By Rod Dreher, European Conservative.
Thanks to the British government, Renaud Camus is having a moment. The gentle octogenarian French intellectual was banned from entering the United Kingdom, which claims that his presence in Britain is “not considered to be conducive to the public good”. So much for Keir Starmer’s boast in the White House that free speech is alive and well in Great Britain.
Camus is best known as the author of the “Great Replacement” theory. A commentator on GB News supported his ban, saying that Camus’s concept is a “racist” conspiracy theory. It’s easy to see where she gets this idea; the media have relentlessly forwarded this claim for years.
It’s not true, as fair-minded people who take the trouble to read Camus’s work learn. I know this, because I was one of them. I assumed that it must be true, because if the belief that a cabal of elites conspired to substitute black and brown foreigners for native-born white people isn’t racist, what is it?
Then a couple of years ago, an American friend, the professor of French literature Louis Betty, asked me to read a translation of some political essays by Camus, set to be published by Vauban Books. I know Betty is not a racist, so despite my reluctance, I read the book Enemy Of The Disaster.
What I discovered was that Camus is not a racist, but rather a clear-eyed analyst of a shocking, even catastrophic, cultural and social trend: the suicide of Western civilization, orchestrated by elites in many different fields—politics, business, academia, media, and the church.
According to Camus, in the postwar period, European elites undertook a mission of “deculturation”—that is, teaching European peoples to despise and to forget about their own history and civilizational accomplishments. Progressives in politics, academia, and the media believe that European civilization is more or less evil (racist, classist, the usual categories). Capitalists conclude that a people attached to its national stories and virtues are harder to convince to permit mass immigration, which they deem necessary to implement frictionless global trade and economic development. Sentimental churchmen conclude that national consciousness contradicts Christianity’s universalism.