Europe’s Cassandra--Enoch Powell and “Rivers of Blood”
On April 20, 1968, on a Saturday afternoon, Enoch Powell delivered his “Rivers of Blood” speech at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. He went there fully aware that what he was going to say would be of historic importance. Earlier in the week, he had told his friend Clement Jones: “I’m going to make a speech at the weekend and it’s going to go up ‘fizz’ like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up.”
In his speech, Powell warned of the dramatic and tragic results which mass immigration from the undeveloped world was going to have on Britain. He referred to the Roman poet Virgil, who has the Sybil prophetize, in Book 6 of the Aeneid, “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
Powell was a leading member of the British Conservatives. He was the shadow defense secretary, a former minister of health, and during the Second World War had been the only British soldier to rise from private to brigadier, and the army’s youngest brigadier at that. Despite his credentials Edward Heath, the shadow prime minister, sacked him the day after the speech. Heath considered the speech to be “racialist in tone.”
Of course it was not. The speech was merely politically incorrect at a time when political correctness was beginning to smother public debate. Moreover, Powell confronted his colleagues with the responsibility to address “future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils”—a duty which most politicians, as Powell realized well enough, “knowingly shirk.”
Powell said that Britain, by allowing in thousands of immigrants from an entirely different culture, was “heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He warned that by the year 2000, there would be five million to seven million immigrants and their descendants in Britain, around one tenth of the population: “Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population,” he warned. And he was right. In fact, the situation is worse than Powell predicted.
Though, as an official report published last month by the British House of Lords states, the data about the stock of immigrants in the United Kingdom “are seriously inadequate,” the British government estimates that there are almost half a million migrants residing illegally in Britain while 9.3% of the legal UK population (a 2003 figure) are foreign-born. The latter figure increases to 10.3% if one includes the under 16 UK-born children of immigrants, meaning all children where both parents are foreign-born and half of the number of children with just one parent foreign born. There is no figure available for the total number of second-generation children in Britain, but it is possible to provide a reliable, moderate estimate. The current percentages of foreign-born population who are aged 45-64, 65-74, 75-84, and 85+ are 9.8, 8.4, 7.8 and 6.5% respectively. If one assumes that they have a similar number of children to the UK-born and if half of their children are born in the UK (which is roughly the current figure), then the UK-born adult children of migrants constitute about 4% of the adult population. This increases the overall population of migrants and their descendants to around 13.5%.
Powell was right in another observation as well. In his speech he referred to voters from his working class constituency. He mentions a “middle-aged working man” who had told him that if he had the means he would move abroad. The blue-collar worker no longer felt at home in his own country. He told Powell that he hoped that his children would manage to get out.
The working-class neighborhoods were the first to experience the realities of the multicultural society. The victims in European society, said Powell, are not the immigrants but “those among whom they have come and are still coming.”
“They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.”
Powell’s speech provides tragic anecdotes from a woman old-age pensioner, the only white person left in her street. Her life was made unbearable by the barbarians who took over her living environment. Forty years later, similar stories are all too familiar, all over Europe. As a result the indigenous workers have all deserted the parties of the Left and vote for the anti-immigrant Right. As Umberto Bossi, the jubilant leader of the Italian anti-immigrant Lega Nord, said this week, following the eradication of the Communists and Greens in last Sunday’s Italian general elections: “The workers don’t vote for the Left any more. The Northern League is the new workers’ party.”
Bossi’s triumph is the tragedy of the common man, betrayed by his own politicians on the left. Meanwhile these treacherous politicians have found a new electoral base amongst the ever-swelling number of immigrants who have been enfranchised. As Filip Dewinter, the leader of the anti-immigrant Vlaams Belang in Belgium, recognized well enough when talking about the situation in a major town like Antwerp: “The number of potential voters for our party is declining year by year. […] In ten years’ time the number of “new Belgians” in Antwerp—half of whom are Moroccans—has doubled. [...] If the number of foreigners in Antwerp continues to grow by 1.5% a year, as it is doing now, then in twenty years from now there will be more people of foreign than of indigenous extraction in this city.” The population replacement is leading to a voter replacement.
