White Pride and the Next Holocaust: The Camp of the Saints

<p>This chapter analyses the imaginative roots of White Replacement Theory, the Far-Right fantasy about white genocide, in the racist novel The Camp of the Saints, as a way of extending and deepening the Lacanian interpretation of the authoritarian personality. The chapter discusses how the logic of perversion clarifies the connection between disavowed racism and the racist fantasy, present in election denialism in the USA, before looking at the American Right’s romance with Camp of the Saints. After an analysis of the novel, the chapter explains how its aversively prejudiced racist content fits with the Lacanian interpretation of the authoritarian personality. Then, it analyses the novel as authoritarian propaganda, intended to “hail,” or recruit, the reader to an authoritarian ideology, with reference to Lacan’s famous “graph of desire” and Zizek’s use of that graph in explaining ideological interpellation. The novel is designed to recruit individuals to agreement with the ideology of White Nationalism, based on a fantasy of white replacement, and the evidence from the American Right is that this works. The chapter closes by discussing the idea of authoritarian propaganda as “psychoanalysis in reverse,” meaning, a massive dose of political anxiety designed to induce infantile regression amongst latent authoritarians.</p>