Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 5:44am

Enoch Powell: Rivers of Blood

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

 

 

Fifty years ago on April 20, 1968 Member of Parliament Enoch Powell, a unique figure from a middle class family who was a Professor of Ancient Greek at 25, rose from Private to Brigadier General in his early thirties during World War II, and who had held Cabinet positions in Conservative governments in Britain,  signed his own political death warrant by giving his rivers of blood speech, warning of the impact of third world immigration on Europe.  The speech was widely condemned as racist.  Parts of it certainly were.  It was also prophetic, at least in the long term, as most of Europe is finding out now with the violence and terrorism that mass immigration from the muslim world has brought.  “Respectable” parties in Europe are doing their best to ignore this, and even punishing those who seek to accurately report on what is going on.  The Pope has repeatedly condemned those who point out any of the problems with such mass immigration.  Well, let me play the prophet for a moment.  In democracies when “respectable” parties ignore a problem long enough, the mass of voters will ultimately find other leaders or parties, for good or ill, to carry out their wishes.

 

0 0 votes
Article Rating
15 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, April 20, AD 2018 8:03am

“Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.””

A remarkable error from so eminent a Classical scholar

The reference is to Vergil,

bella, horrida bella
et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno’ (Aeneid 6.86-7).

And, as every schoolboy knows, it is uttered by the Sybil of Cumae (Not a Roman) to Aeneas, (a refugee from Troy).

A case of “quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus” – Even Homer sometimes nods off.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Friday, April 20, AD 2018 8:51am

It’s a popular speech on sites like Blazing Cat Fur. The trouble is, it’s largely a whinge about Caribbean immigration. Caribbean immigrants to Britain carry a certain quantum of social pathology white British do not. However, they’re a modest population (2% of the total) and the source countries have modest populations in sum. They’re also not challenging culturally and not particularly endogamous.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, April 20, AD 2018 10:29am

Art Deco wrote, “[I]t’s largely a whinge about Caribbean immigration”

Curiously, the only group singled out by name were the Sikhs. Even now, the total Sikh population of the UK is about 432,000, a tiny minority.

They are prominent in business and the professions, have the highest level of home-ownership of any religious group and their crime-rate is very low.

In Scotland, they have matriculated their own tartan!
http://tinyurl.com/yd2dad5b

Murray
Murray
Saturday, April 21, AD 2018 9:35am

I just re-read the whole speech, and I can’t find one racist sentiment within it. The word “piccaninnies” is unacceptable to modern ears, I suppose, but our forefathers were accustomed to speaking in a more forthright manner. Powell was strikingly correct, down to the details.

Kennybhoy
Kennybhoy
Monday, April 30, AD 2018 5:18am

Michael Paterson-Seymour wrote:
“A remarkable error from so eminent a Classical scholar”

Powell was way too good a classicist for it to be a simple error. It was a deliberate attempt to pervert the meaning of the lines and of the entire poem to evil ends.

For the benefit of any others without your advantages Maister Paterson-Seymour! 🙂

It was indeed the Cumaean Sybil who foretold the “Tiber foaming with much blood”. The Latin, not Roman, who was to actually see the “Tiber foaming with much blood” was Latinus, the king of Latium. Obedient to the will of the gods, he welcomed Aeneas and the other Trojan refugees, ancestors of the Romans, to Latium. The War in Latium, the “Tiber foaming with much blood”, was brought about, not by the mere fact of the Trojan presence, but by the impious machinations of Latinus’ wife Amata and the neighbouring King Turnus.

Powell cast himself not in the role of the Sybil or King Latinus, but of Amata and Turnus. Or maybe, his ego was certainly big enough, in the malevolent role of the goddess Juno manipulating the mortals Amata and Turnus!

Kennybhoy
Kennybhoy
Monday, April 30, AD 2018 5:25am

Wot Michael Paterson-Seymour and Art Deco wrote about Caribbeans and Sikhs with bells on.

