Dante Alighieri and the Needle of Doom

 

Dante Alighieri’s magnus opus the Divine Comedy was completed in 1320, the year before the poet’s death. Dante’s story begins on Good Friday of his thirty-fifth year.   Lost in the woods, beset by wild animals, he is rescued by the ancient Roman poet Virgil.  Virgil takes Dante on a guided tour down through the circles of the pit of Hell then up the terraces of the mountain of Purgatory where Beatrice takes over as his guide through the celestial spheres of Paradise.   The journey through each of these otherworldly realms is told in a cantica which is titled after the realm in question.   These are the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso and each contains thirty-three cantos, with an extra thirty-fourth canto in the Inferno. 

 

In the Inferno, as Virgil and Dante travel down through the nine circles of Hell, the sins and their punishments get worse.   The ninth circle is the Cocytus, the lake of ice where those guilty of treachery are sent.  The Cocytus is itself divided into four regions, the first two of which are described in the thirty-second canto.   The thirty-fourth canto brings Virgil and Dante to the Judecca, the last region of the Cocytus in which those who have betrayed their benefactors are tormented.   It is named after Judas Iscariot who, along with the other great traitors of history, Brutus and Cassius, are found at the very bottom of the pit being chewed in the mouths of the three faces of the original traitor, old Lucy himself.

 

It is the third region of the Cocytus, through which the pilgrims pass in the thirty-third canto that is of interest for the purposes of this essay, however.   This region is called the Ptolomaea after the Ptolemy who was governor of Jericho under Antiochus VII in the second century BC.   Ptolemy had failed to learn the lesson about the sacred duty of hospitality and what befalls those who sin grievously against it that was so aptly illustrated in the mythology of the land of his ancestors by the stories of the curse on the House of Atreus. (1)  He had married the daughter of Simon Thassi Maccabeus, who was the elder brother of the Judas Maccabeus who had led the successful revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, as well as a High Priest and the first ruler of the Hasmonean Dynasty.   In 135 BC, Ptolemy invited his father-in-law to a banquet where he murdered Simon and two of his sons.  (2)  The Ptolomaea was where those who had dealt treacherously with their guests were sent to be punished.  

 

In the Ptolomaea Dante encounters Fra Alberigo of Faenza who in 1285 had invited his brother Manfred and nephew Alberghetto to a banquet.   At the banquet, Alberigo ordered figs to be brought to the table.  This was a signal to his men to fall upon the guests and kill them all.   In Hell, Fra Alberigo draws Dante’s attention to the presence of Branca d’Oria of Genoa who in 1275 had done the same thing to his father-in-law, and of whom Alberigo says “many years have passed since he was shut up in this manner.”   This, Dante finds hard to believe:

 

‘I think,’ I said to him, ‘that you deceive me;

 For Branca d’Oria has never died;

 He eats and drinks and sleeps and puts on clothes.’ (3)

 

Dante had good reason to think this.  Branca d’Oria lived a good quarter of a century after the year in which the events told in the Divine Comedy were said to have taken place, outliving the poet.   Indeed, Fra Alberigo himself was still alive in 1300, dying seven years later.

 

All of this is explained in the poem.   Fra Alberigo tells Dante, when the latter asks him “Oh…are you already dead?”:

 

How it stands with my body

In the world above, I have no knowledge here. 

For Ptolemaea has this privilege

That oftentimes a soul may sink down here

Before Atropos sends it on its way. 

And so that you may the more willingly

Remove the glaze of tears from off my face, (4)

Know, that as soon as any soul betrays, 

As I did, then his body is taken from him

By a demon, who afterwards governs it

Until his time on earth comes to an end.

The soul crashed down into the pit;

And it may be that the body of this shadow 

Who winters here behind me, is still on earth.

 

This portion of Dante’s poem is a great piece of political satire.   Dante lived and wrote in a period in which the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire were engaged in a struggle for power in northern and central Italy.   The Italians had split into rival factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the former supporting the papacy and the latter the Holy Roman Emperor.  Dante belonged to the Guelph faction in his native Florence, a city-state that was divided between the two factions.   Fra Alberigo was a member of a Guelph family that had been driven into exile from its Guelph city-state but later returned by making an alliance with a Ghibelline.   Branca d’Oria belonged to the Ghibelline faction of a solidly Guelph city-state.    Thus, in this episode of the Inferno Dante is not merely drawing attention to the similarity between the crimes of the two men, but is also lampooning a traitor to his own faction and a member of the rival faction by presenting them as being so wicked that their souls were already suffering in Hell while their bodies were walking around on earth.

