WAS ENOCH RIGHT?

"Like the Roman, etc., etc."

Was Enoch Powell the nationalist hero that many claim, or was he much more of a "mainstream" figure than people realise and therefor part of the problem?

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by N.Grifford

The memory of Enoch Powell, a paragon of the political Right, is enjoying something of a resurgence in these ‘diverse’ and ‘vibrant’ times of ethnic plenty.

Mr Powell’s address to a 1968 Conservative party general meeting (now referred to as the Rivers of Blood speech) gave rise to the now frequent utterance and heart-felt proclamation that, “Enoch Was Right!” He was most certainly of the Right, but were Enoch’s motives right and correct, or have modern day nationalists merely been sloppy in their aggrandisement of this totemic political personality?

Let us first assess a popular morsel from Powell’s (in)famous speech:

“Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history...

“We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.”

In essence, the above appears to reflect the genuine trepidation of a post-war indigenous population; a fear that provided fuel for the British National Front through the late nineteen sixties, and which forced the hand of the Tories in 1978, who fitly released a plume of establishment-approved, specious rhetoric – via the medium of their popular female mouthpiece – before an imminent General Election.

British workers march in support of Enoch.

However, the transcript of Powell’s speech contains over 3,000 words, and the pervading attitude towards immigration and race is somewhat less congruous with the views and opinions of racial nationalists of the present era.

Nearing the foamy climax of his this famous speech, Mr Powell goes on to remark:

“The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word 'integration.' To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.

“Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.

“But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

“We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population – that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.

“Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man's hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly.”

For those who have not taken the time to listen to or read the Rivers of Blood speech, the above may come as something of a revelation. It is not beyond the realms of reason to deduce that Enoch Powell’s opposition to “Commonwealth Immigration” was founded purely an a logistic conundrum: permit small quantities of non-White immigrants to reside in Britain and they will surely integrate into the native population, but allowing an “annual inflow of some 50,000” is likely to cause far too much in the way of a disturbance, or, as the former cabinet minister (Lord) Norman Tebbit recently enunciated in relation to the institutionalised suppression of child abuse, the tendency in political circles to “protect the system” is overwhelming compelling. And to paraphrase Francis Parker Yockey, "a threat to the status quo is seen as terrorism."

The assimilationist fantasy.

The ‘so long as they remove the veil and assimilate’ sentiment and 'a threat to our way of life' dissension that permeates the political Right is perhaps even more dangerous to our genetic inheritance in the long term than mass immigration itself. The influx of millions of non-Whites into much of Europe and the White world has created unpreventable conflict and is, therefore, a threat to the status quo: the great ethnic slaughterhouse the Occident now personifies. This genocidal vista is shared with Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Le Pen’s Front National, and numerous other ‘acceptable’ reactionary Right groups oozing from the corpse of the traditionally conservative, capitalist movement that, aside its socialist cousin, once dominated the ideological landscape of the West. 

But in order to fully discern whether or not “Enoch Was Right,” we must investigate the man and his outpourings still further. 

The following is from a speech given by Enoch Powell in Prestatyn in 1969:

“Nationhood is a baffling thing: for it is wholly subjective. They are a nation who think they are: there is no other definition. You cannot discover nations by poring over atlases: for though geography influences nationhood, it does not determine it in any specific way ... Nor will history do your business for you: nations merge with others in the passage of time, while others emerge or re-emerge. Nor again will language or ethnography help: for though, like geography and history, language and race are relevant to nationhood, they are not determinants of it: adjacent nations may speak the same language, yet be fiercely separate, while undoubted nations can comprise those who speak different languages. As for the slippery concept of race, all attempts to match it with nationality are foredoomed to failure.”

The final sentence in particular should be enough to redden the cheeks of even the most ardent promulgator of the “Enoch Was Right!” slogan. It serves to reinforce the premise that Mr Powell was by far more concerned with an erroneous concept of parliamentary “nationhood” than he was perturbed or distressed at the prospect of the terminal numerical decline and inevitable extinction of the native folk who constitute our nation [the word nation itself is derived from the Latin natio, meaning 'race, breed, tribe,' a fact Enoch Powell would have been aware of due to his appreciation and lengthy study of the Classics – he was in fact an eminent scholar and reader of Latin].

