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Alex Kurtagic's Mister
Review by Edmund Connelly
(Source: The Occidental Quarterly Online)

Imagine a novel that is a marriage of George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four and Jean Raspail’s depressing account of the genocide of Europeans, The Camp of the Saints.

As the definitive dystopian novel of our age, Nineteen Eighty-Four conjures up a world that has far too many parallels to our own day for comfort. For starters, the technocratic totalitarian State of the novel echoes loudly in forms we see today such as the Department of Homeland Security and Federal programs such as the Clinton-era Carnivore that could sift through all e-mail traffic.

The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a government functionary named Winston Smith, develops an intense dislike of the cynical regime under which he must live, so he sets out to personally foil the omnipresent and omnipotent system of Big Brother. As is famously known, Smith is naïve in believing he can escape the system’s notice and is arrested, tortured and re-educated to love The Party like all other good citizens.

Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (read the Preface here) is cut from different cloth. Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, it focuses on race and racial differences, where European whites are on the verge of extinction . . . “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.” Boatloads of starving refugees from India head for the shores of southern France, packed onto the ship’s deck:

[I]t was like trying to count all the trees in the forest, those arms raised high in the air, waving and shaking together, all outstretched toward the nearby shore. Scraggy branches, brown and black, quickened by a breath of hope. All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms. And they rose up out of scraps of cloth, white cloth that must have been tunics once, and togas, and pilgrims’ saris.

In the end, these non-white multitudes overwhelm the native Europeans whose sentimental liberalism has prevented them from making the effort needed to save even themselves. The last holdout — mountainous Switzerland — succumbs as well, destined to suffer the fate of its fellow European nations, overrun by “the howling, swarming horde. Thousands of human ants, streaming down the zigzag path from Fontgembar, in an endless column, bristling with fists, and sticks, and scythes, and guns . . .”

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