Enoch Powell: The Man and his Politics
by Sean Gabb
Speech to the Conference
of the Property and Freedom Society
Bodrum, Saturday, 13th September 2014
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
I may have fellow countrymen who cannot identify these words. If so, I have yet to meet them. The words are from the speech that Enoch Powell (1912-98) gave on the 20th April 1968 to the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre – a work best known as “The Rivers of Blood Speech.” It is, beyond any doubt, the most notable political speech given in England during my lifetime. It may be the most notable of the twentieth century. It made its author both the most loved and the most hated politician in the country. Shortly after the speech, dockworkers marched in his support through the centre of London. Thirty years later, at his memorial service in Westminster Abbey, the space outside was filled with a great crowd of those who had come to pay their respects.
If, on the other hand, you want to commit professional suicide in virtually any occupation, not excluding sport or driving a taxi, the surest and shortest mode of self-dispatch is to be overheard muttering that “Enoch was right.” He was never forgiven by those who now have power, and never has been or will be forgiven. And the more he is proved right, the louder and more grim grows the chorus of execration.
I could easily make this speech into an account of what Powell thought and said about immigration. I could pull out statistics to show that, if anything, his projections of the “immigrant and immigrant-descended populations” of my country were too modest. I could probably give you a more entertaining half hour by simply reading out his Rivers of Blood Speech. Like all else he said or wrote, it is a masterpiece of English prose. But I have been asked to speak about “Enoch Powell: The Man and his Politics,” and there is more to him than the debate over immigration. Yes, immigration is part of the story. It is a large part, and I will return to it. But, of all British politicians in my lifetime, he was the most systematic and consistent, and what he said about immigration draws its full meaning only from a consideration of the whole system.
Powell Before Politics
Now, to join the phrases “systematic and consistent” and “British politician” may seem pretentious. But Powell was no ordinary British politician. Not for him a PPE at Oxford, accompanied by much toadying of those already in Parliament, and followed straightaway by a job in Westminster. He came late to politics. His degree was in Classics at Cambridge, where he studied under A.E. Housman and was awarded a starred double first. Even before, at the age of 25, he became the youngest Professor of Greek in the British Empire, he was seen as the most brilliant classical scholar of his generation. He re-edited Thucydides for the Oxford University Press. His Lexicon to Herodotus (1938) remains a standard work on a man who, after all the changes of 2,500 years, is honoured with a statue here in the place of his birth. He wrote poetry. As well as in the classical languages, he was fluent in German, French, Italian and Urdu. He knew Russian and Welsh and Syriac and Aramaic. He was deeply read in German philosophy. He was more than competent in Economics. As learning and subtlety of thought are measured, he would, in the politics of 19th century England, have rivalled, and might have outshone, Gladstone and Macaulay. In British politics of the mid-20th century, he was plainly in a class of his own.
I say he came late to politics. He was in his thirties when he joined the Conservative Research Department. But his immense talents carried him upwards through the Party like a bubble through water, and he was elected to Parliament in 1950. It would be several years still before he arrived fully at the set of views we now call “Powellite.” But to call him systematic and consistent cannot be regarded at all as pretentious.
The Transition to World Empire
I think the best key to understanding Enoch Powell’s thought is to dwell on the years 1760 and 1947. Before the earlier of these years, Britain had been a European nation state – an oddity among its neighbours in its domestic arrangements, and unusually rich and powerful, but a European nation state. It then became a world empire. It would be some while – perhaps a century, or more than a century – before the nature of this change was fully understood. But the governance of the country now had to take into account far wider concerns than those that had filled the thoughts of Walpole and Bolingbroke. Because we ruled India, we had to involve ourselves in the disputes between Turkey and Russia. Because of the long route to India, we had to control Southern Africa. Once the Suez Canal had opened a shorter route, we had to take Cyprus from the Turks, and become the dominant naval power in the Eastern Mediterranean; and it became as great a crisis in our politics as disaffection in Ireland or Church tithes when the King of Egypt refused to pay his debts, and control of the Canal became an open question. Alongside India and its consequent acquisitions, there grew up immense colonies of mainly British settlement, in North America and in the South Western Pacific.
