Who’s Afraid of Renaud Camus?

Renaud Camus may be the most important living thinker no one has heard of. He’s certainly the most misunderstood. Mr. Camus, 78, is author of “Le Grand Remplacement” (2011), which describes how decades of mass migration have altered his native France. He warns that Europe’s current trajectory will, within a couple of generations, lead to the eclipse of its native peoples, their cultures and even Christianity.

Last week Britain’s Home Office refused to allow Mr. Camus into the country because his presence wouldn’t be “conducive to the public good.” {snip}

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Mr. Camus is an erstwhile member of France’s Socialist Party. He sees mass immigration as a product of globalism and capitalism, which regard people as interchangeable cogs and ignore the salience of culture. Western Europe’s governments expected mass immigration to boost their economies. Instead, it produced welfare dependency, crime, terrorism and a sectarian power struggle that has permanently altered European life. The only conspiracy Mr. Camus sees in Europe’s tragedy is a conspiracy of silence about what he called the “disaster”—the mass immigration of Muslims, Arabs and Africans with adverse social consequences that no one wants to admit, let alone address.

Mr. Camus writes with expansive rhetoric and broad brush strokes. If he were entirely wrong, Europe’s voters wouldn’t be swinging sharply right {snip} “Le Grand Remplacement” and several other of his essays have been translated into English. Read “Enemy of the Disaster,” and it’s clear that banning him from England would be akin to the U.S. refusing entry to Roger Scruton (1944-2020), another philosophical essayist who was called a racist for being too quick to state the obvious.

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In February, Vice President JD Vance upbraided Prime Minister Keir Starmer for “infringements on free speech” in Britain. Mr. Starmer insisted he was “very proud” of the state of Britain’s free speech. Mr. Vance was right, and Mr. Starmer should be ashamed. The U.K. prime minister maligns critics of immigration and Islamism as “far right,” and his Labour government is committed to defining “Islamophobia” in law. Should Mr. Starmer get his way, England would effectively grant unique privileges to a minority religion and make the state the partner of antidemocratic activists seeking formal restrictions on lawful speech.

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Mr. Camus has committed the error of noticing all this. If that makes him an enemy of the British state, it is because the state created the disaster. {snip}

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