 

I have been contemplating this passage in Dante a lot in recent days.   It seems to me that bodies, animated in the sense of walking around, talking, breathing, and eating, but devoid of their human souls is not a bad way of describing the great many in our own day who have been willing to sacrifice the basic rights and freedoms, social lives, livelihoods and mental and spiritual wellbeing of all of their family, friends, and neighbours in a vain effort to prevent the spread of the Bogeyman of the bat flu virus.   Indeed, thanks to a particular genre of science/horror fiction that has become inexplicably popular in recent decades, we now have what Dante lacked in his day, a household term, borrowed from the legends of Haitian voodoo for mindless, animated, bodies of this sort, i.e., zombies.

 

There has been much discussion among those of us who are still sane enough to oppose the heavy-handed, diabolical attempts of governments, media and big businesses to coerce people in one way or another into being injected with some concoction or another, hastily whipped together by scientists after the order of Frankenstein and Jekyll, of the potential physical hazards such as blood clots, sterility, and death.   Sadly, there has not been as much corresponding discussion of the potential metaphysical and spiritual hazards posed by the needles and their unholy contents.   Since a foetus could be said, in a way, to be a guest, a guest in its mother’s womb, abortion is, in addition to being murder, a form of treachery against a guest.   Cells obtained from an aborted foetus have, in one way or another – development, testing, manufacture – been involved in the production of these experimental bat flu vaccines.    Could this mean that one hazardous effect of the vaccines is to drive souls from their bodies into eternal torment in Hell leaving zombies to walk the earth turning all of those awful graphic novels, movies, and video games about a zombie apocalypse into an awful reality?

 

The only good argument against this theory that I can see is that all those people who have been living in mindless fear for over a year, relying upon silly totems worn over their faces to magically ward off a virus, were already behaving like zombies before they took the needle.

  

 

 (1)   Tantalus, the progenitor of the line, had invited the Olympians to a banquet where he insulted them by serving up his own son Pelops (after whom the Peloponnesus is named) as the main course.   This led to his own famous punishment in Tartarus – being immersed in a pool with grapes dangled over his head, food and water alike receding from him when he sought to satiate his hunger and thirst.   It also brought a curse upon his descendants in which the sins of the previous generations kept being re-enacted and revisited on the next.   His grandson Atreus, whose wife Aerope had cuckolded him with his brother Thyestes, took revenge on Thyestes by serving up the latter’s own children to him.   Thyestes’ son Aegisthus would eventually avenge his father by seducing Clytemnestra, the wife of Atreus’s son Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, while the latter was away leading the Greek campaign against Troy, and conspiring with her to murder Agamemnon upon his return

(2)   An account of this can be found in the sixteenth chapter of I Maccabees.

(3)   Quotations of the Divine Comedy are taken from the Oxford World Classics edition of 1998, which uses the 1980 translation by Charles H. Sisson.

(4)   This is the punishment in the Ptolemaea – the betrayers lie in the lake of ice, with their own tears freezing across their eyes.

Antiracism is Worse than Racism

While some maintain that there is no gradation of evil, that “sin is sin” and that it is all the same there is little basis for thinking this to be the case. If we did not distinguish between greater and lesser evils there would be no basis for passing laws against certain bad acts while allowing if morally disapproving others. To be consistent we would have to either criminalize everything we considered to be bad or give up the rule and protection of law. Either option would make human existence unbearable. Out of practical necessity, at the very least, we need a hierarchy of goods and evils. Some might qualify the claim that all sin is the same by saying that while we as humans distinguish between greater and lesser evils, in God’s eyes, all sin is sin. This is not the doctrine of orthodox Christianity, however. All that the Scriptures affirm on the matter is that God does not judge as man does. This means that His criteria, for distinguishing between greater and lesser evil, is not necessarily the same as ours, not that He regards all sins as being equal. The Scriptures very much affirm the idea of a hierarchy of goods and evils. If there were no hierarchy of good and evil, statements like “this is the first and greatest of the commandments and the second is like unto it” and “these shall receive the greater condemnation” would be nonsensical.

The grounds for thinking that all sin is equal are at their best, very weak. The grounds for thinking otherwise are much stronger and so we can safely accept the proposition that there is a hierarchy in which some goods are better than others and some evils are worse than others. We will take this proposition as being established, therefore, in making our argument that antiracism is a greater evil than racism.

“Now wait a minute,” some of you might be saying “by saying that antiracism is worse than racism aren’t you saying that a good is worse than an evil?”

That racism is always an evil, and antiracism, which by definition is opposition to racism, is always good, is certainly the conventional opinion these days. The conventional opinion, however, is seldom a good guide to what is true. Conventional means that which is generally agreed upon. Like the words convene and convention, which it is closely related to, it comes from the Latin for “to come together” and suggests the idea of people getting together and coming to an agreement. However effective that process might be in helping people live together peacefully it is not how truth is arrived at.