Yet even as, in the later years of Queen Victoria, its full magnificence finally took hold of the British imagination, this achievement was coming under strain. Powell described British India as a strange and improbable dream. As for the colonies of settlement, their possession of British institutions made it inevitable that they would eventually become free standing nations. The rise, towards the end of the 19th century, of other great industrial powers led to calls in Britain for some kind of Imperial Federation, with a common tariff and a common defence. For Powell, the idea was an obvious nonsense. For Powell, the Empire was a phase, terminating in itself, not the first step to a world state capable of staring down the United States.
The Recessional
And then, almost as quickly as a light is turned off, it was over. The wars with Germany were more expensive than had been expected. By 1945, Britain was on the edge of bankruptcy. India could not be held, and, in 1947, became independent. For Powell, this was the end. To use a different simile, it was as if the magnet beneath a sheet of paper covered with iron filings had been shifted. Because India was gone, we no longer had any interest in whether China went Communist or Fascist. Without any border between us, Soviet Russia itself was no longer a threat. Control of the Suez Canal no longer mattered. We had no reason to hold Cyprus as or for a naval base, nor any reason to buy influence in Arabia, or to garrison Aden and Mombassa.
By all means, let the liquidation be dignified, and carried out with some regard for the interests of the formerly subject peoples. But the logic of 1947 was that 1760 was undone. No longer directing a world empire, the British political class was required to think again like Walpole and Bolingbroke. Its whole concern now was to defend our home islands, and to attend to our commerce and industry, and generally to the rights and welfare of the British people.
Yet, if the Empire was only a phase in our history, its loss did not mean our end as a nation. In the life of nations as of individuals, one phase is followed by another; and, until the very end of things, no one can say which one was the more interesting or productive. Speaking in 1961, Powell told his audience:
And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country.
So we today, at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.
The Long Delusion
Sadly, his view of the logic of our position was not shared by the British ruling class. No doubt, we had been a world empire for nearly two hundred years – longer than the entire life of the United States to that time. By men of second and third rate minds, the assumptions and habits of Empire could not be thrown off overnight – nor, perhaps, in twenty years. But, rather than allow themselves to be led, however slowly and reluctantly, to an understanding of the new logic, our rulers took refuge in a vast and pernicious delusion. The Empire had not fallen, they told each other. It had merely evolved into the Commonwealth. No less organically united than the Empire had been, it remained one of the three great powers in the world, and its unique goodness both entitled and allowed it to act as arbiter between the other two powers.
In this, our rulers were like a man who has lost his job, but who continues, every morning, to put on a suit and buy a railway ticket to his former place of work. And, when the cost of travel exhausts his own means, he turns to borrowing and begging from anyone who may feel inclined to listen to him. So it was in 1950, and in 1960, and in 1970 and 1980 and 1990. So, sixteen years after Powell’s death, it remains. The delusion has become less reasonable since 1950. Its justifications have changed in ways that Churchill and Eden would not have liked. But nerve yourself to attend to the speeches written today for David Cameron to read out: you will eventually hear that we “punch above our weight,” or that “the eyes of the world are upon us.” Or look only at our involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone, and our nagging of Iran and Nigeria and Zimbabwe, and our fussing over aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles and other weapons inappropriate for control of our own sea approaches.
I have said that Powell was a systematic and a consistent thinker. His view of what happened in 1947 connects the whole of his thought – his denunciations of inflation and socialism and his firm defence of the Union of the Kingdoms and the ancient rights of its people, and his resistance to our membership of the European Union. But this is a half hour speech, and I will not put myself on your indulgence by going beyond my time. Let me, then, look at just two of the positions he took during his career.
Powell and America
The first is his suspicion of the United States. By the 1950s, it was clear that the delusion of British world power rested on the suffrance or the active subsidy of the United States. We could fight Communism in Malaya because the Americans wanted us to. When we tried to take back the Suez Canal, they told us to stop, and we did stop. I am not aware that Powell set out his thoughts at any length on the United States, and I am here interpolating my own opinion. But I do not think it inconsistent with what I have read by Powell.
