That's the title of a 1970s novel by Jean Raspail (Amazon write-up here) that hubby made me read some time ago (as in prior to 9/11). For a while my brother and I were making a point of reading some of the same things so we could "talk" about them in voluminous emails, and Camp of the Saints was the book that killed this nice practice. Don't know if bro' did, but I just couldn't finish it. Too ham-handed. The premise of the book is that the entire surplus population of the Third World literally arrives at Europe's shore via boat, feeling themselves invited by Leftist politics of compassion. And they just march in and take over. Europeans do nothing whatsoever to defend themselves --in fact, the few defenders are derided as extremists by the media, even as civilization fails.
I was pretty much done with the book when, at the end of the first chapter, the enlightened white European male working in India is trampled by the hordes piling onto boats bound for Europe. As he sinks beneath the befouled waters of the Ganges, he has an epiphany that he really does love the Western culture he has worked his whole life to destroy after all. Mark Steyn's recent column for the Australian (via ninme, who managed to continue blogging even though she attended the same conference I did) reminded me of nothing so much as that novel.
I am less and less convinced that Islam as a whole is in fact to blame for Islamism, but the secular West and its foolishness cannot be mocked enough. They who fancy it is weak-minded to believe in an omnipotent God nonetheless believe that civilization is so powerful it can withstand infinite attack from without and within. So it turns out the Left actually "believes" in Western civilization more than the the Right does.