Tradition is a much sounder guide to truth than convention. Tradition, from the Latin for “to hand over or pass on”, is that which has been passed down to us through time. Convention and tradition are both forms of established thought. Convention is that which is established because of its acceptance by the majority in the present. Tradition is that which is established because it has endured the test of time. While tradition doesn’t generate truth any more than convention does it has a much better perception of truth and is thus a better guide to truth.

Let us take a closer look then at this particular conventional opinion, considering its two parts separately. First there is the assertion that racism is always evil. Is this assertion true? The answer to that depends upon what we mean by racism.

Racism is a word that is used and overused everywhere in society today. One would think that due to this ubiquity there would be a universal consensus as to the meaning of the word. That such is not the case was recently illustrated for us here in Manitoba. Last fall a Winnipeg lingerie shop put on a burlesque show to raise funds for Osborne House, a shelter for battered women. Through e-mail, Eric Robinson, Deputy Premier and Minister of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs in Manitoba’s provincial government and Nahanni Fontaine, an advisor to the government, discussed how they felt this was inappropriate and in poor taste. In the course of this discussion, Robinson said that it was an example of “the ignorance of do-good white people.” This summer, the content of these e-mails was leaked to Barbara Judt, CEO of Osborne House, who condemned the comment as hateful and racist and filed a complaint with the provincial human rights commission against Robinson.

This generated an ongoing public discussion and in the course of that discussion it became apparent that there was a great deal of disagreement over what constitutes racism. Robinson is of Cree descent and his comment, if racist, was racist towards white people. Some took the position that racism can only be committed by a more powerful group against a less powerful group and that because Robinson belongs to a less powerful group, historically oppressed by the group his comment was about, his words could not therefore be racist. Tim Sale, for example, took this position in an article that appeared in the August 31st issue of the Winnipeg Free Press (1) and it was echoed by several people whose letters were published in the weeks following.

Others, whose letters were also published, found this position to be absurd and offensive. They took the position that racism consists of negative thoughts about and actions toward people of other races and that racism is racism regardless of who is on the giving and receiving ends of it.

The second group probably represents the views of the majority of Canadians. Their understanding of racism is certainly more in line with the definitions found in most standard dictionaries. Where then, do Sale and the other members of the first group get off saying that racism is a one way street, going from powerful to less powerful, from white to non-white, and never the other way around?

After the triumph of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960’s, progressive academics rethought their concept of racism. The left had just won everything they said they wanted: the Supreme Court of the United States had overturned the legality of the “separate but equal” concept in Brown v. Board, the President had ordered the National Guard to enforce the integration of institutions of higher education in the deep South, de jure segregation was now illegal, and the Civil Rights bill had passed, outlawing various sorts of private discrimination, paving the way for the legal shakedown industry and the reverse discrimination of affirmative action quotas. Their total victory, however, threatened to rob progressive academics of one of their favourite pastimes, i.e., complaining about how deeply and horribly unfair and racist their society is. They therefore came up with a new concept of “institutional” or “structural” racism, racism that does not consist of conscious and overt negative thoughts and acts towards others, but which is built into the very structure of society, supposedly generating special privilege and power for white people while keeping others down. The progressives redirected their energies towards attacking this kind of beneath-the-surface “racism”, thus allowing them to maintain their image of themselves as public tribunes, fighting for the downtrodden against an unjust system, even though that system had given them everything they had demanded.

There is therefore now a vast difference between what progressive intellectuals mean by the word “racism” and how ordinary people understand the word. Most people think that racism means hating or disliking other people either because they are of a different race than you or because they are of a particular race that is the object of such hatred. Most people think of racist behaviour as ranging from mild forms, such as the use of racial slurs and insults, to extreme forms such as lynching and ethnic cleansing. Progressive intellectuals, however, tend to think that white people who do not behave like that and do not dislike people of other races are nevertheless guilty of racism for being unconscious of their “white privilege” and thus “indifferent” to the racism built into their society. Moreover, progressive intellectuals tend to see explicit statements of racial hatred towards white people and racially motivated acts of criminality and violence towards white people as not being racist but rather being understandable, if undesirable, responses on the part of the oppressed to the unfairness of society. Ordinary people, when they learn how the progressive intellectual views things, tend to think he is crazy, if not from another planet altogether.

If asked whether racism is always bad, most people would probably say yes at first, but if pressed on the subject, many would begin to quibble. Ethnic jokes might hurt someone’s feelings, they may say, but they are not on the level of genocide. If the same question were put to progressive intellectuals they would firmly insist that all racism is bad, but if pressed about verbal and behavioural expressions of racial hatred towards whites on the part of members of groups that have been historically oppressed, they would probably offer arguments why this isn’t really racism. Both ordinary people and progressives, in other words, hold to the position in theory that all racism is bad, but neither group is willing to take this position to its logical conclusion.