Leave aside the evil and insanity of the American ruling class – something, I think, on which all in this room can agree. The problem for us is that every American, unless he denies his own birthright, must resent the survival of England since 1776. It is possible for one nation to speak a language that evolved in another nation, and to study a literature and to possess a legal tradition both of which are truly organic only to that other nation. But success in such an effort requires that other nation to be dead or insignificant. The Byzantines managed it. So have the Brazilians. When that other nation is rich and powerful, and in some degree a rival, the effort will, of necessity, lead to feelings of inferiority.
In 1917, and, again, after 1940, the Americans were given their chance. They helped Britain to victory, and did so with a lavish hand. But, if the fruit of this help was pulled beyond their grasp after the Great War, they took full possession in the 1940s. The price of helping Britain was the reduction of Britain to the status of a satellite. Even a firmly Powellite Britain, after 1950, would have had to take account of American power. But every grand gesture of the rulers we had was underwritten by the United States. To go back to my last simile, the Americans lent the railway fare money – and the price, each time, was entanglement in an American foreign policy that made no sense in terms of our own interests, and that led us into continual and corrosive national humiliation.
Enoch Powell was as hostile to NATO as he was to the European Union – perhaps more so. He never blamed the French or Germans for wholesale bribery of our rulers, or for the occasional murder of dissenting politicians. He went to the grave convinced that Airey Neave had been murdered, in 1979, by the CIA because his policy on Northern Ireland was inconvenient to an American Government that wanted the Irish Republic to join NATO.
Powell and Immigration
Now to immigration, and I hope that his views on that make more sense than perhaps they did before this morning. He never had time for rather American views of white superiority, or for the moral infirmity of the coloured races. You do not become fluent in Urdu, and a scholar of its poetry, when you believe its speakers are a lesser breed. He would probably have been indifferent to the opinions of Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer – not that I think it appropriate to denigrate either of these men thereby. His whole objection to mass-immigration was that the newcomers – regardless of their inherent quality as human beings – were not our people. Small numbers of immigrants – perhaps a few hundred thousand, concentrated in a few well-marked districts – might be accommodated. But the millions who did come, and their children and grandchildren, were in the nation, but not of the nation. Their physical presence displaced and otherwise inconvenienced the natives. The moral effects of their presence were to make the country ungovernable according to its ancient ways.
We can agree that the second, and greater burst of mass-immigration to Britain that began in the 1990s was part of the Cultural Marxist assault on Western Civilisation. But the first wave, beginning in the late 1940s, was entirely an effect of the delusion I have explained. The British Empire had a common citizenship. If the pretence of the Commonwealth as a continuation of Empire was to be maintained, it too needed a common citizenship. For this reason, British Governments refused, until the partial, and unwilling, withdrawal from delusion in the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1961, to give up on insisting that every citizen of the Indian and Pakistani Republics, and of every other territory coloured red on the map in 1947, had the same right to settle and live in the United Kingdom as my own parents, and the same right to vote and to benefit from the various welfare services that, wisely or unwisely, had been made available to the British people.
I began by quoting two sentences from his Rivers of Blood Speech. I will approach my end with another: “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre” Powell said this of British immigration policy. But he could have said it of every other failure of the British ruling class to understand and act upon the logic of what happened in 1947.
Bearing in mind the nature and tone of what I have said, my closing may be superfluous. Even so, I will give it. I met Enoch Powell and heard him speak less often than I wish I had. I wish I had known him better than I did. But I can say, with not the smallest doubt, that he was the greatest Englishman of my lifetime. I am proud to say that the Libertarian Alliance frequently invited him to speak at its meetings in the 1980s and 1990s, and that we published several articles by him. Of particular importance among these articles is the attack that he made in 1984 on the Drug Trafficking Offences Bill and the principle that it brought into English law of asset forfeiture without conviction.
