Camp of the Saints Comes to Life

I haven't read Camp of the Saints, but I remember reading this article when it came out in 1994.

The Atlantic: Must It Be the Rest Against the West?

Absent major changes in North-South relations, the wretched should inherit the earth by about 2025

It predicts the massive population movement seen today:

Set at some vague time--perhaps fifteen or twenty years--in the future, the novel describes the pilgrimage of a million desperate Indians who, forsaking the ghastly conditions of downtown Calcutta and surrounding villages, commandeer an armada of decrepit ships and set off for the French Riviera.

And also the weakness of the societies the desperate poor are invading:

But it is not the huddled mass of Indians, with their "fleshless Gandhi-arms," that is the focus of Raspail's attention so much as the varied responses of the French and the other privileged members of "the camp of the saints" as they debate how to deal with the inexorably advancing multitude. Raspail is particularly effective here in capturing the platitudes of official announcements, the voices of ordinary people, the tone of statements by concerned bishops, and so on. The book also seems realistic in its recounting of the crumbling away of resolve by French sailors and soldiers when they are given the order to repel physically--to shoot or torpedo--this armada of helpless yet menacing people. It would be much easier, clearly, to confront a military foe, such as a Warsaw Pact nation. The fifty-one (short) chapters are skillfully arranged so that the reader's attention is switched back and forth, within a two-month time frame, between the anxious debates in Paris and events attending the slow and grisly voyage of the Calcutta masses. The denouement, with the French population fleeing their southern regions and army units deserting in droves, is especially dramatic.

...Many members of the more prosperous economies are beginning to agree with Raspail's vision: a world of two "camps," North and South, separate and unequal, in which the rich will have to fight and the poor will have to die if mass migration is not to overwhelm us all. Migration is the third part of the problem. If we do not act now to counteract tendencies toward global apartheid, they will only hurry the day when we may indeed see Raspail's vision made real.

It's a long article that concludes with:

One thing seems to us fairly certain. However the debate unfolds, it is, alas, likely that a large part of it--on issues of population, migration, rich versus poor, race against race--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, Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints. It will take more than talk to prove the prophet wrong.

At least one nation refuses to be overrun. ZH: Meanwhile At Budapest Main Train Station (Live Feed)

The main railway in Budapest got closed for an “undetermined time” for migrants Tuesday after hundreds of them attempted to board a train to Vienna, the latest event in the spiraling migrant crisis that’s engulfing Europe.

Hundreds of refugees – most of them from conflict areas like Syria – are now waiting at the station, with the entrance blocked by police, and are demonstrating, urging the authorities to let them in, shouting “Germany, Germany.”

The station remains open for other passengers, local media report.

Camp of the Saints has come to life.