How is racism defined in the dictionary? Perhaps that will help us decide whether racism is always bad or not.

If we turn to the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, we find that it offers us two short definitions and a full definition with two parts. Here is the first of the two short definitions:

poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race (2)

If we accept this as our operating definition, then I would say that all forms of racism are bad and I suspect most people would agree with me. I would add the clarification however, that if racism is “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race”, it is always wrong, because it is always wrong to treat people poorly and not because this particular form of poor treatment is motivated by race.

This raises the question of what constitutes poor treatment. Sometimes this is an easy question to answer. To assault or murder someone, to steal or damage his property, to have an affair with his wife, to go around town spreading malicious gossip about him – each of these things falls under the category of treating people poorly. It is wrong to treat anyone this way, regardless of his race. Sometimes, however, it is more difficult than that.

The progressive left has complicated matters by declaring equality to be the ideal standard to be striven for. If we accept equality as an ideal, then by our standards to treat people as if they were not equal is to treat at least one of them poorly. Much discussion of racism is based upon the idea that all races are equal and deserve to be treated equally and that racism is deviation from that ideal.

As I have argued elsewhere, however, equality is more of an idol than an ideal. (3) The problem with making equality into the ideal is that it clashes with justice. Sometimes it is right to treat people equally. Other times it is wrong to do so. It is as wrong to steal one man’s property as it is to steal another’s. Therefore, we should treat both men equally in refraining from taking what is theirs. Sometimes, family relationships, friendships, and other ties, place duties upon us which require us to act towards specific people in ways we are not required to act towards others. In this case it would be wrong to insist upon treating everybody equally. In theory, equality might be thought of as a form of virtuous generosity, treating a perfect stranger as if he were your best friend. In practice and in reality it is more likely to mean treating your best friend as if he were a perfect stranger.

If we accept the progressive idea that equality is the standard and that it is wrong to treat people differently this greatly changes the meaning of “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race”. Here we see how the conventional idea of racism, so defined, under egalitarian presuppositions, runs up against traditional ideas of virtue and vice.

Ever since ancient times, that which the Romans called pietas has been considered to be one of the chief virtues. Pietas was an attitude of faithful duty towards one’s parents and kin, one’s country, and the gods. We will use the Latin word for it, because its English equivalent and derivative, piety, has lost much of its meaning. Pietas was piety, both filial and religious, and patriotism all rolled into one. It is the subject of Plato’s Euthyphro. (4) Marcus Tullius Cicero, believed it to be implanted in us by instinct as the law of nature. (5) Virgil made it the chief virtue of Aeneas, the last survivor of Troy and the ancestor of the Romans, in his Aeneid.

Lest it be thought to be merely a pagan virtue, note that the Ten Commandments given to Israel by God at Mt. Sinai start with duties to God and end with duties to man. The commandment to honour one’s father and mother falls between these duties and if the commandments were divided equally between the two sets of duties, would have to fall under duties to God. Note that when Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for using human tradition to nullify the commandment of God, this is the commandment to which He made specific reference. That was hardly a coincidence. St. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between a pietas towards our earthly parents, which was a mere human virtue, and a pietas towards God that was a gift of the Holy Spirit, but maintained that it was appropriate to use the same word for both because the latter is directed towards God as Father. (6)

Do you see where the conflict exists between the egalitarian and conventional understanding of racism and the classical and Christian traditional view of pietas? The former teaches that we are to treat all people equally and that it is wrong to treat people differently because of their race. The latter teaches that we owe special duties first to our parents, then to our kin as a whole, and finally to our country and that the same virtue of pietas is involved in faithfully and lovingly fulfilling these duties as in fulfilling our duty to love and worship God. Since the idea of having special duties to our parents, kin, and country is not compatible with the idea that we should treat all people equally, i.e., the same, progressive egalitarianism would seem to condemn pietas as a form of racism.

This is not just speculation about where progressive teachings might lead. Antiracism promotes impious thoughts and attitudes in practice.

This leads us to the second part of the conventional opinion about racism and antiracism, the assertion that antiracism is always good. This assertion is a conclusion drawn from the first assertion, that racism is always bad. If racism is always bad, then surely antiracism, which is by definition opposition to racism, must be good.

