Doug's Dynamic Drivel

I used to read reams of Science Fiction. At one time back in the early 80s when I needed to move quickly I decided I didn’t want to pack my collection around with me anymore and I sold off 700 books, many of them old and signed by their authors. Needless to say I’ve often rued that rash decision (though I would not today have room for them.) None more so than one particular novel the author, and name of which, of which I could not remember but the plot of which kept surfacing in my consciousness for many years and causing me no end of mental frustration that I could not track this book down or remember the name. However today I sat down and spent about 20 minutes trying different searches in Google based on my memory of the plot and I finally found the book, The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail

What dredged it up from my memory yet again was this IPS article CLIMATE CHANGE: Scientific Fact, Not Political Issue

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 19 (IPS) – “In a year’s time, the Japanese archipelago will be completely under water.” This official announcement was made following a violent eruption of Mt. Fuji, as a series of devastating earthquakes shook the country, forcing the world to face the challenge of taking in 110 million refugees within a very short time.

After a brutal diplomatic battle, the Japanese government managed to secure frail support from its fellow nations and evacuate 65 million people. Twenty million sank with the islands, many of them voluntarily, out of love for their country or to give younger people a better chance of fleeing. The rest are believed to have died before the islands sank, victims of the quakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters.

This account is part of a futuristic book published in Japan in 1973, and translated into English as “Japan Sinks”. The author, Japanese novelist Komatsu Sakyo, imagines this catastrophe based on potential natural phenomena, such as the intensification and alteration of tectonic plate shifts under the Pacific Ocean

The Camp of the Saints was a very disturbing book to read. Written in the 1973′s in French and translated into English in 1975 the book concerned an exodus of people from India into Europe. The book has been adopted by many racists, much to the horror of the author – but when reading it, it’s not hard to see why.

The story begins in Bombay, India, where the Dutch government has announced a policy that Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is reversed when the Dutch consulate is inundated with parents eager to give up their infant children as it would be one less mouth to feed. An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast. The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India. Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia.

Nevertheless what stuck in my mind was the picture of a million refugees getting on every kind of ship imaginable and setting sail for a distant shore. Now that Kyoto and Copenhagen have been shown to be dismal failures, with Canada and the US actively seeking to scuttle any real legally binding agreements and setting goals that won’t be kept but even if they were would still lead to a minimum 3 degree rise in temperature, a rise likely sufficient to complete the melting of the polar ice caps and likely doom mankind to extinction along with many other species, I thought about those refugees and the very real possibility that in coming decades what started out as a fantasy novel will shortly become a reality, only it won’t be a million refugees it will be in the billions. What is coming, even if we as a species survive, is going to be nothing short of a cataclysmic upset of the social and political orders across the planet.

I’m grateful that I’m 60 years old and even if I live to be 100, which given my health is exceedingly unlikely, I will still not be around to see the worst of the damage, the pain and suffering coming. I hope though that long before that time comes the youth of today, across this planet, take over the reins of power, one way or another, and set a course to save what they can and while doing so remove from the face of this earth those who would stand in their way of doing so – it is purely a case of self-defense, nothing more, nothing less.

Related posts

• Oh noes we has refugees (0)