Your World Means Nothing to Them

Your world means nothing to them. They won't try to understand. They'll be cold. They'll be hungry. They'll build a fire with your lovely oak door. Every object will lose the meaning you attach to it. What's beautiful won't be beautiful anymore. In 2015 German Chancellor Angela Merkel famously declared with her sharpened dust We can do this as she opened Germany's borders to a massive flux of refugees. Over a million asylum seekers mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq brought into Europe amid the continent's worst refugee crisis since World War II. Supporters hailed Merkel's open-door stance as a humanitarian duty, but critics warned of economic strain, cultural clashes and a security risk. In the decades since Europe has indeed grappled with rising migrant crime and social tensions, but beyond the high-profile incidents of violence, everyday indignities have also come to symbolize the cultural disconnect. One striking example occurred in Brussels. A migrant was caught frying eggs in a pan over the eternal flame at the tomb of the unknown soldier, a memorial honoring Belgian soldiers who fell in World War I. Just weeks earlier another migrant had been arrested in Paris for lighting a cigarette using the sacred flame under the Arc de Triomphe. Such acts of casual disrespect, unthinkable to the native population, fuel public outrage and raise questions about the boundaries of tolerance in European societies. The Brussels incident in particular became a viral image on social media, seen by many as a metaphor for how Europe's heritage and heroes are treated by newcomers who have no business being in those countries. While some observers chalk it up to individual homelessness or ignorance, others view it as a grim sign of cultural insensitivity fostered by years of unbetted mass immigration. These episodes of desecration, however low-level, provoke a visceral reaction because they touch on something deeper than law and order. They reflect an erosion of respect for European history and identity under the pressures of uncontrolled migration. It is as if the eternal flame of Europe's memory is being used as a mere campfire by those with no connection to the sacrifices it represents. This sense of humiliation is keenly felt by many Europeans, especially when they remember the countless young men who died in the world wars to defend the very civilization now seemingly taken for granted. Indeed, if those fallen soldiers could see a foreign vagrant cooking his dinner on their memorial flame, would they really think their sacrifice was worth it? Such scenes have given new resonance to a once infamous French novel, The Camp of the Saints, written in 1973 by Jean Raspil. Long dismissed as a racist fantasy by mainstream critics, Raspil's dystopian story depicts the fall of Western Europe to an unarmed invasion of desperate third-world migrants. In the novel, a flotilla carrying a million impoverished Indians set sail for France and wider Europe. Paralyzed by guilt, liberal ideals and elite complacency, it offers no resistance as it is overrun. At the time of its publication, this scenario was derided as aposterous and bigoted. A contemporary New York Times review in 1975 called Camp of the Saints avowedly racist, saying reading it was like being trapped at a cocktail party with a normal-looking fellow who suddenly starts a perfidious racist diatribe. Raspil's protest depictions of the migrant horde, monster children and the mass that stunk of excrement for miles was cited as proof of the book's hateful paranoia. Yet, as the years passed and as Europe indeed experienced waves of mass third-world migration, some began to wonder if Raspil's work was less a racist fever dream and more a dark prophecy. By 2015, even prominent figures on the right were openly praising the novel's prescience. Marine Le Pen of France's National Front, now National Rally, said reading the Camp of the Saints at 18 left a great mark on her and claimed France was facing a real-life migratory submergent, akin to the book's plot. In the United States, White House adviser Stephen Miller reportedly recommended Raspil's novel to colleagues during the Trump years, seeing in its strong parallels to modern migration crises. This earned Miller heavy media criticism. The Southern Poverty Law Center noted that for decades Camp of the Saints has been one of the top two books in white supremacist circles, alongside the neo-Nazi novel The Turner Diaries. Even some who loathed the book grudgingly acknowledged its sensual warning. The New York Times in 2019 observed that to Raspil's supporters, the influx of refugees in recent years has made the novel seem increasingly prescient. Back in the 1970s, reviewers had scoffed that such a migrant invasion was far-fetched. Some