I regret that I was unable to stand outside his memorial service. But my late friend, Chris R. Tame, made a point of being there. A hundred years from now, no one will remember the corrupt nonentities who fall over each other to denounce Enoch Powell. Equally, a hundred years from now, men will still be reading Enoch Powell for pleasure and instruction. And, by then, it may not be an informal crime to stand up and say “Enoch was right.”
I’ve thought about it, but I don’t believe there’s any American politician who’s approached his stature. Reprinted with gratitude.
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2014/09/sean-gabb-on-enoch-powell.html
Thanks
An excellent speech. The more I read about Enoch Powell, the more I like him. Not only was he right about idiocy and (IMHO) immorality of uncontrolled mass immigration, he was an economic liberal who was unshakeably committed to civil liberties and the ancient constitution that had served this country so well. There should be nothing shameful whatsoever about saying, “Enoch was right” and it is beholden upon us to say so loudly and proudly – the least that we can do is to rebuff the witless defamation and demonology to which this great man has been subject.
It is interesting that Mr Powell did not see the rising importance of the Middle East – the Suez Canal may have been built to quicken travel to India, but by 1947 (let alone 1956) the Middle East was vastly more important than India.
The de facto defeat of Britain and France in 1956 (a political not a military defeat) led to chaos in the Middle East – for example the terrible revolution in Iraq in 1958. It led the eventual nationalisation of the oil and gas industry in most Western countries (including by our “friend” the Emperor of Iran – thus making the operation of 1953 a bit ironic), and the blackmailing of the West by the OPEC cartel. Almost needles to say…. the various Middle Eastern regimes (including that of Iran) wasted the wealth of oil and gas on wild statism (which they will not be able to sustain in the long term – indeed it has already collapsed in some countries).
It later years both retired President Eisenhower and retired Sec of State John Foster Dulles both said they wished that Britain had gone on and defeated Nasser (the socialist dictator of Egypt who ruined his own country and spread armed subversion to so many other countries).
However, at the time the perception of the American attitude was radically different. This means there are two possibilities.
Either the attitude of the United States government was radically misunderstood at the time – Eisenhower was preoccupied with the Soviet invasion of Hungary (and with his own re election campaign – under the cover of being “above politics” Ike was actually an intensely political person), John Foster Dulles was ill (thus meaning that Herbert Hoover Jr was in de facto control of the State Department) and Harold M. (the British Chancellor) had his own squalid reasons (he wanted to overthrow Eden and become Prime Minister himself – so he was “first in, first out on Suez) for over starting the “threat to the Pound” from a failure of the Americans to step in support (why was the Pound exchange “fixed” at all? “Rab” Butler had suggested, before Suez, that the “fixing” of the exchange rate was demented and could not be maintained for ever), and on and on…………
However……………
There is another possibility…….
Retired American statesmen trying to rewrite history – for reasons of personal vanity (to cover up their judgement in 1956 being so radically wrong).
No one likes to go down in history as a moron – and the effort to befriend Nasser in the early 1950s was moronic (hence “what effort to befriend Nasser – we wanted Britain to go to victory, we were astonished they did not…..” or whatever).
There is little doubt which possibility, the rather wary of the American government, Enoch Powell would have believed.
One could also cite the choice, also by the Eisenhower Administration, to destroy Senator McCarthy – even though they knew what he was saying was largely true (see “Blacklisted by History”) – the (internal) Communist threat was “defeated” you see, and many of the Communists were from “good families” (unlike Joe McCarthy) so they should be allowed to quietly resign, and everything covered up………..
With the explosion of Marxist activity (in the universities, the media and so on…….) in the 1960s (so much for the internal threat being “defeated”) this choice by the Eisenhower Administration also appears to be moronic.
Enoch Powell would not have needed to know what was to happen in the 1960s.
Enoch Powell was an honourable man – he would not have thrown another man (even a hard drinking Irish American whom he would not have liked) to the wolves, for the terrible crime of telling the truth.
Without (an American backed) NATO, Europe (including Britain) would have fallen to Stalin – a murderer of tens of millions.