Powell also pointed out that the problem with non-white immigration in Europe cannot be compared to that of the “Negro population of the United States.” He did not mention, however, that the huge difference between non-whites who cause no problems and those who do is that the latter are mostly Muslims. Powell does not address the problem of Islam at all. This is the only aspect of the speech that makes it sound somewhat odd to modern listeners, thereby revealing that it could not have been written today. Powell’s failure to address the fundamental issue of Islamization, however, is hardly surprising. Muslims are admonished by Islam not to assert themselves too openly until their numbers have grown sufficiently. When Powell enunciated his speech forty years ago, the followers of Muhammad still kept quiet, while today it is they who decide what one is allowed to publish in Europe, what one is allowed to eat, how one has to dress and behave, and when one is allowed to swim at the public swimming pool.
Despite the fact that Enoch Powell’s prediction of the future population figures was correct, despite his accurate perception of the worries and fears of the working class, and although he cannot be accused of “Islamophobia,” his speech is still considered beyond the bounds today. Indeed, so much so that when Nigel Hastilow, a Conservative candidate for parliament wrote in an op-ed piece last November, “Enoch Powell was right,” David Cameron, the current shadow prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, acted exactly as Ted Heath did forty years ago. He immediately sacked Hastilow.
The reason why Powell’s speech is still a taboo today is undoubtedly the solution he proposed for saving Britain: Get the immigrants to leave again. “Stopping further inflow and promoting the maximum outflow” of aliens, he said, was the only solution to the problem. This is the big taboo topic in Europe, although everyone knows that here, too, Powell was right. “If all immigration ended tomorrow,” Powell pointed out, “the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.” Hence, he added, “the urgency of implementing […] the encouragement of re-emigration.”
Powell hoped the aliens would leave voluntary:
“Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent. Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.”
It is obvious, however, that if the aliens do not want to leave voluntarily, Europe will have to make them leave. Europe can only save itself if it has the courage to consider deportation. Unfortunately, it did not have the courage to do so 40 years ago. Tragically, it does not even wish to consider it today. If Europe does not find this courage soon it will be too late. Forty years have been lost. The funeral pyre has been lit. The fire is burning. Powell referred to Virgil’s Sybil and her prophecy. Unfortunately, he himself resembles Cassandra. She had the gift of prescience but, cursed by the gods, no one ever took heed of her predictions.
Comments
Mass deportation of non European immigrants would cause civil wars all over the continent.
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Wow, I’m impressed this piece was published.
“Mass deportation of non European immigrants would cause civil wars all over the continent.”
So would failing to do so. It’s only a question of: when? and how severe?
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The author is right. So are the comments above. The leadership of conservative thought has long since passed from National Review and Takimag is one of the few taking up that burden.
“We investigated various cases of the island model with stochastic migration. If the population is infinite, the immigrants have a fixed gene frequency and the alleles are neutral, the gene frequency on the island converges to that of the immigrants.”
Genetics. 1979 January; 91(1): 163–176.
The Island Model with Stochastic Migration
Thomas Nagylaki
Department of Biophysics and Theoretical Biology, The University of Chicago,
Mixing doesn’t stop it. The liberals promise a mixture, but a mixture is only an intermediate state. One way migration causes genetic replacement. The immigrants know it and intend it. So do the establishment parties.
Don’t vote for someone who is for your genocide. Don’t give them money. Support third parties against immigration.
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In a 2003 interview with “Terre et Peuple”, Alain de Benoist is quoted as saying:
If Europeans are less demographically dynamic, it is not the fault of those who are.
If they no longer know what their identity is, again this is not the fault of those who
do. In face of peoples with strong identities, those lacking such an identity might
reflect on why they have lost their own. To this end, they might look to the planetary
spread of market values or the nature of Western nihilism.