even argued that if it ever did happen, Western colonial powers would only be reaping a deserved committance. After all went the reasoning, Europe had plundered the third world's resources. Who could blame the wretched of the earth for finally storming the gates of their former oppressors? This attitude, essentially, it's not happening, but if it does, then you have it coming, revealed an ambivalence in the Western liberal establishment that Raspil had acutely diagnosed a mix of disbelief and almost masochistic guilt. Today, looking at Europe's demographics, one might say Raspil's nightmare 100-year flood of migration came through slowly rather than all at once. In his novel, a single armada of 1 million migrants triggered societal collapse. In reality, the numbers have occurred year by year. By 2022, for example, the UK saw over 1.2 million people immigrate in just one year, with net migration hitting a record of 606,000. Germany admitted over 1 million refugees between 2015 to 2016 under Merkel's policy and continue to accept hundreds of thousands annually. Across the European Union, the foreign-born population has swelled into the tens of millions. While these arrivals did not come as one giant flotilla, the cumulative impact has been profound, arguably even transformative, on many cities and towns. Raspil's fiction exaggerated for effect, but its core question remains painfully relevant. How much demographic change can Western society absorb before they cease to be recognizably Western? And if it is possible, that liberal Europe's very virtues, its humanitarianism, its openness and self-criticism, could be the instruments of its undoing. Obviously, The Camp of the Saints is a deeply controversial novel, laden with dehumanizing portrayals. Even some sympathizers admit Raspil was dehumanizing in his caricatures of Indians, Africans and Arab migrants. The text dwells on sordid imagery. The migrant and martyr is described as packed with squalor, fermenting in filth and excrement, with corpses tossed aboard daily and even acts of cannibalism and rape implied. These lurid details understandably repelled critics, who saw them as racist exaggerations intended to stoke fear. Raspil himself maintained that he was an equal-opportunity offender. His harshest barbs in the novel are aimed not at the migrants, who he sometimes portrays as pitiful, but at the elite Western enablers of this invasion. Indeed, the true villains of Camp of the Saints are the suicidal white liberals, the pontiff who urges Europeans to welcome the invaders as an act of Christian charity. Even as the Vatican's treasures are sold off and the Catholic doctrine perverted, or the French president who cannot bring himself to order the army to fire on the oncoming ships, most scathing of all is Raspil's depiction of the academic and media class, the left-wing intellectuals who in the story actively paralyze any will to resist the influx, preaching that surrender is the only moral course. Beyond politics, Raspil's novel and Europe's real migrant tensions both underscore a fundamental cultural clash. The clash is not simply about religion, though Islam's spread in Europe is a major factor, but about worldviews, nations and social norms. Camp of the Saints suggests that our civilization is not communicable to these people, that many of the newcomers neither understand nor respect the ethos of the West. This is, of course, a generalization with exceptions, but consider the earlier example of the war memorial flame. What would possess someone to treat a sacred monument as a camp stove? In fairness, the individual in Brussels might simply have been a homeless man desperate for a hot meal, yet the symbolism of the act touched a nerve. It epitomized the fear that Europe's heritage means nothing to them. In Raspil's novel, a leftist character chillingly warns Frenchmen of this exact point. Watching the migrant fleet approach each once, your world means nothing to them. They won't even try to understand. They'll be cold. They'll be hungry. They'll build a fire with your lovely oak door. Every object will lose the meaning you attach to it. What's beautiful won't be beautiful anymore. In other words, they will use your civilization's treasures as kindling and latrines because they simply do not share your frame of reference or value. Is this an unfair stereotype? Perhaps. Many immigrants do appreciate and respect their host nations, but Western Europe has also seen glaring failures of integration. Enclaves of migrant populations sometimes live in isolation from the mainstream, with little attachment to national symbols or cultural norms. Cases of vandalism or disrespect towards European traditions, from Christmas markets to churches to national commemorations, are increasingly sensitive topics. But these incidents