And (in spite of its blunders – sometimes extreme blunders) without the alliance with the United States the world would have fallen into a Marxist totalitarian nightmare (a new Dark Age – as Churchill, rightly, warned would be the consequence of the victory of the Nazis). True the tyranny would have eventually collapsed, but it would have taken civilisation with it (with incredible death and suffering).
If Enoch Powell thought differently – then he was honestly mistaken.
Sean Gabb knows the truth perfectly well – and pretends he does not (so he is not honestly mistaken).
Like Lost Leonardo I also would like to have seen more on Enoch Powell’s believe in limited government (I had the honour of talking with him about this at the Institute of Economic Affairs – many years ago).
Dr Gabb is perfectly capable of writing about Enoch Powell’s (correct) belief that spending on the Welfare State should be strictly limited (for both economic and cultural reasons). But I will not be holding my breath waiting for Dr Gabb to write about this matter.
Enoch Powell was also (of course) a strong supporting of free trade. As Mr Powell was not ignorant of economics – nor did he pretend to be ignorant of economics.
America is not one country. It is an oligarchy ruling four large fiefdoms, each more different from its neighbours than from the european traditions from which it came.
As for American “help” after World War 2, stalinist russia was a pathetic basket case that could have been turned to ash in a real war. The cold war was nothing more than confected enduring marketing campaign run by Third Force nazis, a monstrous number of whom were partnered by the incipient ashkenazi ruling class in post-anglosaxon America- a trend that now sees so many dual citizen israelis in American administrations that a sincere and real question is begged.
Likewise all these things America has rescued us from, and I say this as an Amerophile, have largely been either delusional or self created- or both.
CIA, DIA, DISC and the gestapo-like FBI with its discredited “crime lab” that has sent so many innocent men to death are a sinister 1930s style cabal that is terminally infecting a divided America with what JFK of all people called a Death Cult mentality.
Perhaps I am biased as a fellow orientalist and classics scholar but Powell makes more sense and seems still more insightful the more of his thoughts one exposes oneself to. The classical parallels he saw are not the affectation of a dilettante but the thunderclap of enlightenment of a giant of his age.
He deserved better than he received, but perhaps by his treatment the anglo-saxon has sealed his fate.
Ate? Nemesis? Phthonos?
Irony, certainly.
It’s worth noting that a major purpose of the FBI from its inception was to create an American federal moral police force, an equivalent of the mutaween. Its first job was cataloguing brothels in preparation for the Mann Act (a typical example of a Progressivist/Feminist law predicated entirely on a fictional moral panic about “white slavery”) and the bureau made its name enforcing alcohol prohibition, fighting a crime wave entirely created by State action. Hoover was openly and proudly inspired into his career by his admiration of Anthony Comstock, the great “obscenity” crusader. Etc.
Britain would not likely have fallen to Stalin, but we might have been forced to kowtow to him. Stalin did not choose risky wars of conquest. More likely we would have been America’s Airstrip One when we finally got them to help.
Excellent speech.
I must admit, it’s news to me that Airey Neave may have been taken out by the CIA, but then you see, I don’t get out much.
One is superficially disinclined to believe that hypothesis: but then, we note that the “Democrats” ruled the USA at the time, so it doesn’t seem entirely improbable. They were friends of the Kremlin, which needed the Irish Republic for hunter-killer-submarine bases to interdict the western Approaches more fully. 30+ years of funding of the many and various IRAs by the USSR was a strategic attempt to Cubanize the island of Ireland. (i in turn hypothesise that it was the Us democrats who did for JFK, never forgiving him for brokering a quick patch to avoid war in 1962!
Now to Enoch Powell:-
As it may be useful for readers to have the full text of the “Rivers of Blood” speech, I will try to edit in a link to the text of it here later.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643826/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html
Or you can just go here.
