Camp of the Saints - The nightmare vision is coming true
Whilst attention has been focussed on the enthralling drama of the collapse of the Euro, in another corner of the European Union a genuine disaster for the real Europe - that of the people rather than the bureaucrats - continues to unfold.
The tide of illegal African immigrants entering Europe through the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, rises ever higher. And it is a tide of our own making because it has been raised by the short-sighted and confused interventions by major European Governments in the internal affairs of North African countries.
Since those Governments, notably Britain and France, incited revolt and insurrection across North Africa and the Arab world late last year, the resulting disorder has removed the strict controls formerly preventing any mass migration northward from the North African coast.
The result of this has been a mass influx, at first of over 50,000 Tunisians, and now tens of thousands more sub-Saharan Africans, shipped by people-smuggling gangsters in leaky and often unseaworthy boats to Europe, mainly via Lampedusa.
Over a thousand a day are landing at Lampedusa and the quiet, picturesque island has been transformed into an overcrowded refugee camp. Lampedusa is now full, so the Italian Government is fast-forwarding Africans landing in Lampedusa to the Italian mainland.
Once in Italy they have fanned out across Europe, triggering the collapse of another 'pillar of the European Union' - the Schengen Agreement which was brought in to allow free movement of people within the EU core area. But now, first France, then Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark have quietly reintroduced border controls, all ignoring the hand-wringing expostulations from Brussels.
The French Government has even started paying the Tunisians arriving in their major cities to move on. Paris now offers every illegal Tunisian immigrant 300 Euros to go home. But as the authorities across Europe try to deal with the Tunisian influx, there's a new problem on the horizon.
The economy of Libya has been ruined by Anglo-French air strikes and the insurrection. The country no longer needs its hordes of Ghanaian, Nigerian and Somali guest workers who are leaving the country in their thousands and heading for... yes, you have guessed it - Lampedusa.
Evidence is growing that the Libyan Government has stopped preventing people-smugglers from shipping them to Lampedusa - which it used to do very efficiently before leading EU members attacked it - to actively encouraging sub-Saharan Africans now surplus to requirements to get on the boats. With European bombs whistling around his ears Libya's Colonel Gaddafi has warned that Europe will be flooded with illegal Immigrants. Seeing this, understandably one may well think, as a way to fight back against completely unprovoked European aggression and interference in his country. In the first quarter of last year, just 147 illegal immigrants tried to enter Italy. They were sent back.
In the first quarter of this year, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants tried to enter Italy. Almost all have succeeded. 38 years ago, the French novelist Jean Raspail depicted the invasion of Europe and the overwhelming of its peoples, culture and civilization in his classic 'Camp of the Saints'. His nightmare vision is coming true at this very moment on Europe's southern flank.