Another interesting aspect of Powell’s persona (and, as the reader will no doubt be aware, we are discussing the man, not the myth), is his enigmatic emotional state. To elaborate on this point I have included the following article taken from the Mail Online entitled, “The day Enoch exposed our Mau Mau shame”:

“On 27 July 1959, Powell gave his speech on the Hola Camp of Kenya, where eleven Mau Mau were killed after refusing work in the camp. Powell noted that some MPs had described the eleven as ‘sub-human’, but Powell responded by saying: ‘In general, I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil upon the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgement on a fellow human being and to say, 'Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow.' Powell also disagreed with the notion that because it was in Africa, different methods were acceptable:

“‘Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard. We cannot say, 'We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home'. We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.’

“Denis Healey, a member of parliament from 1952 to 1992, later said this speech was "the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard... it had all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes". The Daily Telegraph report of the speech said that ‘as Mr Powell sat down, he put his hand across his eyes. His emotion was justified, for he had made a great and sincere speech.’”

A man who openly weeps for Africans engaged in a guerrilla war against his own country, murdering at least one hundred people of European descent in the process, is surely to be viewed as ‘suspect’ when scrutinised through a racialist lens. It is claimed, although it appears to be anecdotal only, that Powell also opposed the contemporaneous South African government’s policy of racial segregation, known as Apartheid. Given his stance on racial integration – as opposed to balkanisation – this should come as no special shock.

Sympathy for the devil: Mau Mau killer on trial.

Delving deeper in the politics of Enoch Powell, and bearing in mind his tendency towards melodrama, another revealing disclosure involves the late MP’s sexual habits. Yes, Powell also seems to have engaged in the 'love that dare not speak its name.' 

From a brief account to be found on the Free Online Library, entitled ‘Gay affair,’ it may have inspired Powell's poetry:

“Poetry written by former Wolverhampton MP Mr Enoch Powell when he was a Cambridge student was inspired by a homosexual friendship, it was claimed yesterday.

“Canon Eric James said Mr Powell, who died on Sunday, confided in him ten years ago about the relationship and he had sworn to keep it secret until Mr Powell died.

“Canon James, who was a chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge after Mr Powell was there, said the former Wolverhampton South West MP gave him a copy of his First Poems, and drew his attention to some verses in which he 'tried to put into words what a homosexual relationship had meant to him'.

“The poems had previously been assumed to refer to Mr Powell's feelings for Albrighton hunt social committee member Barbara Kennedy who he took to a music hall for his first date in 1948, when he was in his thirties.

“She later became engaged to a Shropshire businessman and Canon James yesterday said the verses referred to a much earlier episode. “He said Mr Powell did not identify the man but said the relationship was ‘the most painful thing in my early life’.

“Canon James added: ‘I promised Enoch Powell I would not disclose what he had said to me about the homosexual basis of certain of his poems until after his death. Then it would be a matter of literary history.’”

This would appear to explain Powell's support of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which decriminalised homosexuality, a piece of 'progressive' legislation also supported by another titan of the Blue & Purple rinse brigade, one M. Thatcher.

The following quote by the vexatious, age-defying celebrity, Anne Robinson, goes some way in summarising the entire Powell ‘Storm in a Tea Cup’ controversy:

“I didn’t judge my parents as racists for supporting Enoch Powell. Like many others, they felt they hadn’t come through a war to see their neighbourhood transformed and property values threatened. So when nationalists get all excited about the 'mood of the public' remember that your ideals are not their ideals: they are worried about how it (mass immigration) will affect them personally - and their property prices [emphasis added].”

What we are presented with then is quite a tragic character, and certainly not an exemplar of genuine British or White nationalism. Powell’s views on immigration were rooted in a phlegmatic parliamentarian assessment of nationhood; a state devoid of ethnic cohesion yet replete with patriotic sentimentalities and vacant customs. He was an early champion of ‘gay rights’ and was clearly and publicly perturbed when colonists, under British administration and protection, attempted to defend themselves against savage, endemic insurgents. Powell was, I will grant you, an opponent of multiculturalism, but it was for all the wrong reasons. The assimilation of divergent human racial groups into Britain, no matter how protracted, is genocide and Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech today serves as the fountainhead for the tendency to advocate 'assimilation' amongst the political Right.

On a TV talk show with notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile.

Powell was (and still is) nothing more than a distraction; a comfortable, controllable, and incidental jingle, when what our country required was a reverberating symphony. He provided the deceitful political establishment with a modicum of credence, and he remained loyal to "the system" until the end. Was Enoch right? He was most assuredly of the Right, but he was, in my opinion, dead wrong – in fact the spectre of Enoch Powell should be considered as one of the most deleterious influences on the present-day racialist movement and the man himself should be regarded, without equivocation, as a traitor to his nation and his people.