I remember it quite well. There was absolute consternation on the BBC via the “sound-wireless” the following morning. Or at least, in the restrained tones those days of what passed for sheer hysterical panic. Very shortly – in fact almost that day, Powell was fired by Edward “Red Ted” Heath, the leader of the Opposition and Powell’s boss. I think Panorama even did a prog about it, the sainted Richard Dimbleby officiating. From the intro of Sean’s piece, we know that Powell didn’t say the words “Rivers Of Blood”…but that is what the popular press made of it right away, and we seem even to be having these if the British Political-EnemyClass isn’t careful (or rather, is…)
I think I’d only take issue with Sean on one point. Even when thinking and writing fast, some slightly sharper distinction between the American Political Class – the Beltway Nazis – and the American People ought to be emphasised in the syntax. The former really do hate and despise us even more fiercely than they despise what they term “Rednecks” (their words, not ours.) The latter (“Rednecks”) are either in my experience quite indifferent to Britain and our world/domestic entanglements and scrapes, or else are even slightly well-disposed towards us.
Sean, that was excellent. I wholeheartedly agree with your view that he was the greatest Englishman of our generation. I was once a constituent of his, and I am extremely proud to say that I met him and shook his hand. You might have included in your brief biography of him that he enlisted in the British Army as a private soldier at the beginning of the war and finished as a Brigadier – something achieved by no other person in WWII.
None of us have a hundred years left, so I’ll say it while I can – and to hell with those who don’t like it: ‘Enoch was – most definitely – right’.
I repeat what I have already said (although, I note, that the comments for this [and all other posts from this site] are not delivered to my “in box” regardless of whether I press on the “notify me” or not), comments to the contrary are counter factual (for example the military power of the Soviet Union was vast – and international Communism had many friends around the world, including in Britain).
Anyone who thinks that the American alliance after World War II was not necessary is wrong – just wrong.
As wrong as those Rothbardians who think such things as the Korean War was wrong. Such Rothbardians would have handed the world to the Marxists on a plate, just as they previous would have handed the world to the Nazis.
Still returning to Mr Powell.
As for the Mr Powell’s comments about “high contracting parties” ignoring the plans of the INLA to murder Airey Neave in 1979 (not warning Mr Neave when they. allegedly, could have done – because they were actually rather happy to see him got out of the way, without the guilt of having the blood on their own hands…..).
This is from a brief conversation between myself and Mr Powell in Birmingham (long ago) at a meeting – I asked the question whether government policy towards Ulster (and other matters) would have been different had A. Neave lived. And I got the answer about the “high contracting parties”.
A journalist was present at the gathering – there we go…….
Do I agree with what Mr Powell said (even what he actually said – which was slightly different to what is often repeated)?
I know from my own past life (I have not always been in the pathetic position I now am) that protecting informers is a primary obsession.
It is not a matter of wanting-someone-dead – it is a matter of being obsessed with protecting sources of information (like some miser counting his gold coins – security and intelligence organisations often collect information for its own sake, they do not understand the need to DO THINGS with the information).
Getting the Irish Republic into NATO was never a particularly high priority of the Central Intelligence Agency – not something they would make a great effort on (Britain, in many eyes, is a small fairly unimportant island – and Ireland is an even smaller almost totally UNimportant island). The United Kingdom armed forces (no matter how brave they undoubtedly are) are small and underequipped (Mr Powell said that he suffered from the “illusion” that they were not till the end of his life, he always had the vision of what they had been in his mind’s eye, but he understood that their strength was an illusion) – as for the Irish armed forces, they basically hardly exist. The police department of a large American city could wipe out the Irish armed forces (one would need not need to call out something like the Texas National Guard – let alone the Untied States armed forces themselves).
One of my nightmares is that the British armed forces might one day be ordered to fight (by some over optimistic British government) WITHOUT American support.
Courage is not enough, bravery is not enough. If the modern British armed forces faced a serious foe, without American supplies, logistics and other support, they (the British) would be – wiped out. As for the civilian population of Britain – they are unarmed, unused to arms and (therefore) essentially helpless.
As for the American armed forces – their most serious enemy has long been internal (the vile world of American politics – the world of the university trained “Social Justice” lovers), not on the battlefield (where the Rednecks can kill any enemy they are ALLOWED to kill).
