The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews

(By Jean Raspail) (1973)

Western self-loathing has been increasingly documented, with the focus rarely on shame (the healthy recognition of past cultural excesses and infamies) but more particularly on Guilt and Submission. And white people have had their anti-racism homework set. Despite and perhaps because of this, we’ve seen, in recent decades, an elitist multi-cultural rejection of assimilation, an undocumented invasion of the West, run by an unholy trinity of criminal networks, corrupt NGOs and cynical governments (on the supply side, sending away not-their-best; on the demand side, pursuing a growth mirage and co-opting a furtive voting demographic). With care comes control, but not of the ‘guests’, resulting in lack of cohesion, fragmentation, ghettoization, erosion of a governing consensus, race-shaming, and a sense at least of ‘replacement.’ After all, “no-one is illegal on stolen land“!

Recent examples of this can be seen in the un-trammelled entries into country of people neither vetted nor documented – millions of them, in Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the UK, across the southern border into the US, in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Leading to calls for intifada and the one-state solution; incursive slaughter of infidels and destruction of churches around the globe (think Israel east of Gaza, and the templates of Nigeria, Senegal, Syria or Sudan); tubes and buses and nightclubs bombed; a Manchester concert massacre; beheading and knife-wielding; graffiti on and burning of synagogues and Jewish schools and restaurants; defacing of ‘colonialist’ statuary; a mass shooting on Bondi Beach; murder at the Charlie Hebdo office, the Bataclan and Nice; out-of-control serious crime seemingly everywhere, including vast fraud in Minnesota via Somali ‘Quality Learing’ centres; gang violence; illegal street trading; parallel societies; welfare, health and housing squeezes; civil unrest when authority seeks out ‘sanctuary’ to enforce immigration law; hate and scant regard for sanctuary hotels (countries); a culture of cancellation and ‘de-platforming,’ and a general malaise. When my father came to Australia, he had English, but his cohort made sure to master the national language. Today, in my State, when civil court process is issued, a mandatory notice accompanying it comes in 10 different languages.

In a strange way, Malthusian prejudice accompanied this tyranny of guilt. In The Population Bomb, which surely influenced Raspail while writing his own book in 1971/72, Paul and Anne Ehrlich described their experience of Delhi:

“The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”

The Ehrlich view (lined-up with Nietzsche’s observation that “the earth has a skin and this skin has diseases; one of these diseases is called ‘Man‘”*) did not exactly come to pass, yet Raspail, writing in a splenetic rather than scientific or philosophical way, seems to have been something of a seer.

His rather remarkable dystopian book (re-published in 2025, the 100th birthday of the author, in a rare English translation) is wildly uneven, somewhat forced, chock-full of scatological references and vile and reactionary ranting, and yet, it is prescient to a spooky degree. Written in the early 1970s, it countenances mass migration (in the story, a million people in an armada of leaky boats, from the Indian sub-continent rather than the Maghreb or Middle East) to the European continent, that creates an existential crisis among various progressive and naively tolerant governments. Tolerance gives way to panic, and the “panic liquifies, annihilates.”

Raspail had the idea for this book, when, looking out over the Mediterranean from the Côte d’Azur, he suddenly wondered, not quite knowing to whom he referred, “What if they came?” Perhaps Chancellor Angela Merkel, Presidents Mitterrand and Chirac, Joe Biden, every British PM of the last 20 years, and even the current Australian Government, should have closely read this book, confronting though it is?

There is a thin line between (1) concerns about the effect of Multi-Culti on national identity and social cohesion, and (2) out-and-out racism. Sometimes these lines are blurred from passion, or carelessness; sometimes as a matter of deliberate policy (I’m talking about all frequencies of the political spectrum, now!). The tyranny of guilt, written about eloquently by Pascal Bruckner, had its genesis in works such as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and the new left activism of the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, who called for colonizers/oppressors to starve and the colonized/oppressed to brutally subjugate them. And the West is now, all around the world, promoting such developments in a pious paroxysm of guilt. Social segmentation dressed-up as ‘social justice.’ As Nathan Pinkoski says, in his introduction to this new edition, in the post WWII years, “the West fattened its body but lost its soul.”**

Some extracts from the book are illustrative of the vitriol and the sometimes dazzling absurdities that have since become fact.

Young Frenchman tells old one about the coming reckoning: “I think you’re perfect. That’s why I hate you. And it’s here, to your house, that I’ll bring the most wretched ones tomorrow. They know nothing about what you are, about what you represent. Your world means nothing to them. They won’t try to understand…Sitting on their haunches, they’ll watch as your armchairs go up in flames…”

Jean Raspail

“Passports, nations, religions, ideals, races, borders, and oceans – all nonsense!”

Sometimes, Raspail seems to channel Céline, apart from the ellipses: “Also waiting that night were the garbagemen, streetsweepers, and sewer cleaners of all the garbage dumps throughout the Paris metropolitan area; the orderlies and bedpan technicians of all the hospitals; the dishwashers of the workers’ cafeterias; the unskilled laborers of Billancourt, Javel, Saint-Denis, and elsewhere; the lopsided gas and electricity navvys; the chemical industry wretches; the machine pushers; the troglodytes of the Métro; the stinking drudges of the filthiest jobs, and so many others, representing a hundred essential trades that had slipped from the limp hands of the French. Altogether, a few hundred thousand blacks, Arabs, and sundry other swarthy peoples, somehow invisible to the eyes of the ostrich-like Parisians and of whose true number no one had the least inkling ever since the authorities started doctoring the statistics, for fear of too brutally awakening the sleepwalking capital from its tranquil slumber.”

