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Along with autographed blunt instruments SteynOnline offers a speech by another Brummagem King Edward's School old boy, Enoch Powell MP.
His Peaky Blinders stemwinder warns that immigration from former colonies will reduce Britain to a state of civil war grim as Rome in the days when Virgil wrote of 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'
Powell's"Rivers of Blood " speech comes across as purple prose today, but it arguably reflects Thomas Jefferson's 1787 letter on Shay's rebellion, lamenting that " the Tree of Liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of Patriots" delivered in response to Eisenhower dispatching National Guard troops to end school segregation in Little Rock. Here's Mark's take :
Rivers of Blood and the Tides of History
Steyn on Britain April 20, 2018
Half-a-century ago today, Enoch Powell gave the speech that ended his political ambitions within the British Conservative Party… BBC Radio, aired a re-enactment of the speech, read by Ian McDiarmid, best known for playing Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movies...
The performance, in fact, is well worth your time… It begins with something... few politicians other than Powell have bothered to articulate:
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.
Enoch discerned a lot, as I wrote on his centenary in 2012:
National Review June 21st 2012
Happy Warrior by Mark Steyn" he was never well disposed toward Uncle Sam… he was "allergic" to "the things that are typically American." This "allergy" was about all he had in common with… the faux-Tory technocrat Euro-fetishist Edward Heath. On almost every other matter, Heath was wrong, and Powell was right. | ||
To the despair of captive leftie passengers, cabbies the length and breadth of the realm enthused about "Enoch."… John O'Sullivan and I took a taxi ride in Dublin in which our driver ended his disquisition on immigration with the words, "Enoch got it right." I once wrote a piece on the increasingly crusty and reactionary Aussie feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, which a waggish editor headlined "The Female Enoch," confident that every reader would get the joke.
Most of today's political class will end their lives as failures, too, and without even the consolations of contrarianism. But, on statism, Europe, multiculturalism, and much else, Powell taught a very basic lesson — that any sane person should be instinctively skeptical when all the smart people agree. The "unforeseen consequences" are usually out there on the not-so-far horizon looming large in plain sight