Well, we have just seen that pietas, which was considered a virtue by pre-modern, traditional civilizations, which was considered to be the chief virtue of ancient Rome, was commanded in the Ten Commandments and considered to be a spiritual gift by St. Thomas Aquinas, would fall under the category of “racism” if we accept the egalitarian standards of progressivism, the parent ideology of antiracism. Therefore, either Moses, Jesus Christ, and all Western philosophers until very recently were wrong in insisting that we have special obligations to our parents, family, and country or the assertion that racism is always bad is simply not true. If it is not true, then the conclusion that antiracism is always good, which depends upon racism always being bad, cannot be true either.

In fact, as we are about to see, antiracism is not good at all. Rather it is an evil that masquerades as a good, a vice that wears the mask of a virtue.

Our first charge against antiracism is that it promotes impiety. It has caused people to revile and dishonor their parents, their ancestors as a whole, and their country.

This was illustrated in the television cartoon Family Guy a few years ago. In the episode entitled “Chick Cancer”, the character Brian makes a comment that contains a racial stereotype of black men. Stewie, to whom he addressed the remark, responds with shock: “Whoa! What was that?” Brian’s reply is “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, that was my father talking” and is told by Stewie “You gotta work on that man”. (7)

Stewie’s response of antiracist shock to Brian’s racial slur provokes filial impiety from Brian as a self-defense. Granted this is a conversation between a talking cartoon baby and a talking cartoon dog but it mirrors reality in the sense that it reflects the kind of shame and disrespect towards one’s parents that antiracism provokes among young people.

Another form of impiety antiracism promotes is disloyalty to friends. Sometimes this is done explicitly, as in the song “Racist Friend” by Jerry Dammers, songwriter for the British ska group The Specials, which tells people: “If you have a racist friend/ Now is the time, now is the time/ For your friendship to end.” (8) More often it is done indirectly through guilt by association which a favourite tactic of antiracists.

The most obvious form of impiety promoted by antiracism, however, is that towards ancestors and country. It is quite common these days, on college and university campuses and even in high schools, to hear “socially conscious” students express deep shame for the actions of their ancestors or for their country’s past. In the vast majority, if not all, of these cases, it is the racism of their ancestors or country for which they are expressing shame.

The students who make these impious statements are almost always white students. This brings us to our second charge against antiracism. It is not just that antiracism is hypocritical and holds to a double standard. While that is included in the charge, it is much more serious than that. Antiracism is, ironically, itself a form of racism. It promotes impiety towards parents, friends, ancestors, and country among white people alone and promotes hatred towards white people on the part of other people.

Think back to the earlier part of our discussion where we discussed the current progressive view of racism, that it is embedded in the structures, institutions, and cultures of Western countries so as to give privilege and power to whites and withhold these from other people, so that whites are guilty of racism even if they have no conscious negative thoughts or feelings towards other people and other people are not guilty of racism, even if they express hatred towards whites or commit crimes against whites based upon that hatred, because these are expressions of frustration on the part of disempowered people against an unfair system. What other effect could this idea have than to encourage white people to disavow their ancestors and their countries and to encourage other people to hate white people? To be antiracist, in practice, means to be antiwhite.

Antiracism’s antiwhite racism is not the mild ethnic joke variety of racism either. In Europe, the United Kingdom, and Canada, antiracist progressives have passed hate speech laws which make it, in some cases a crime, in other cases actionable under civil law, to express views that might expose someone to hate because of that person’s race. Although these laws are written in race neutral language, they are ordinarily only ever enforced against white people. The complaint Barbara Judt made against Eric Robinson was newsworthy because it, very unusually, concerned a comment that was pejorative to white people. Even when Chief David Ahenakew, another rare non-white defendant in hate cases, was charged in Saskatchewan with promoting hatred ten years ago, it was not white people but Jewish people he was accused of hating. In the United States of America, where the Bill of Rights theoretically prevents the passing of hate speech laws, hate crimes laws have been passed which require stiffer sentences for crimes where racial prejudice is the motivation. As with hate speech laws in other countries, in practice hate crime laws are seldom invoked unless the criminal is white and his victim the member of another race. “Hate” laws, of either variety, clearly exist for no other purpose than as forms of legal harassment targeting white people.

At this point, let us introduce our third charge against antiracism, even though we are not quite done yet with the second. Our third charge against antiracism is that it makes mincemeat out of the truth.

Antiracists treat racism as if it were a sin that was the unique property of white people. This can be seen in the way “hate” laws are enforced, in progressive theories about why only white people can be racist, and in the way antiracist watchdog organizations keep tabs on the most insignificant activities of the most obscure white identity groups while all but ignoring racist groups from other races. Yet antiracism is itself evidence that the opposite is true – that white people are, if anything, the least racist people on the planet and always have been. Antiracism draws upon many source ideas including liberal individualism, humanism, and Marxism. Whatever the merits and demerits of these ideas may be, they all have this in common, that they are the product of Western, European, civilization. They are, to put it bluntly, white ideas. Most antiracists are themselves whites who have renounced any sense of identity with their own people. The only other people group that I can think of that has a problem with this kind of internal self-loathing is the Jewish people. Yet according to physical anthropologists and population geneticists Jews are part of the same race as Europeans.