“The world seems to be controlled, not by a single orchestra conductor, but by a new apocalyptic beast, a sort of anonymous, omnipresent monster who has vowed, first and foremost, to destroy the West.”

“There is no longer such a thing as the Third World,^ that’s just a word (sic) you’ve invented to keep your distance. There’s just the world, and this world will be submereged by life. This country of mine is but a river of sperm that has abruptly changed course and is now flowing West.”

“All the idleness, the heat…They’ll make demands. They’ll demand independence. And why not? A hundred unlivable nations have representatives on the benches of the UN. We’ll just invent a hundred and first!”

“At the very same moment, seven thousand two hundred and twelve high school teachers told themselves that they would begin their courses the next day with a debate on racism. Whether their subject was mathematics,. English, chemistry, geography, or even Latin in no way changed the matter.”

Progressive broadcaster Durfort, as the armada looms: “…I say to you, my friends, we are all men of the Ganges!”

A Frenchman born in India telephones the radio station: “You don’t know my people, their filth, their fatalism, their idiotic superstitions, their atavistic resistance to change. You have no idea what you’re in for if this fleet of primitives falls upon you.”

“The pope published a maudlin little press release…The international civil servants…so many rats draped in UN cheese…agreed to wait. The only distant reaction worth noting came from Australia…They lived like nabobs in that vast, empty country, assured of the limitless wealth of their mines and livestock. But, above all, they knew how to read a map…In rather veiled terms, the Australians were being encouraged to steel their hearts against pity…and the Ganges fleet encouraged to stay clear of her shores.”^^

“India burns its dead. As soon as it left port, so did the armada. At least those who died on board, not those who fell into the water, who were but miniscule fleas fallen from the flanks of the wave-shaken armada. Many died, above all old people and children, already exhausted before they even came on board, starving wretches at the end of their rope, finished off by insane hope.”

“The great migration unfurled its carpet. And certainly not for the first time, if one cares to look into the past of mankind. Other civilizations, neatly labeled in the display cabinets of our museums, had already suffered the same fate. But mankind rarely heeds the lessons of its past…what is culture if not a pious inventory of the past?”

Two opposing camps. One believes in miracles. The other no longer does. The one that will raise mountains is the one that has kept its faith. It will conquer. Mortal doubt has sapped all energy in the other. It will be conquered.”  “Paradise had already changed hands, and hatred made faith all the stronger….It’s probably a new form of modern warfare, where the enemy attacks unarmed, protected by his wretchedness….never once did this multitude seem to realize that this country upon whose soil it had just landed might belong to others.”

“In the international organizations responsible for Third World problems, one does not make a career for oneself by relying on the truth.”

“For every errant socialite, there is always a threshold beyond which the spirit of caste once again takes the upper hand…”

“The minister carefully examined his 1937 model Soviet revolver. He rediscovered those forgotten gestures and, this time, the old revolver did not jam. The minister was found slumped at his desk, his torso lying on the table, his head resting in a pool of blood, which his open mouth seemed to be drinking after having spat it out. On a sheet of paper, just before dying, he had strangely written: “Might as well water them myself…””

“As the barman in the first-class lounge concluded before quitting his job and then his life, a knife planted in his back, “when all’s said and done, I prefer the rich. At least when they’ve got to puke, they go to the trouble of doing it in the toilet!””

“The true right is not serious. This is why the Left hates it, rather like a hangman must hate a victim who laughs and jokes on his way to the gallows. The Left is a conflagration that devours and consumes in deadly earnest. All appearances notwithstanding, its parties are as grim as one of those parades of puppets in Nuremberg or Beijing.”

“Here were two men, each of them instruments of fate for their side. One crossed the oceans, encountered the other, and, in a flash of inspiration, killed him, as if he recognized him.”

“When the official history of this D-Day of brotherhood later came to be rewritten, their rout was presented as merely the vanguard moving inland to prepare “reception centers…” Half in shock and half in terror, the little darlings held their noses and then got the hell out of there. Never had they expected a good cause to smell so bad. A lack of maturity, that’s all. Everyone knows that it’s the evil causes that smell best – progree, prosperity, money, luxury, excess, higher morality, and all the rest of it…”

Raspail’s book has a recurring line throughout – “Perhaps this might be an explanation” which is really as tedious and unnecessary as Vonnegut’s “So it goes” in Slaughterhouse-5. Yet somehow, it seems apposite, as Vonnegut’s seemed to him.

As of writing now, the world is hardly contending with a creature it cannot name: the Islam-o-nut. The Quran, full though it is of poetry and compassionate and merciful thoughts, swerves wildly into sword verses that promote the extirpation of infidels (plus those apostates in Iran, who’d like to be cut a little slack, or at least some journalistic interest). From this arose the concept of Intifada (or, as Taylah Swift might put it, ‘Shake it Off’). The last word of God and the last of the line of the great religions, its adherents mandate shaking off what went before and signing up to the new-replacing-deal (whichever half of the Schism that happens to be).

A lot of Raspail’s scorn is for sclerotic authority and especially the cringeworthy Fourth Estate. As we see today in the denial of plain-as-face facts, the practice of transcription rather than criticism of the managerial class, the omission of covering uncomfortable topics and events, the downright lies and distortions, antisemitic tropes, blood libels and cartoons, the judgment without curiosity and the sheer partisan fawning, these professional failures have failed-up and fomented the present discontents.