are not random. They are the fruit of importing large numbers of people for whom our monuments, our heroes, our history means nothing. Why might this be so? Part of the answer lies in stark cultural differences in tribal loyalty, upbringing, education and well-being. Europe's liberal, secular, post-war societies operate on principles that cannot be assumed to be universal. Concepts like individual rights, pluralism, equality before the law and sanctity of cultural heritage are learned values nurtured over centuries in the West, often painfully. Migrants from war-torn Syria, tribal Afghanistan or rural Africa will not instantly imbibe these values upon arrival. Many come from societies where tribal clan or religious loyalties trump civic nationalism, where the line between public property and personal use is blurry, and where the nation-state itself may be an alien idea. There is also the factor of historical grievances and mindset. As author Ed Hussain recounts in his travels among British Muslim communities, some immigrant background individuals harbour a deep seed of resentment towards the West, viewing issues like the Iraq war or colonial era injustices as justification for not assimilating. In one case, Hussain pressed an imam in Northern England about why local Muslims were indifferent to crimes like the grooming gang scandal or preferred self-segregation. The imam's response was telling. He immediately invoked the legacy of British imperialism, the partition of India, Western wars in the Middle East, and essentially argued that white people are getting what they deserve for past wrongs. When such sentiments exist, even implicitly, it's hard to foster a genuine respect for the host culture's monuments or laws. A person who inwardly believes the West owed them recompense may feel little guilt in exploiting Western generosity or flouting its customs. Furthermore, religious and philosophical differences can shape behaviour in subtle ways. For example, commentators have noticed a strain of fatalism in some Muslim and Hindu communities that affect attitudes towards planning, personal responsibility, and public cleanliness. The oft-heard phrase, Inshallah, God willing, in Islamic culture, as Ayin Hirisi Ali and others describe, can sometimes encourage a mindset that outcomes are preordained by Allah, thus diminishing personal agency in improving one's surroundings. In part of South Asia, Hindu beliefs in karma and reincarnation can likewise engender a certain resignation to fate. If someone is born into suffering, perhaps it is cosmically ordained and attempts to greatly change one's lot for one's society may be seen as futile or even impious. This fatalistic outlook contrasts sharply with Western, especially Protestant, influence ethics of taking initiative and valuing each individual life. It might help explain observable differences like littering behaviours, infrastructure maintenance, or attitudes towards corruption between, say, Northern Europe and the developing world. When large populations carry those habits into a new country, integration is not automatic. Actually, it's nearly impossible. For instance, high rates of cousin marriage in the Middle East and South Asia mean loyalty is often the strongest to one's extended family or clan. This can manifest as ethnic nepotism, such as business owners hiring only co-ethnics or preferring in-group networks over metacritic fairness. Western societies idealistically expect newcomers to adopt a civic identity and treat fellow citizens equally regardless of kin or creed. But if a diaspora maintains a colonial mentality, viewing the host nation primarily as a place to extract resources and wealth, e.g. via remittance sent back home rather than as a new motherland, tension will inevitably rise. India's government, for example, openly celebrates its global diaspora as a living bridge that funnels economic gains back to the motherland. Such strategic diaspora policies can clash with the expectations of host countries that migrants fully commit to their new homeland's civic life. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of differing attitudes towards life and death comes from history. In a report from 1864, a correspondent from The Times, reprinted in the New York Times, described a Hindu Jagannath festival in Puri, India. Enormous temple chariots carrying idols of the god Krishna were pulled by throngs of devotees. The account notes that in earlier times, pilgrims would throw themselves under the wheels of Jagannath carts in an act of fanatic devotion, seeking instant salvation or rebirth. The British colonial authorities had officially banned this practice of human sacrifice, yet during the 1864 festival, the reporter witnessed a gruesome scene. As the heavy cart finally lurched forward, it crushed out