Oops. My bad. I said race when I should have said population or genetic cluster or whatever current euphemism is being used by population geneticists to keep the antiracists off their back and allow them to do their research in peace.

This brings us to the other way in which antiracism makes mincemeat out of the truth. Antiracists, like progressives in general, tend to subscribe to the founding mythology of modernity, in which the Catholic Church is believed to have held Europe in superstition and darkness before the dawn of Renaissance humanism and the “Enlightenment”, in which man threw off the shackles of religion, left the darkness, and set his feet on the path to truth, by following the light of reason and science. While much of this is pure malarkey – the foundations for the expansion of science were in fact laid in the medieval times by Christian scholars (9)– in the last half century antiracist progressives themselves have acted the way they accuse the medieval Church of behaving.

When the late Dr. Arthur R. Jensen, professor of educational psychology at the University of California in Berkeley published a paper in the Harvard Educational Review, questioning how effective IQ boosting programs like Head Start actually were by offering evidence that much of human intelligence is due to a hereditary g-factor, progressive antiracists began protesting outside his office and disrupting his lectures. (10)

When the late Dr. J. Philippe Rushton, British born professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario presented a paper to a general meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Fransisco in 1989, a police investigation was ordered in Ontario. (11) His “crime”? He had put forward the theory that racial difference could be explained by the r/K selection theory. (12)

Earlier in the 1970s, the co-author of that theory, Harvard University entomologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson had come under attack by antiracists for his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. (13) The antiracists even went so far as to physically assault Wilson, dousing him with water at a 1978 meeting of the AAAS. (14)

My point is not that the theories these men espoused were the truth. Their materialistic presuppositions, in my opinion, blinded them to the most important aspect or dimension of reality. (15) In this, however, they were no different from their antiracist opponents. My point is that the antiracists condemned these men as “scientific racists” because their theories, and the data upon which they based their theories, contradicted the antiracist idea that the only biological differences between the races are differences in appearance, and that any other differences are cultural and/or caused by the legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in general. This idea, to which antiracists inflexibly adhere, did not arise out of scientific observation but is entirely political in origin. In 1963, Dr. Carleton S. Coon, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, resigned as president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists when the association voted to censure a book as racist and unscientific while admitting in a show of hands that the vast majority of them had not even read the book. If materialism kept both sides in this debate from the full truth, by blinding both to the spiritual aspect of reality, the antiracists willingly removed themselves a step further from the truth, by subjecting science to political dogma, in a manner worthy of Trofim Lysenko.

What is most apparent about antiracism, in this approach to truth, is just how ideological it is. For the purposes of this discussion, we will define an ideology as a rigid set of inflexible doctrines, lacking the internal self-correction mechanism of a tradition, that are believed to contain the technical blueprint for solving most if not all of the world’s problems. Antiracism is by its very nature an ideology. It is an inflexible belief in the equality of the races and the rigid conviction that racism is the root of all evil which if extirpated will bring justice, peace, and happiness to all.

Racism, on the other hand, while it can be ideological, as it was in the case of National Socialism, more often than not is not. This is an important reason for considering antiracism to be the worse of the two evils. A racist might be a person who, for some reason or another, dislikes a particular racial group but who does not allow that dislike to overrule his sense of fairness and cause him to mistreat members of that group and who does not make his dislike of that group the most important thing in his life. While there are ideological racists, for whom race is the lens through which the world is to be viewed, who see life as a Darwinian struggle for existence between the races and build their entire life around this idea, most racists, at least in my experience, are of the former type.

Auberon Waugh had the right idea, I think, about ideological racism and antiracism when he wrote:

For myself, I see nothing to choose between the National Front and the Race Relations Board. Both are a collection of bores and busybodies and both are harmful to the extent they are taken seriously. (16)

Of course, the Race Relations Board, like its Canadian equivalent the Human Rights Commission, has the power to impose its ideas upon people. Everyone must therefore take it seriously, if they wish to avoid a great deal of unpleasantness, whereas the National Front has no such power, and is taken seriously only by its own members the Race Relations Board. Therefore the Race Relations Board is the more harmful by far.

Nor is it merely the Race Relations Board or the Canadian Human Rights Commission that ideological antiracism has at its disposal. The schools, universities, and churches as well as the news and entertainment media have become its propaganda arms. Government child protection agencies have used the racism of parents as an excuse to remove children from the home. (17) Its attempts to root out incipient racism and nip it in the bud at younger and younger ages might be comical (18) if it were not so Orwellian.

