Midway through Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, the French president asks his army to consider shooting refugees on sight: “I am asking every soldier and officer, every member of our police—asking them from the depths of my conscience and my soul—to weigh this monstrous mission for themselves, and to feel free either to accept or reject it.” Raspail makes clear that the president, bowing to liberal sentiment, should have never allowed the army a chance to object. As a result of its left-wing decadence and self-hatred, Europe fails to realize the threat it faces until the refugee hordes land and pillage.

Raspail’s enemy is the entire non-white world. It tramples monks and white saviors alike in its invasion of France. His refugees are nameless caricatures, with no inner lives. He ascribes to them an almost supernatural combination of obstinance and depravity. The smell of death is the first sign their rickety ships are about to land, because they dump their corpses in the sea. They are savages, led by a literal shit-eater, and they foist their poison dead upon the shores of Europe before their feet touch earth. It is allegedly one of Steve Bannon’s favorite books—and on the right, he is not alone.

“Raspail was ahead of his time in demonstrating that Western civilization had lost its sense of purpose and history—its ‘exceptionalism,’” Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote in a 2014 piece for National Review. A decade earlier, William F. Buckley Jr. called the book “a great novel” in the same publication and added, while musing over the plight of refugees, “What to do? Starve them? Shoot them? We don’t do that kind of thing—but what do we do when we run out of airplanes in which to send them back home?” There, he ended the column.

White nationalists have answered Buckley’s question. The Camp of the Saints is a veritable fixture on alt-right forums across the internet. It stars in Stormfront threads and appears on reading lists disseminated on 8chan’s /pol/ board. At VDARE, white nationalist writer Chris Roberts compared it to George Orwell’s 1984. The Camp of the Saints appears frequently on Reddit, in r/Europe and r/New_Right and r/DarkEnlightenment and r/The_Donald, where eager Trump fans even launched a live reading series. Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Worker’s Party, recommends the novel to his followers; so does Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, which bills itself as “the internet’s premier race-realist site.” “The Camp of the Saints has never gone out of print, and has been translated into all major European languages—and yet the coverage of the European ‘migrant’ crisis goes on as if it had never been written,” Taylor complained in one piece.

“Of course, Raspail was denounced as a racist, and his emphasis on the white race can indeed be off-putting,” Owens wrote. “But the central issue of the novel is not race but culture and political principles.” At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher called The Camp of the Saints “a bad book, both aesthetically and morally,” but added, “his cultural diagnosis struck me as having more merit than I anticipated, given the book’s notorious reputation.” Dreher has since admitted the book is racist, but maintains that “there were, and are, also some important truths to be minded out of the narrative, especially when it comes to the way progressive ideology in the European establishment institutions (state, church, media, academia) disarms people in the face of a hostile and alien culture.” Recall that the “alien culture” of Raspail’s book murders and rapes, and only suffers from poverty because of its own moral depravity and stupidity.