Westerners need to get some religion. We need to be led by virile sages and priests--not
self-loathing, snivelling ones.
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Pat Buchanan can be considered the Enoch Powell of America. Most Americans know in their heart that mass immigration in transforming the country into a Third World nation. The interesting question is why Buchanan failed so miserably in his 2000 bid for president as the Reform Party nominee. The American right supported and continues to support George Bush, a callow and ignorant man and an enthusiastic proponent of open borders. Obama was partially correct. It is not “guns and God” that the white working class clings to in times of distress. The Republican Party and the neoconservatives have been successful in distracting conservative whites by promoting fear and hatred of Arabs/Muslims in the “war against Islamo-fascism.”
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Heath’s sacking of Powell is an early version of what happened to Sam Francis and other rightists who are beyond the respectable mainstream. Even this brilliant classicist and tough-minded realist might have been surprised that leftist politicos go after critics of “Islamization” in Europe or Canada with impunity. He rightly predicted some of the side-effects of multicultural immigration, but I wonder if he ever could have anticipated just how supine the populations of western democracies (even the tough old Brits) would become in accepting this agenda.
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National Review ran a similar piece on Powell last year. Where has Mr. Hotspur and “Old Atlantic” been?
If you want to the immigration Islamicization plot for Europe in fulle, pick up a copy of “Eurabia” by Bat Yeor.
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J. Enoch Powell was a true British patriot, a gentleman, and a scholar.
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Politically, it is important to highlight Powell’s focus on the working class. It is the working class which has borne the brunt of uncontrolled immigration. They have been betrayed by those who were meant to represent them. Most Americans will not understand this mostly European phenomena. Take note of the latest election result in Italy. Similar trends occured in Greece, Germany, Hungary, Portugal and Bulgaria. The danger is that the elites are so oblivious to the idea of identity that a demagogue may arise who will manipulate the masses as happened in the past.
Alain de Benoist is correct. The fault lies in ourselves (and in many of the commentators of this blog).
Only a God can save us
-Martin Heidegger
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RonL thanks for the information about National Review. There are occasional signs of thinking there I agree.
The Wright Island Model theorem says that any island with an annual rate of immigration above zero will have complete replacement. What this means is that immigration itself causes a substitution effect of immigrants over births.
Stop all immigration and the birth rate picks up. The white population would not go to zero if it was not subject to immigration pressure.
Its like black and silver squirrels around DC. Black are driving out silver, but its not the case if there were no blacks the silver would spontaneously die out to zero.
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Some commenters here are excited that the author wrote: “Europe can only save itself if it has the courage to consider deportation.” But any number of anonymous commenters at various Web forums in recent years have favoring deportation of Muslims and other unassimilable aliens. Even some commenters at Lucianne.com and Jihad Watch say the same thing regularly. So what is the big deal about the anonymous author of this current article saying the same? He calls himself Henry Hotspur. Would the brave Hotspur of history and of Shakespeare have hidden under an alias? Did Enoch Powell give his speech wearing a mask? What is vitally needed is not writers hiding under pennames calling for the departure of Muslims from the West, but people saying it under their real names, and then more and more people saying it, and then being willing to defend the position when attacked, as I have been doing at my website, View from the Right, for years.
You could start by reading my 2004 article at FrontPage Magazine, “How to Defeat Jihad in America” then see my article at VFR, “Separationism.” Both can easily be found via Google.
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Indeed, Mr. Auster, courage is needed at this hour more than ever. Despite 9/11, our
world is still living in the shadow of WW II. Repatriation, voluntary or not, sounds
like ethnic cleansing in a post-Holocaust world.
Jews and Gentiles need to band together to protect our civilization. Thank-you for your
work.
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Now now now. Some Jews have realised that some of their pseudo-liberal gentile despising brethren have made a grave error in opening Europe and the U.S to mass immigration.
