Political observers such as Douglas Murray have been warning for years about the upheavals now being observed in Great Britain. But they were preceded by the conservative politician Enoch Powell, whose “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 presciently predicted the current situation.
“The forgotten Spengler takes revenge by threatening to be right.” Such an admission by a left-wing intellectual, as Theodor Adorno expressed it in 1950, is hardly imaginable today. Therefore, the rehabilitation of the reviled Enoch Powell and his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech from 1968 is not being undertaken by a contemporary intellectual, but by reality itself, which in recent days has confirmed Powell’s predictions with frightening precision.
Russia in England?
Unrest in the UK: The movement lacks the leaders needed for a revolution Who has so far remained unaware of Powell and his speech: Enoch Powell was a British conservative politician who was feared for his uncompromising and sharp rhetoric, but also very much loved. During his lifetime, however, he became famous for a speech – in the fateful year of 1968 – that went down in history under the nickname “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell himself was aware of the far-reaching significance of his speech and suspected in advance that it would effectively mark the end of his political career.
The speech, delivered on April 20, 1968 in Birmingham, proved to be an almost prophetic prediction of the developments that had been gradually building up over the past few years and had now suddenly and explosively manifested themselves in the riots of recent days.
Some excerpts from Powell’s speech are intended to demonstrate his foresight:
“The primary duty of government is to prevent avoidable evils. In attempting to do this, government encounters obstacles deeply rooted in human nature. One of these is that, by their very nature, such evils are not detectable until they have already occurred: at every stage of their genesis, doubt and dispute may arise as to whether these evils are real or imaginary.
For the same reason, they receive little attention compared to current problems, which are both indisputable and urgent: hence the temptation in all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.
Above all, there is a tendency to confuse predicting problems with causing them, and even with wishing for problems: ‘If only,’ we like to think, ‘people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.’
Powell continued his speech with an anecdote about meeting a worker in his district who shockingly revealed to him that he and his children would leave the country if they had the money. This man is also responsible for one of the speech’s most infamous predictions, as Powell quoted him:
“In this country, in 15 or 20 years, the black man will hold the whip against the white man.”
It may have taken a few years longer than the worker predicted at the time, but the events of the last few weeks, months and years do little to refute that prediction.
Better politically dead than lukewarm
Even then, Powell was aware of the enormity of this statement for the modern zeitgeist:
“I can already hear the chorus of outrage: How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I cause unrest and inflame emotions by repeating such a conversation?
The answer is that I have no right not to. Here is a decent, ordinary Englishman, in broad daylight in my own city, saying to me, his MP, that his country is no longer going to be a place worth living in for his children.
I simply have no right to shrug my shoulders and think of something else. What he says is said and thought by thousands and hundreds of thousands – perhaps not all over Britain, but in the areas that are already going through a total transformation for which there is no parallel in the thousand-year history of England.”
While other politicians of that fateful time avoided the unpleasant conflict with the destructive social policy out of convenience – they were simply “lukewarm” – Powell uncompromisingly followed that inner conviction and obligation to call the truth by its name when he recognized it, regardless of any personal sacrifices that might be expected as a result of this truth.
Powell cited figures that must make one shudder from today’s perspective. He predicted a critical mass of migrants who could not be integrated, based on the immigration at the time of just under 50,000 people per year, a figure that seems frighteningly harmless in view of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who now flood the countries of the former West every year. And yet: Due to ongoing immigration and increased willingness to reproduce, Powell predicted a migrant population share in Great Britain for the year 2000 that corresponded almost exactly to reality.
What modern statistics often try to conceal, however, is the proportion of the population group with a migrant background who are already second or third generation residents of Britain and who, in the impending unrest, are more likely to sympathise with the migrants than with the native population, so that the proportion of those who are actually unable to integrate is now much higher.
Remigration demands as early as the 1960s
Regarding the question of how to deal with this situation, Powell also expressed an assessment that has lost none of its relevance:
“The natural and rational first question of a nation confronted with such a prospect is, ‘How can the extent be reduced?’ Admittedly, it cannot be prevented entirely, but it can be limited. The significance and consequences of a foreign element introduced into a country or population differ fundamentally depending on whether that element constitutes 1 percent or 10 percent.
The answers to the simple and rational question are just as simple and rational: by stopping further immigration and encouraging maximum emigration. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.
[…]
I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration were to stop tomorrow, the growth rate of the population with and without a migrant background would decrease considerably, but the expected size of this population share would still leave the basic character of the national danger untouched.
This can only be tackled as long as a significant proportion of the total population still consists of people who have come to this country in the last ten years.
It is therefore urgent to implement now the second element of the Conservative Party’s policy: encouraging re-emigration.”
When dealing with immigrants, however, Powell always stressed the need for equal treatment of all citizens, which he saw as being threatened by the anti-discrimination laws that were already being propagated at the time, as these were intended to grant privileges to immigrants at the expense of the native population. Powell also made a strict distinction between those people from parts of the Commonwealth who came to Great Britain to study, for example, and then brought this knowledge back to their home countries, and those who came to Great Britain for the purpose of “settlement”.
The deliberate division of society
Labour government makes it worse
Britain is becoming tribalised – ethnic conflicts threaten to become the norm The conservative politician reported on countless cases in which locals were systematically discriminated against and even sent their letters to him without giving an address for fear of reprisals. Powell did not deny that some immigrants had the will to integrate, but he did identify a paradigm shift:
“We are on the threshold of a change. Until now, it was the consequence of external circumstances and backgrounds that made the idea of integration inaccessible to the majority of the immigrant population – so that they did not develop any ambitions in this regard and never even thought about it themselves – and that their numbers and physical concentration meant that the pressure to integrate that normally acts on any small minority did not take effect.
But now we are experiencing that positive forces are working against integration, that there are interests in preserving and intensifying racial and religious differences with a view to exercising actual dominance, first over fellow immigrants and then over the rest of the population.”
What foresight at such an early stage! Powell analyzed and described the deliberate division of the population, which has now become a primary instrument of power in the remaining Western democracies, with admirable clarity and acuity. No wonder his political career was ended shortly afterwards!
Powell ended his speech with that famous reference to Virgil’s Aeneid, which gave the speech its nickname “Rivers of Blood”:
“As I look forward, I am filled with a premonition; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the Tiber foaming with much blood.’ The tragic and insoluble 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 United States itself, is coming upon us here through our own will and our own negligence. Indeed, it is almost here. In numbers it will assume American proportions long before the end of the century. Only determined and urgent action can avert it now. Whether the public will have the will to demand and enforce this action, I do not know. I only know that it would be a great betrayal to see and not speak.”
Enoch Powell was branded a racist for his prophecy. But reality teaches us that Powell’s rehabilitation would be more than appropriate. The numerous critics of modern mass migration in the English-speaking world would hardly be imaginable without Powell’s foresight and his sense of duty to speak uncomfortable truths.
You can find Powell’s entire speech here for further reading.