Kennybhoy
Kennybhoy
Monday, April 30, AD 2018 5:51am

No Donald, ‘Enoch wos wrong’.

My Dad, God be good to him, taught me early on never to trust an antiSemite or an anti-American. Powell was a particularly rabid, conspiracist, bordering on the insane example of the latter.

And, Jesus wept, have you read his “The Evolution of the Gospel”?
Heretical, blasphemous and sacrilegious and, as Paul Johnson wrote of the C19th German text scholars, “pervaded by a subtle quality of anti-Judaism, tinged even with antisemitism”.

Kennybhoy
Kennybhoy
Monday, April 30, AD 2018 6:08am

Regarding Murray’s comment…

Powell was likely not an actual racist. He was something even worse. He was a politician who calculatedly used racism to further his own ambitions. Alas, he calculated correctly with regard to sections of the electorate. God be praised, he rather unforeseeably in the context of 1968, spectacularly misjudged the Conservative and Unionist Party. They dealt with him as Bill Buckley Jnr. had previously dealt with the likes o’ the John Birch Society, and Ayn Rand and for similar if not identical reasons.

Kennybhoy
Kennybhoy
Monday, April 30, AD 2018 6:57am

Only superficially and/or by by accident Donald.

The pre 1990s Commonwealth immigration into Britain was not mass and was not unrestricted. Even Migration Watch, no’ exactly a pro-immigration outfit, acknowledges this:

“The massive increase in the level of migration after 1997 is totally unprecedented in the country’s history, dwarfing the scale of anything that went before.”

The massive increase in the level of migration after 1997 is totally unprecedented in the country’s history, dwarfing the scale of anything that went before, and is entirely down to New Labour’s treasonable ambition to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”.

https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/key-topics/history-of-immigration

Further to the comments of Michael Paterson-Seymour and Art deco above. The Britain of the early to mid 1990s had reached a settlement with previous immigrant communities. In a treasonable conspiracy to “rub the right’s nose in diversity” New Labour blew that settlement away.

Kennybhoy
Kennybhoy
Tuesday, May 1, AD 2018 7:16am

“Powell understood how government policies could swiftly change the demographics of a nation…”

You mean like how C19/20th mass immigration, including Irish and other Catholic such, altered the demographics of the United States and provoked nativism? Or how Irish Catholic immigration altered the demographics of my own Scotland and provoked the like o’ 1923’s ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality’? That’s a pretty banal understanding man. The problem is not immigration, it is mass uncontrolled such combined with the poison that is multi-culturalism. As I wrote above, above the immigration that Powell denounced was not mass or uncontrolled, and cultural relativism had not yet given birth to multi-culturalism. Absent assimilation/integration mass uncontrolled immigration is a species of colonization or invasion leading almost inevitably to bloody conflict. Immigration plus assimilation/integration produced the United States. Maybe that is why Powell hated the Great Republic SO much?

Powell believed that race was the foundation of nationality. He was not concerned about culture or values. You are familiar with the exchange between himself and Margaret Thatcher described at the link immediately below?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2007/03/the-revival-of-tory-philosophy/

It is no surprise to me that he found a new constituency over the water among the Ascendantists, kindred spirits, in a province that had until only a few short years before been run like a watered down version of Jim Crow and which was as a consequence enduring the sort of violence and disorder his inflammatory speech could have invoked on the mainland. And believe me, there were no many black or brown face to be seen over the water back then!

Foxfier
Admin
Tuesday, May 1, AD 2018 8:42am

America:
it’s considered a sign that a place is really, really stuck in the mud if you still call the folks who moved here ten years ago “the new guys” or “the Californians” or whatever.
UK:
You’re that Dutch guy if your grandfather moved over.

For crying out loud, Russia’s pretext for taking over a chunk of the Ukraine was the grandchildren of people their predecessors had moved in! And don’t get me started on the great great grandchildren of those who left Israel in expectations of it being wiped off the face of the earth being identified as natives.

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top