[See also France's "Anti-Hate" Hysteria: Facts Need Not Apply, by Paul Gottfried.]

"How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?" asked neoconservative Bill Kristol some years ago.

Very easily, is the proper answer, not only from American conservatives (real ones, not the pseudo-cons  Mr. Kristol commands) but even their French allies.

In a recent article in Le Figaro, a leading French magazine, novelist Jean Raspail explains how.

Mr. Raspail is not well known in the United States today, but some 30 years ago, he published one of the great dark prophecies of the last century—  Camp of the Saints., a somber but oracular account of the impact of mass Third World immigration on Europe and the West and the flaccid Western non-reaction to it.

Along with George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Camp of the Saints told the West truths about itself it didn't want to hear.

That's what Mr. Raspail is still telling us in his article, "The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic." ["La patrie trahie par la République" by Jean Raspail, Le Figaro, June 17, 2004]

The article is about France and how its political class—such heavy-lifters as Francois Mitterand (the respectable left) and Jacques Chirac (the respectable right)—have helped destroy the nation by doing nothing to resist the anti-white, anti-Christian invasion.

But it could have been written about America.

"The deed is done," Mr. Raspail grimly asserts. The ruin of his nation by those that welcomed or refused to resist the invasion is now virtually irreversible –

"Because I am convinced that the fate of France is sealed, because 'My house is their house' (Mitterand), inside 'Europe whose roots are as much Muslim as Christian' (Chirac), because the situation is moving irreversibly towards the final swing in 2050 which will see French stock amounting to only half the population of the country, the remainder comprising Africans, Moors and Asians of all sorts from the inexhaustible reserve of the Third World, predominantly Islamic, understood to be fundamentalist Jihadists, this dance is only the beginning." [English translation at Amren.com]

You can hate your government ("The Republic" of Mr. Raspail's title) but love your nation ("The Fatherland," "La Patrie") because in France—and to no small extent in this country too—the state has become the enemy of the nation.

To the totalitarian mind, the distinction, let alone the antagonism, between nation and state is not possible, which is why it's so incomprehensible to pseudo-cons like Mr. Kristol.

But to almost everyone else, including Mr. Raspail, the distinction is fundamental.

In the case of France, "The Republic" means not only the state but also the ideology that has helped destroy La Patrie. The French section of the Open Borders lobby, he writes, "confuse France with the Republic."

"France is from the outset a country of common blood." But "the Republic, which is only one shape of government, is synonymous for them with ideology, ideology with a capital 'I', the major ideology. It seems to me, to some extent, that they betray the first for the second."

Mr. Raspail is being moderate.

The Ideology is what the Open Borders crowd in this country calls the "Creed" or the "Proposition," the notion that in order to be an American, all you have to do is agree with an abstraction—"all men are created equal"—and therefore anyone who can crawl or creep across the border becomes part of the nation.

In France, the Ideology took shape in the French Revolution.

In this country, it rose to power in the Civil War and more recently in the liberalism (and the pseudo-conservatism) of the late 20th century.

Like the real France, the real America is also a "country of a common blood" (Jefferson used that very phrase in the original Declaration, as well as appeals to a "common kindred" and "consanguinity").

In fact, every real nation is a country of a common blood.

The only nations that claim to be defined by creeds are—come to think of it—totalitarian states.

The Soviet Union, a 20th century descendant of the French Revolution, really was a credal nation, and it survived only because it rested on the same Terror that reigned in France.

When the common blood dries up and the civilization founded on it withers, all that's left is the state—the government to which Mr. Kristol and the neocons are so attached.

Mr. Raspail understands perfectly well it's not just France that faces the extinction the Creed and its partisans have inflicted.

"All of Europe marches to its death," he writes, because of the demographic, racial and cultural tidal wave swallowing it.

He tried to warn his countrymen as well as Europe and America of what was happening 30 years ago, but nobody listened.

Today his prophecies seem tame, and for his own Patrie, if not for ours, it may well be too late.

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Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future. His review essay on Who Are We appears in the current issue of Chronicles Magazine.