a life with every revolution of its hideous wheels, covered as they were with human flesh and gore. A number of people, including an old woman, had deliberately slung herself beneath the wheels. The crowd's reaction was shocking to the European observer. No one in the crowd offered to move her or raise her head from the ground, he wrote, describing the mortally injured woman. The masses stood by with vacant stares, while the high-caste Brahmin priest atop the cart gazed down with as much unconcern as could be written on human countenance. Many victims lay mangled under the chariot, and still the Brahmin signalled to the crowd to pull again until police intervened. This harrowing anecdote reads as if it's a passage from Count of the Saints. It starkly captures a moral divide. The Western journalists saw every individual trampled as a tragedy, a horror to be stopped, but to the devotees and priests, those deaths were either acts of pious self-sacrifice or simply not worth concern. Human life in that context was weighed on a very different scale, especially if the victims were low-caste. The reporter even mused that if Europeans hadn't been present, local authorities would have hushed it up indeed. Indian police tried to claim it was all an accident. Now, fast forward to modern Europe, one obviously cannot equate a 19th-century ritual with 21st-century migration, yet subtler echoes of that disregard for other lives can sometimes be seen. For example, the grooming gang scandals in the UK, which involved mostly South Asian heritage Pakistani perpetrators targeting vulnerable white British girls for sexual exploitation. Whistleblowers and survivors described how the abusers saw their victims as nothing, infidel girls of low worth in their twisted view deserving of no compassion. Similar attitudes have been noted among some extremist elements in Europe who justify crime or even terror by dehumanizing the outgrowth, whether by religion or ethnicity. The truth is, not all cultures share the West's post-alignment view of universal human dignity. In societies rigidly stratified by caste, clan or creed, empathy often does not extend far beyond one's in-group. As Raspil provocatively suggests in his novel, if people do not see you as a part of their moral community, they will have few qualms about taking what is yours. This is not a uniquely non-Western trait. Humans everywhere have the capacity for tribalism, but Western liberal democracies have spent centuries trying imperfectly to expand the circle of inclusion. All men are created equal, love thy neighbour as thyself, etc. It is folly to assume that newcomers from regions that have not undergone a similar humanist evolution will subscribe to those ideals. While acknowledging cultural friction is important, Raspil's most withering critique was aimed at the West itself. In Count of the Saints, Europe collapses not so much because the migrants are strong, but because Western resolve is fatally weak. The continent is armed only with its ideals, which prove to be suicidal. Time and again in the story, European authorities choose inaction or surrender out of guilt or misguided altruism. The French president divvies on national TV, unable to give the shoot-to-stop order, as the flotilla beaches on the Riviera. Soldiers lay down their rifles, unwilling to be branded racist murderers. Church leaders, academics and journalists all implore the public to welcome the migrants, insisting it would be immoral to do otherwise, even as riots, rapes and killings accompany the influx. In short, Western self-hatred and the bleeding-heart empathy pave the way for conquest. Raspil personifies this pathology in the character of Professor Clementio, a French intellectual of mixed race in the novel, who uses lofty humanitarian rhetoric to paralyze France's defences. At one point, he exalts overcoming invasions, sneering to a traditionalist opponent. Because the conscience of the world makes me hate all of this, your heritage. Your world means nothing to them. They'll wipe their hands on your books in your library, they'll defecate on your terrace, they'll spit out your wine. Now get lost, I'm sick of you. This fictional academic welcomes Europe's humiliation as a form of justice and eagerly assists in it. In the end, he's too killed by the very people he helped bring in. His final thought, an ironic realisation of his own folly. Overcome by love and homesickness for the West, he deliberately opens his mouth and inhaled death. Raspil writes of the character's demise. In the author's eyes, the Western leftists have a death wish for their own civilization, born of nihilism and guilt. Only at the last second do they realise what they have lost. This idea of suicidal empathy has been echoed by modern scholars like Gard Sade, who warn that excessive