In September 2015, not three weeks after Germany temporarily suspended the Dublin Regulation for Syrian asylum seekers that would eventually see between 890,000 and 1.1m people added to that country’s population, the English translation of the brilliant French writer Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (‘Submission’) was published. Two months later, Paris would be brought to its knees by a series of Islamist atrocities occurring on one night, notably at the Bataclan theatre.
Submission tells the story of Francois, a man around the vicinity of JM Coetzee’s David Lurie in Disgrace. Francois is a niche academic who sleeps with his students, as Lurie did, in a country fraught with the inevitable reckoning of multiculturalism. France’s socialists get into bed with the Muslim Brotherhood party led by the son of a Tunisian immigrant grocer, Mohammed Ben-Abbes, and contest the 2022 elections. Ben-Abbes triumphs. France now has an Islamist as President.
Francois loses his girlfriend when she returns to Israel with her parents, the consequences of rising anti-Semitism in the country. Both his parents die. Thereafter he is pensioned off; only Muslims are now permitted to teach at the newly privatized Sorbonne. Ben-Abbes then begins to enact a vision of a greater European Union that includes parts of Africa and the Middle East.
The most haunting part of the book, though only a few pages, involves Francois visiting the Benedictine Abbey of Ligugé in the hope Catholicism will redeem his suicidal thoughts. But he is vacant and irritable. Like the decision Lurie’s daughter made in Disgrace – to become the former farm worker Petrus’ third wife despite one of her gang-rapists (‘Pollux’) living with him – Francois’ only salvation appears dependent on a conversion to Islam.
My favourite critics of Houellebecq back then were English liberals and leftists, none of whom (evidently) read the book. Incandescent, they called Submission racist and ‘islamophobic’ (not actually a word, means nothing) and compared it to another French book they hadn’t read – Jean Raspail’s 1973 The Camp of the Saints.
The Camp of the Saints is a wondrous piece of dystopian literature, way ahead of its time. But if Submission was made for France’s present age – as seen in the extravagant violence recently engulfing Paris’ streets – Raspail’s novel is more applicable to the fortunes of the United Kingdom, which is embracing Third World-ism in mainstream politics and institutions.
Both Submission and The Camp of the Saints express radical descent administered dishonestly by craven political establishments. In context, this is described today as ‘managed decline’. Both express the theme of invasion, but neither features any meaningful, grassroots resistance to it. That has emerged only in South Africa in 2026 in the form of March & March.
This should be profound: to the most popular and revered narratives of decline, a counter in real life from a country half the world away. This is not to defend the harm supporters of March & March have inflicted on decent people from African nations; that is regrettable, and must be condemned. But what is similar in the books, and indeed the present South Africa, is that the same political and media settings exist.
Included in those settings is denial. All of a sudden there are none of the porous borders that News24’s incels once squealed about – nor were there ever. There are no Mozambican kidnap gangs, featured on Carte Blanche, or former Zimbabwean soldiers blowing up cash-in-transit vehicles. Then a sense of licence in the government and it pet media’s response: we will respond to Ms. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma in the way European legislators respond to the so-called ‘far-right’, itself aligned to the political scenery Houellebecq and Raspail conditioned their novels with. And when we include unprovable claims like ‘diversity is our strength’, we will win.
That is just not going to happen. Ngobese-Zuma did not appear in a vacuum, despite the conspiracy theories circulated by News24. She is an expression of something nobody cares about, let alone bothers to explore. Calling her Idi Amin will have precisely the effect that right-on Germans calling the AfD ‘Hitler’ has.
Houellebecq is reportedly a grumpy guy slowly detaching himself from the world. His reluctant comments in the wake of viruses, lockdowns and vaccines post 2020 (‘the world will be the same, but worse’) are possibly some of the most accurate. But what would he say about March & March and Ngobese-Zuma were he to hear about them? I think his ears would prick up. If the ANC or News24 had any idea who he was and what he’s done, that should terrify them just as much as Submission depressed everyone else.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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