In this ideologically driven effort to mobilize the institutions of an entire society for the purpose of indoctrinating all of its members with a simplistic message and eradicating a chosen scapegoat, antiracism resembles nothing so much as the Nazism it believes it is protecting us from.

If you think that comparison is unfair, that antiracists are the white knights protecting society from a resurgent Nazism ready to break forth the moment they let their guard down (how mighty white of them) then consider what antiracism has actually looked like in practice. In Canada, the UK, Europe and Europe a system of thought control has been imposed, that punishes white people for expressing even the mildest of racist thoughts, with stiff fines, gag orders, expulsion from schools, the loss of jobs and/or careers, and occasionally jail time. The system encourages people to turn in their relatives and friends and goes without a large public outcry, in part because the news media are complicit in the process and refuse to report on it, and in part because antiracism has dulled people’s sense of outrage by convincing them that the victims are racists, and therefore deserve what is coming to them. Meanwhile, the system metes out punishment, not just to the accused racists, but to those who speak out against the system who are lumped with the accused racists.

In other countries, the effects of antiracism have been far more severe. Here we return to our second charge against antiracism, that it is a form of racism directed against white people, and that it is not the mild ethnic joke or stereotype variety of racism either. It was antiracism, that motivated the UK and other Western countries to oppose Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia, leading to the rise of Robert Mugabe, the transformation of Rhodesia into the dysfunctional hellhole of Zimbabwe, and the murder of the white Rhodesians. (19) When South Africa gave in to the demands the world, again motivated by antiracism, was making on it, it led to the rise to power of the African National Congress, which has gradually been recreating what happened in the former Rhodesia. The murders of the white Afrikaner or Boer farmers, vastly underreported by the world press, have been classified as the start of a genocide. (20)

“Those are extreme examples.” “That sort of thing could never happen over here.”

Perhaps. It is interesting, however, that during the last several decades, as progressive antiracism has become the entrenched ideology in Western countries, white fertility rates have dropped below population replacement levels and remained low, as these countries have opened their borders to mass immigration from non-white countries, opting to replace rather than reproduce their populations. (21) The dates have already been projected for when whites will become minorities in the United States and Canada and those dates are not far off.

What do you suppose is going to happen to white people in these countries when they become minorities in countries where the official ideology, drummed into everyone from earliest childhood in schools, on television, and in popular music and film, all dissent from which is punished by social convention and/or hate laws, teaches that racism is the ultimate sin, that only white people are guilty of it, and that only non-whites are its victims?

The answer, if you have not already figured it out for yourself, can be found in Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints, first published forty years ago. (22) Read it if you dare. (23)

(1) Tim Sale, “Eric Robinson may be rude, but he is not a racist”, Winnipeg Free Press, August 31, 2013, A17, http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/eric-robinson-may-be-rude-but-he-is-not-a-racist-221899441.html

(2) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

(3) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/02/demon-idol-of-equality.html

(4) In this dialogue Socrates, who is awaiting his trial on a false charge of impiety, encounters a young man who thinks he is pious but who embodies impiety, by seeking in the name of the gods to lay a capital charge against his father. The two enter into a discussion of the nature of piety. While most commentary on this dialogue focuses on the arguments, do not overlook the fact that in the end, Euthyphro is dissuaded from pursuing his impious suit.

(5) Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Inventione, 2:22.

(6) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Q. 121, Article One. See also Q. 101 on the virtue of pietas.

(7) “Chick Cancer”, Family Guy, Fox Broadcasting Company, original airdate November 26, 2006.

(8) Jerry Dammers, “Racist Friend”, recorded by The Special A.K.A. and released as a single in 1983 and on album In the Studio (2 Tone Records, 1984)

(9) James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Lay the Foundations of Modern Science, (London: Icon Books Ltd., 2010).

(10) http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/02/local/la-me-arthur-jensen-20121102

(11) http://psychology.uwo.ca/facultyremembrance.htm


(12) The theory basically postulates that species fall upon a spectrum between r-selection, in which parents have a lot of offspring but invest little in each particular offspring and K-selection, in which parents have fewer offspring with a larger investment in each, and that certain combinations of traits can be associated with either end of the spectrum. Rushton applied the theory to differences between populations within the same species, i.e., mankind.

(13) This book, published by Harvard University Press in 1975, like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene which came out a couple of years earlier was largely made possible by the research of W. D. Hamilton, particularly that found in his two part “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour”, published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1964. Hamilton proposed a theory that explained the paradox of how socially cooperative or even altruistic behaviour could improve the fitness of an individual organism’s genes. Wilson’s book was more ambitious than Dawkins’. He proposed a new discipline, a synthesis of ethology, anthropology, and other disciplines that concerned social behaviour among animals and humans. As the proposed name of the new discipline suggests, it is based on the idea that all social behaviour can be explained biologically.

