As I mentioned on social media, I put the book The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail on my reading list, primarily because Amazon banned it.
Call me a rebel, but I like reading banned books.
Nevertheless, apparently the book publisher’s letter concerning the ban went viral, and Amazon capitulated within hours. The Streisand effect1 strikes again.
For those who haven’t heard of the book, like me, here’s a very brief snapshot:
- “The 1973 dystopian novel depicts the destruction of the West (Caucasian race) through third-world mass migration.”
Moreover, The Federalist has a quality summary of the book’s banning ordeal, including these points:
In an act of censorship that liberals would normally decry as fascist and authoritarian, Amazon banned a new edition of The Camp of the Saints by the late French novelist Jean Raspail — and then quietly re-listed the book after online backlash to the company’s attempted censorship. The book, published by a small outfit called Vauban Books, was removed from Amazon’s U.S. site on Monday with almost no explanation. As of this writing, Amazon has not explained why it de-listed the book.
It went on to explain that the author specifically made efforts not to make the novel about racism, but rather about how civilizations die and how a society’s elites are often the villains.
…The novel isn’t actually about race at all, but about how civilizations die. Raspail himself wrote that he chose Indians, and not North Africans or Arabs, as his Third World antagonists, because of a “refusal to enter the false debate about racism and anti-racism in French daily life.” The real villains of his story aren’t the Indians who seek to despoil and occupy Europe, but the European elites who encourage and aid them.
Nevertheless, the original 1973 first edition and more recent editions can be found on Archive.org, too.
Footnotes
- A phenomenon in which attempting to suppress an item of information attracts even more unwanted attention, thus furthering its dissemination. ↩︎
