Camus Against the Machine

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.   

When Camus describes anti-racism as “the Communism of the 21^st century,” he is not defending racism, but rather accurately analyzing a totalitarian ideology. 

They are aided in this task by what Camus calls “the second career of Adolf Hitler.” Antiracists and other progressives invoke the Nazi dictator’s odious example to demonize anyone who objects to their ideological project. 

Writes Camus:

…Hitler served to once and for all condemn or silence anything a person might say, or believed he might say, or thought he might at least insinuate should it have any connection, however slight, to Hitler, to anything he did, anything he wrote, anything he thought. In this domain, however, accusation equals condemnation. Suspicion equals guilt. And, for the potential target, risk equals ruin.The Hitler weapon is, he says, a rhetorical atomic bomb deployed by culture warriors of the Left to stigmatize dissent and disrupt continuity with the past. Camus correctly claims that a people that knows and cherishes its history, its literature, and its culture will not allow itself to be replaced by those who do not share that cultural inheritance, or who despise it. 

Camus emphasizes that the ideological groundwork was laid not by migrants, but by elites who sought to replace what they regarded as a corrupt and bankrupt culture with a superior one—and would have accomplished this even if they had not permitted a single migrant to enter Europe. 

However, these elites, of both the Left and the mainstream Right, laid the conceptual and policy groundwork for importing millions of foreigners who do not share the deracinated beliefs of these Europeans, but who rather bear a strong religion and culture—the superiority of which these strangers harbor no doubts. 

In his 2010 speech titled “The Great Replacement,” reproduced in the Vauban Books volume, Camus observes that France is in the middle of “radical, irreversible transformation” by mass migration. Mass migration is not the Great Replacement, but only part of it. 

In fact, Camus believes it is possible for migrants to become good Frenchmen, through active assimilation and acceptance of France’s “grand narrative”. Camus stresses that he does not love French culture because he unfailingly considers it to be superior to other cultures; he loves it because it is his own.

“Individuals who so wish can always join a people out of love for its language, literature, its art de vivre or its landscapes,” he writes. “But peoples who remain peoples cannot join other peoples. They can only conquer them, submerge them, replace them.”

The point lost on Camus’ ignorant critics is that he does not believe that a people is made so because of its genetic profile. Rather, he defines a people by its distinct culture. 

Why are politicians and journalists so eager to demonize and silence Camus? It is unfortunately true that some right-wing radicals cite the Great Replacement in their grotesque racist and antisemitic rants. But Camus is no right-winger. In fact, he is a gay atheist who is also a pacifist, and avowed enemy of the Le Pens, the French family whose late patriarch, Jean-Marie, founded the National Front, and whose daughter Marine leads its successor party. 

He also warns that the multiculturalist ideology is often promoted by people who are themselves at risk from its consequences.

Camus’s worldview echoes the “Murti-Bing” pill in the 1932 Polish dystopia Insatiability—a metaphor for ideological sedation before conquest. 

Wokeness, multiculturalism, anti-racism, globalism—all are Murti-Bing pills designed to clear the way for the Great Replacement. Reading Renaud Camus is an antidote to the intoxicating effects of these drugs. No wonder the Starmer government wants to ban Camus, who understands exactly what has been done to the British people 

Of Camus’s vilification in his native France, Prof. Betty writes, “An instinctive reaction to the threat of a dumpster fire is to avoid mentioning the dumpster, in the hope that carnage-seeking miscreants will not throw a spark on it.” This is exactly why the UK forbids Camus to set foot on British soil, even as it permits the ingress of scores of migrants, both legally and illegally, who profess beliefs entirely inimical to Britain’s liberal democracy. As Britons who have of late felt the strong arm of the police for having said, tweeted, or even thought things that contradict the official ideology well know, it is dangerous to notice reality in the United Kingdom. 

The good news is that Britain’s Free Speech Union announced plans to fight the ban. What’s more, the British people—for now, at least—are free to read the writings of Renaud Camus. Vauban Books has published several of his translated works. Prof. Betty, in his introduction to Enemy Of The Disaster, writes that one purpose of bringing the Camus essays out is to rob “ideological bad actors” of the chance to use Camus’s thought as a “racist cudgel” in debate.

Camus is important because, as the young U.S. scholar Nathan Pinkoski has written:

For Camus, the Great Replacement—mass immigration—may be the political issue of our times, but it is not the issue. The issue is the managerial, mechanical, technological revolution that substitutes us out for machines. We have learned that our humanity is replaceable.

Renaud Camus not only wants to save European cultures from being swamped by waves of mass migration. He wants to save European peoples from being turned into machines.

If Starmer’s illiberal hostility to Camus drives curious Britons to read the man’s work, it may prove to be a classic case of the “Streisand Effect.” In trying to silence him, Starmer may have only amplified the message.