Ulster is a bit different – but their attitudes (as regards religion, firearms, and other things) are closer to American “Red Necks” (indeed Ulster “Scots-Irish” [rather different from the Scot-Scots] is who the “Red Necks” culturally are), than are the “grumble but OBEY” English.
The British security and intelligence services ignoring a report that might have saved lives had it been acted upon?
It would not be the first time (the “Gollum attitude” with information “precious, oh my precious” – endless gloating and inaction, defended by the doctrine that any positive action would “threaten sources”, is a common attitude).
But it does not mean they wanted Airey Neave dead.
I again apologise if I do not keep up with this or the other comment threads – ticking the “notify me” box appears not to work.
“One of my nightmares is that the British armed forces might one day be ordered to fight (by some over optimistic British government) WITHOUT American support.”
Falklands War? Although we had such a hard time vs a fourth-rate power, arguably that supports your thesis. We still won, though.
Agree about Ulstermen = Rednecks. No Pakistani grooming gangs in Ulster!
If anyone is interested, there is a video of a Peter Mullins reading the speech, which can be watched online or downloaded, at
https://archive.org/details/PeterMullins-riversOfBlood
It is discouraging that when I searched for a recording of the speech, I got lots of hits from Stormfront, NationalSocialists.whatever, something called the “White Network”….
David Davis, thanks for the links to transcripts of the speech. :>)
Also, I suspect a typo: where you wrote “up” did you really mean “us”? If so, I will tell you that “the Beltway Nazis” are properly referred to using a highly pejorative term that naturally such a refined young lady as I do not know, but it takes a short Anglo-Saxon word beginning with “s” and appends the word “head.” I can’t think what it could possibly mean, but I assure you that it describes the B.N.’s quite accurately.
Oh yes, the probable typo:
You’re quite right – I will deal with the typo.
Julie – the “Beltway Nazis” means the Social Justice lovers (the university trained elite). There may be some justification for calling them “Fascists” (as long as one remembers that Fascism does NOT mean some “partnership” of business and government – it means the desire for government to dominate society, including business), but calling them “Nazis” is a bit silly.
As for the real Nazis (Stormfront and the others) – Enoch Powell would have despised these Black Flag types (indeed despised all factions of followers of the Black Flag – Fascists, Nazis, anti capitalist “anarchists”, Islamists and so on).
Enoch Powel was loyal to the Queen and to the United Kingdom and opposed the followers of the Black Flag as much as he opposed the followers of the Red Flag (after all they are fundamentally akin – they are all Social Justice supporters, haters of large scale manufacturers, landed estate owners, and traders).
Enoch Powell
A person more different from Sean Gabb than Enoch Powell, would be hard to imagine.
Enoch Powell opposed Appeasement in the 1930s (as Edmund Burke would have put it – National Socialism was an “armed doctrine” that was a threat to the entire world) and served honourably in World War II.
He is still remembered with respect in Northern Ireland – and by many Roman Catholics as well as Protestants.
Paul,
Fear not, you were perfectly clear on whom you meant by the “Beltway Nazis.” You even defined them: “the American Political Class,” you said. :>)
Julie – it was not me who used the term “Beltway Nazis”. As someone whose family lost members to the real Nazis I am careful whom I call a Nazi (“Fascist” is a more general term).
Simontmn – the British armed forces were a lot stronger back in 1982 (although the key damage was done in the 1960s by Denis Healey- who did terrible harm to both the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force).
However, even in 1982 American logistical support was vital (although not much talked about).
This is why C.W. (the American Defence Secretary at the time) got a knighthood (although under American law he is not allowed to call himself “Sir Casper”).
The American government (as normal) was split into rival factions – but, at that time, the Defence Department was under the control of the pro British faction.
As for Enoch Powell – his loyalty was to the Queen and to the United Kingdom (a United Kingdom where people were allowed to engage in free trade with the people of other lands).
Both of which Sean Gabb despises.
For Sean Gabb to present himself as a follower of Enoch Powell is an obscene lie.
[…] should have the right to do so and not have busybodies browbeat them into being quiet? In his remarks concerning Enoch Powell, Sean Gabb, a notable British libertarian stated this regarding […]