the eternal flame, when it hoots at the old farts loping by in their berets, or yells “Women’s Lib!” outside the church, at an old-fashioned wedding (to cite just some basic examples), it does so in such a grim, serious manner — like such “pompous assholes,” as the Left would put it, if only it could judge. The true Right is never so grim. That’s why the Left hates its guts, the way a hangman must hate the victim who laughs and jokes on his way to the gallows.
The Left is a conflagration. It devours and consumes in deadly dull earnest. (Even its revels, appearances notwithstanding, are as grisly an affair as one of those puppet parades out of Peking or Nuremberg.)
The Right is different. It’s a flickering flame, a will-o’-the-wisp in the petrified forest, flitting through the darkness…
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“The Left is a conflagration,” Raspail wrote. “It devours and consumes in deadly dull earnest.” The Right, on the other hand, is “a flickering flame, a will-o’-the-wisp in the petrified forest, flitting through the darkness.” Let’s test his theory with a few side-by-side comparisons.
Heidi Beirich and the SPLC vs. Jared Taylor
For years, I have been one of the SPLC’s “haters.” If it learns that I have been on a radio or television program, it calls the producers to berate them. If it learns I am to speak at a university or civic group, it contacts the organizers to tell them I should be denied a podium. It never argues that my facts are wrong or that my conclusions are illogical. … It simply wants to gag me. … The SPLC tries to have “haters” fired from their jobs. This goes beyond suppression of dissident views. Trying to ruin someone financially is not “politics” or “advocacy,” however thuggish. The SPLC wants to hurt people.
Since I am not part of an organization like theirs, with $216,000,000 in the bank and $400,000-a-year salaries, I sometimes work as an interpreter of Japanese. For more than 10 years, a US State Department website has advertised my services. The SPLC recently found out about this and warned the department that I was a vicious “hater,” and that it should take my name off its website.
Interpreting Japanese does not help spread one word of whatever “hate” the SPLC thinks I serve up. It helps feed my family. Nothing more. The SPLC wants to starve my family, just as it wanted to starve Kevin Lamb, Kevin MacDonald, and others it attacks. This is not principled disagreement or political debate. It is pure aggression.
Alex Pareene vs. Peter Brimelow
Mr. Pareene maligns Mr. Brimelow:
CPAC is here, so it’s time for everyone’s annual look at the psychos invited… The National Review’s John Derbyshire, a stock “pervert Tory” character from a Martin Amis novel sprung to life…, is hosting a panel on “multiculturalism” (boo hiss) featuring two of America’s most detestable sacks of shit: Peter Brimelow, founder of white supremacist site VDARE, and Robert Vandervoort… the fact that these panelists are all well-compensated members in good standing of the conservative movement instead of shrieking their “defense of Western Civilization” nonsense for free from a bench outside a subway station does suggest that something has gone wrong with the American experiment. …
Then Mr. Brimelow rebukes Mr. Pareene:
John Derbyshire’s recent Takimag column eviscerating Salon’s Alex Pareene, for his obscene echo-chambering of the various cultural Marxist pre-emptive strikes on the CPAC ProEnglish breakout session at which Derbyshire and I both appeared, is a polemical model. … Of course, it’s all part of the current intensified crackdown on any expression of the Right Opposition dissent, above all on topics like immigration… Much of the Takimag comment thread is taken up with rude speculation about Pareene’s rather depressing appearance: [see above]
Mainstream journalists vs. John Derbyshire
In April 2012, author John Derbyshire sparked a fair amount of controversy with his TakiMag article ‘The Talk: Nonblack Version,’ leading to his dismissal from National Review. Here’s a representative sampling of rebuttals by authors and journals spanning the mainstream political spectrum, from progressives to progressives pretending to be conservatives:
“shockingly racist… tired racist stereotyping… horrifying diatribe” (Gawker), “dated racial stereotypes” (The Atlantic), “if NRO doesn’t fire Derbyshire a blot beyond measure” (Mother Jones), “the hideous monstrosity that is John Derbyshire’s deeply racist mind” (Gawker), “a racist” (The Atlantic), “Please, Lord, tell me that this is a joke” (New York Daily News), “a perfect example of why Australia needs racial vilification laws” (ABC), “racist nonsense” (Forbes), “National Review must fire John Derbyshire” (Forbes), “a bizarre and offensive piece… disturbing advice… downright crazy talk” (Twitchy), “National Review needs to fire John Derbyshire. Immediately” (RB), “fundamentally indefensible and offensive” (Jonah Goldberg, coworker), “racist trash” (Ramesh Ponnuru, coworker), “nasty and indefensible… constitutes a kind of letter of resignation” (Rich Lowry, coworker, pictured)
And here, for comparison, is John Derbyshire, one year earlier:
The dissident temperament has been present in all times and places, though only ever among a small minority of citizens. Its characteristic, speaking broadly, is a cast of mind that, presented with a proposition about the world, has little interest in where that proposition originated, or how popular it is, or how many powerful and credentialed persons have assented to it, or what might be lost in the way of property, status, or even life, in denying it. To the dissident, the only thing worth pondering about the proposition is, is it true? If it is, then no king’s command can falsify it; and if it is not, then not even the assent of a hundred million will make it true.
