By Paul Nachman
06/16/2017
In a piece about that London high-rise building’s conflagration, Mark Steyn has written [The Great Fire of a New London, June 16, 2017] what amounts to a complement for a current Steve Sailer blog entry here at VDARE.com, NYT: “Remember the Population Bomb? It’s Still Ticking” (June 16, 2017).Steyn’s fine-grained observations of the worldwide population bomb’s effects in the "global city" of London, bring to mind a passage in the preface to the third edition (1985) of Jean Raspail’s dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints:
The domestics have innumerable relatives on this side and beyond the seas, a single starving family that populates all the earth. A global Spartacus … To cite but one example from hundreds, the population of Nigeria, in Africa, has close to seventy million inhabitants which it is incapable of feeding even while it spends more than fifty percent of its oil income to buy food. At the dawn of the third millennium, there will be a hundred million Nigerians and the oil will be gone.A correspondent of mine termed the Steyn article "magisterial." Indeed, you should read it for yourself. Here I'd like to highlight part of a comment posted there by Bob Stewart, one of Steyn’s readers:[PDF reprint in the Winter 1993 — 1994 issue of The Social Contract, translated from the French by Gerda Bikales]
Enjoying the "benefits" of modern technology requires a fairly high degree of assimilation. Things that we take for granted, like flush toilets, may be unknown to the migrants that [London’s mayor, Sadiq] Khan and his colleagues have populated their ever growing slums with. … The Left, in its embrace of "diversity", is largely unaware of these realities, since they are committed to a philosophy that holds all cultures and their technology as interchangeable. …Regardless of the seismic internal conflicts looming for humanity, earth will continue spinning on its axis unperturbed. But Raspail and Steyn (and perhaps Steyn’s reader/commenter Stewart) see clearly what humanity itself is facing. Raspail concluded his preface:I worked as a draftsman during my summer breaks, and one of my coworkers was a successful Hispanic who had parlayed his earnings into a number of rental houses that were rented primarily to immigrants from central America. One of his rentals was so misused that after 3 months the only thing he could figure out to do with the property was to donate it to the fire department to use as a training exercise. The renters hadn’t used the toilets, and the urine and fecal matter made the place very unpleasant, shall we say. Fire was the solution.
[Emphasis added.]
I am a novelist. I have no theory, no system nor ideology to propose or defend. It just seems to me that we [i.e. Western civilization — PN] are facing a unique alternative: either learn the resigned courage of being poor or find again the inflexible courage to be rich. In both cases, so-called Christian charity will prove itself powerless. The times will be cruel.
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