They have created a new enemy amongst themselves and some now wish to backtrack. fair enough, accept them.
Plus, Jews have an awful lot to do with western civilisation, to refute that is insane.
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My previous comment may have created a wrong impression which I want to correct. I did not mean to criticize people who use pen names. Truly, I have never criticized, and I have never felt critical of, people who use pen names; I know that they have valid reasons for doing so. I said what I said because it suddenly struck me that people in this thread were expressing excitement about something (namely an article calling for deportation) which in fact was not new, given that anonymous commenters, even at mainstream conservative sites, often call for deportation. So the thought came to me that that the real threshold in advancing this issue will be crossed, not when anonymous people call for deportation, but when people—numerous people—writing in their own name call for deportation.
And of course people in Europe are in a completely different situation from people in the United States. Because of the anti-"hate speech” laws that exist in all Western countries except for the United States, anyone calling for deportation of Muslims, as well as anyone making much milder statements, could be charged with a criminal offense of saying things “that may incite people to acts of discrimination.” Notwithstanding the constant invocations of Western “democracy” and “freedom,” the peoples of the West outside the U.S. are at present not free, since they are prohibited from publicly discussing the most vital issues facing their countries. This is why I believe the number one priority for Western patriots in Europe, Canada, and Australia is to repeal their respective countries’ quasi-totalitarian “hate speech” laws, since no movement to save the West from Islamization and mass immigration will be possible so long as those laws remain in effect. I see European conservatives frequently complain about the effects of these laws; but I don’t see many European conservatives say that these laws are totalitarian and totally unacceptable, and that they must be repealed.
I repeat, so long as these laws remain on the books, the peoples of the West are not free and they will be helpless to save their countries.
People constantly say, “What can we do? If we say anything critical of Islam we will be accused of hate speech.” It is true that you can be accused of hate speech for criticizing Islam. But you cannot be accused of hate speech for calling for the repeal of the hate-speech laws.
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One further point.
As I said, I do not criticize anyone for using a pen name. If I were living in Europe I would be using one too. But if one is going to use a pen name, it should not be a heroic name like Hotspur. Hotspur, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One, is a bold warrior, famously impulsive and unrestrained. Writing under a pen name may be necessary, but no one would call it an act of bravery. Therefore to conceal oneself under the name “Hotspur” is to claim a war-like quality that one has not shown.
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Sebastian sed: “American and European banks are falling over themselves
courting Arab investment.”
True enough. Much of the momentum for “multiculturalism” and “diversity” and unrestrained immigration comes from the pandering to Arab despots with petro-dollars that Wall Street bankers need to prosper
It’s sort of ironic that neo-Marxists and Leftists support unrestrained immigration because it undermines Ameerican nationalism, and that “libertarians” of the free market fundamentalist variety agree with them fo rthe same reason.
In large part, I see a lot of cultural antipathy toward America on the part of both varieties of kooky ideological zeoltry.
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I think a racialised political party with large emerge in the UK soon. The
turnout in the next general election will be so low that the all the main political parties will have lost not just support but credibility. The new party will then gain support.
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Be sure to also read Auster’s 2004 article at FrontPage Magazine, “Why Jews Welcome Muslims”.
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In an era of increasingly unspeakable truths, Enoch Powell spoke the unadulterated version. Due to the machinations of enemies and traitors in our midst, all white countries have been slated for “browning.” We will ultimately have to fight to get our countries back. Fortunately, we Americans still have our guns and will no doubt have to use them for more than home-defense. It has always been about race and it always will be.
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“Mass deportation of non European immigrants would cause civil wars all over the continent.”
“So would failing to do so. It’s only a question of: when? and how severe? “
You have a choice to vote now for the appropriate anti immigration party or vote for one of the bullshitters with the inevitable consequences for the survival of your race. The problem for the native population is the that the longer they trust the bullshitters the more likely they’re likely to loose such a conflict.
Vote Now or Fight Later.
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