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Want to learn more about the topics covered in this issue of Radish? We highly recommend the following books and articles. (We do not, however, necessarily endorse all opinions expressed in them: some are not nearly extreme enough.)
The Camp of the Saints
Reviews, analysis, mindless condemnation:
- Jared Taylor
- The Atlantic
- Chilton Williamson, Jr.
- New Statesman
- Front Page Magazine
- A 2011 interview with Jean Raspail
Novels similar to Camp
Colonization in progress
- ‘Camp of the Saints Begins in France’ (2001)
- ‘Camp of the Saints Comes True in France’ (2005)
- ‘Camp of the Saints May Soon Come True’ (2010)
- ‘Canada Welcomes The Camp of the Saints’ (2010)
- ‘Some Recent News from Up North’ (2010)
- ‘Is Camp of the Saints Actually Happening?’ (2011)
- ‘The Camp of the Saints Crisis’ (2011)
- ‘Camp of the Saints Comes to Italy’ (2011)
- ‘Europe’s Nightmare Becoming Reality’ (2011)
- Gates of Vienna archive (2011)
- ‘Time to Rethink Immigration?’
- ‘No Irish Need Apply’
- ‘How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders’
- ‘“Biblical Exodus” from Africa Feeds Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric’
- ‘Europe’s Arizona Problem’
- ‘Boat People Can Be Turned Back’
- ‘The Case for Family-Based Immigration’
Assorted, tangential & miscellaneous
- ‘America the Beautiful, 2013’
- ‘Derbyshire’s Firing Is an Ideological Matter’
- ‘Conservatism Inc. Is Done’
- ‘Rise of the Far Right’
- ‘The Return of Toxic Nationalism’
- ‘Enoch’s Legacy Is Still Tainting Our Party’
- ‘In 455, the Vandals Sacked Rome’
- ‘Twelve Racist Quotes from Pat Buchanan’s Book’
- ‘Screw You, Touré Neblett’
- ‘South Africa Facing White Genocide’
- ‘Rapist Told Woman He Was HIV Positive, Laughed’
- ‘Top Dem. Warns Against Term “Illegal Immigrants”’
- ‘Crackdown on Migrants Tugs at Soul of Israelis’
- ‘Muslims Angry Over Spanish Citizenship for Jews’
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Thank you for reading Radish, the world’s first free weekly newsletter for sexy reactionaries! Our readership is certified 100% sexy. So well done.
I trust you’ve seen enough to know that Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints is well worth a read. Why not buy two copies and share it with that special someone? It might arouse some interest in preserving Western civilization. At the very least, you’re in for a stimulating intercourse on the problem of plunging European birth rates.
On a completely unrelated note, Valentine’s Day is coming up!
On this special occasion, and in light of the popular theory that Western countries are all racist and discriminatory and hate-crime and… Hitler, or whatever, for not welcoming the population overflow from the entire Third World, I think we’ll close on a short poem by the Carlyle Club’s very own, rarely seen Official Poetry Correspondent/Poet:
If Western civilization
Has so much “discrimination,”
Here’s a plan to help the “refugees” survive:
Line them up, in any order;
Send them back across the border —
The Third World can’t be racist, so they’ll thrive!
Yes… I believe I’m beginning to recall why we so rarely call upon the Official Poetry Correspondent/Poet. Well, on that note, from everyone here at Radish: happy Valentine’s Day!
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