compassion without pragmatism can become a pathogen undermining a society's survival instincts. Many of Europe's leaders have exhibited an almost pathological inability to set limits on immigration or to assert their nation's interests for fear of seeming inhumane. Angela Merkel herself, when pressed on whether her open border policy might impact disaster, famously retorted If we start having to apologise for showing a friendly face in an emergency, this is not my country. That sentiment may appear noble, but it's actually blinding. Merkel's stance arguably ignored the very real capacity limits and integration challenges Germany faced. Indeed, by 2016, she had to backtrack. Admitting that uncontrolled immigration cannot, should not and must not happen again. But by then, political backlash had fuelled the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland and left deep divisions in German society. Throughout Europe, we see similar patterns. Elites in government, media and academia tend to downplay problems associated with immigrants, whether crime, welfare dependency or cultural friction, out of a mix of idealism and fear of being labelled xenophobic. When citizens complain, they are often shamed as bigots. This suppression of legitimate concern only drives frustrated publics towards populist movements. Rispel's lesson is that denial and self-flagellation are no way to manage a civilisation. A culture unwilling to defend itself, or even articulate that it has a distinct identity worth defending, invites others to walk all over it, sometimes literally. In the final analysis, The Camp of the Saints forces Western readers to confront an uncomfortable question. Do we believe our civilisation is worth preserving, or will we let it be subsumed by a utopian dream of universal humanity? Rispel's answer was that the Tower of Babel project housing all people under one global civilisation is a naive fantasy, doomed to end in anarchy and misery. He chooses a biblical allusion for his title from the Book of Revelations, in which satanic hordes surround the Camp of the Saints before the end day, to suggest that what is at stake is almost spiritual. For Rispel, the West's loss of faith in itself was the true herald of the apocalypse. Once Europe was no longer willing to assert its own values or enforce its boundaries, everything solid melted away. Whether one agrees or not, it's clear Europe is at a crossroad. The stark rhetoric of invasion vs humanitarian duty continues to polarise debate, but between those extremes lies a sober middle path, a recognition that not all peoples, cultures and value systems are compatible in a single quality, and that third world migration can indeed overwhelm a society's cohesion. In practical terms, Europe may need to re-embrace concepts that have become unfashionable in elite discourse. Patriotism, nationalism and even a kind of ethnocentrism, the idea that it's okay and good for the French to unapologetically preserve what is French, the Swedes what is Swedish, and so on. As Rispel's novel bitterly illustrates, the opposite, indiscriminate altruism coupled with self-loathing tends not to be a Kumbaya utopia, but leads to chaos and the loss of all that was once held dear. Europe's unknown soldiers did not die on clandestine fields or on the beaches of Normandy so that a century later their grandchildren would be told that their nations don't even have a core identity worth protecting. Yet an ethos of excessive relativism had done just that, convincing many Europeans that defending their own culture is somehow immoral. It is past time to dispel that notion. Charity begins at home, a nation's first duty is to its own people and heritage. The tomb in Brussels where a man fried eggs on the memorial flame is a sober reminder. If present trends continue, such desecration of memory may become commonplace, just part of the new normal. But if Europe chooses to awaken to say no when it must and enough when it should, then perhaps the flame will not die out. In Rispel's epilogue, the last holdouts of the West dedicate their struggle to our grandchildren in hopes they will not be ashamed of us. It's a moving sentiment. Do not let the light of your civilization be extinguished, not even by the noblest of intentions. Ultimately, the lesson is that civilization is fragile. It can endure external assaults but it cannot survive internal surrender. Europe must overcome its suicidal empathy and rediscover a rational nationalism and pride, otherwise the camp of the saints, once a fiction, could become a fact and the monuments of Europe, from its cathedrals to its Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers, might indeed become nothing more than cooking posts and curiosities for a future world that scarcely remembers the greatness that built them.