When most people think of dystopian visions of the future, they think of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Both excellent choices. Some readers have other volumes they would propose instead. But for myself there are two outstanding books that each singularly stand out alone: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. I have frequently discussed this later brilliant prophetic novel here at LRC.
But here is a very good introduction and overview of it, stressing its continuing prophetic relevance to dramatic and destructive catastrophic events in the contemporary world. The original novel, written in 1973, even had a delusional leftist South American Pope.
It is unquestionably the most powerful novel I have ever read. Insidious egalitarianism, destructive welfarism, aggressive multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, Third World invasions by the wretched of the earth, militaristic imperialism posing as humanitarian liberation, and mindless parousiatic atheism in the name of a hallowed pluralism.
Daily, relentlessly each and every day, on social media and our TV screens, we see this horrific story unfold at the southern US border, in our crime-ridden jungle-like cities of squalor and hopelessness, throughout the European continent’s serious decline into unimaginable barbarism, unrelenting warfare and invasive treachery and subversion.
7:18 pm on October 9, 2024
