A while back I wrote about a book I found on a list of Steve Bannon's favorite books, The Camp of the Saints. In it a flotilla of nearly a million Indians leaves India for the South of France. Here's how that post started:
"It's a disgustingly racist novel about 1000 old ships that leave India for Europe with 'the Ganges horde' of nearly 1 million people, led by the giant 'turd-eater' who carries the monster child on his shoulders. I did try hard to read this book to see if it would help me understand something about Bannon and others who supported Trump. I wasn't able to finish it - it's really hard to read this stuff - before it was due back at the library. But I think I got enough to get the gist."
But the post also looks at the insightful, if skewed, analysis of the left wing news media at that time in Europe and how it was probably one of the guidelines for Fox and other far right media. (Hint: those commentators who talk about helping the immigrants are the villains.)
What better image could the Trump folks have than a caravan of wretched refugees coming to invade us? While the caravan is only 1000 or so, the imagery enables Right Wing fanatics to fan the anti-refugee flames and maybe get more of their voters out by next week.
This caravan comes ready made with an origin story that puts George Soros in the role of God. That's all too perfect for me. In the book it’s a thousand ships, today it’s a thousand immigrants. One of the Right's tactics is to accuse the Left of all the things it's doing itself. (Think about accusations of Democratic voter fraud as the excuse for real Republican voter suppression, for example.)
Given that such a caravan is the main character of one of Steve Bannon's favorite books, I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives helped organize this group, or at least the PR about its menacing approach. I'm not making the accusation, since I only have the circumstantial evidence of their past behavior and the plot of a book. But I sure hope someone looks into this and finds out how the caravan really got started and who first called it ‘a caravan.’ It just seems far too convenient a talking point to accidentally happen just before the elections.
The book itself includes an interesting, if disgusting, analysis of post 60's Europe and how the political lines were drawn. You can read my original diary on it here: Meet the Turd-Eater From The Camp Of Saints, One Of Steve Bannon’s Favorite Books.
It’s not a pleasant read, but it will help people understand where a lot of the virulent, anti-immigrant sentiment is coming from. Not that many people have read the book, but those who have — Bannon and surely Stephen Miller - are getting propaganda themes right out of the book. And it’s why I suspect the Republicans are pointing fingers at Soros, to distract from their own involvement in this seemingly perfect fear-mongering story.
[An earlier version was posted at What Do I Know?]