(14) Wilson tells the story of the antiracist attack on him, led by his Harvard colleagues Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, in his autobiography Naturalist (Washington D. C.,: Island Press, Shearwater Books, 1994). See also Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

(15) For an excellent rebuttal of this materialistic worldview see Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle, (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000).

(16) Auberon Waugh, “Che Guevara in the West Midlands”, originally printed in The Spectator, July 6, 1976, reprinted in Brideshead Benighted (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), p. 155.

(17) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/unrepentant-nazi-mom-aims-to-get-her-kids-back/article1365488/


(18) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139735/Babies-develop-racist-traits-aged-months-coming-contact-races.html Note the quotation from Lisa Scott about reducing or eliminating the biases.

(19) Ian Smith told the story in his memoirs Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath (London: Blake Publishing Ltd., 2001).

(20) http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html


(21) My essay “The Suicide Cult” discusses how this policy, and the ideology behind it, is an ideology of racial and national suicide: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/02/suicide-cult.html

(22) Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints (Petoskey: The Social Contract Press: 1995) which is a reprint of the 1975 Scribner edition, translated by Norman Shapiro from the original French edition published in 1973.

(23) The text is available online here: http://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

Enoch Was Right

Forty-five years ago today, the Conservative Political Centre for the West Midlands met in a room in Midland Hotel, in Birmingham.  It was a small meeting, not the kind that would ordinarily attract much media attention.   The man addressing the meeting, however, was no ordinary man, and his speech was no ordinary speech.  It would be the talk of the nation for days, weeks, even years to come.  It would earn the speaker, an articulate, well-educated intellectual, of High Tory convictions, the love of the lower and middle classes, and the hatred of the progressively inclined, academic and media elites.  It was due to this speech that dock workers, union members, and other manual labourers would march in defense of the most outspoken advocate of free enterprise since World War II and prior to Margaret Thatcher.

The Man

The man speaking that day was John Enoch Powell, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton, South West, the constituency he had represented since 1950. (1)   He had twice been Minister of State for Health in the government of Harold Macmillan.  In 1968, however, the Labour Party was in power and Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.  The Conservatives, led by that wettest of the “wet Tories”, Edward Heath, were in Opposition, and Powell was Shadow Secretary for Defence   Until he gave the speech, that was.  April 20^th was a Saturday that year.  On Sunday April 21^st, a vivid Heath sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, replacing him with Reginald Maudlin, the Deputy Leader of the Party.  Powell would never again hold a position within a Conservative Cabinet, government or Shadow.   The rift between him and the Conservative Party leadership, especially Heath, would never be repaired.   In 1975 Heath was replaced as Conservative leader by Margaret Thatcher, an admirer of Powell’s who had advised Heath against firing Powell and who expressed agreement with the controversial speech in her memoirs, (2) but by this time Powell, while remaining a Tory by conviction, had left the Party in disgust over the way Heath had betrayed his Party’s principles and platform in his premiership and had compromised British national sovereignty by bringing the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community.  

 

Powell had been born in Birmingham, the city of his famous – or infamous, depending upon your perspective – speech, in  June of 1912, three years after the marriage of his parents.  His father, Albert Enoch Powell, of Welsh descent, was an elementary school teacher and later principal.  His mother, Ellen Mary Powell, nee Breese, a policeman’s daughter who had been a teacher herself before her marriage, was a woman of immense scholarly aptitude, who had taught herself classical Greek, and who encouraged this same trait when it manifested itself early in her only child.  He won an early scholarship to King Edwards’, a grammar school in Birmingham, when he was only thirteen.  He initially entered as a science student, but transferred to the classical form after one term.  In the break between, under his mother’s tutelage, he learned two years worth of Greek in two weeks, catching up with his fellow students.  (3)  

After graduating with distinctions in Latin, Greek, and Ancient history, he entered Trinity College at Cambridge with several scholarships,  where he studied Latin under A. E. Housman, the classical scholar more famous as the poet author of A Shropshire Lad, and read the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.   Nietzsche had become the professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland when he was only 24.  Powell acquired an ambition to beat his then-idol’s record.   He did not succeed in this, but he came close to matching it.  He became full professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in Australia in 1937 when he was 25.   The following year his Lexicon to Herodotus was published by Cambridge University Press which also published, early in 1939, his History of Herodotus.  His career as a classical scholar was already well-established but events of that same year, would lead to the resignation of his professorship in a romantic answering of the call of duty.   On September 3^rd, 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany.  On the following day, Powell resigned his position and caught a flight back to England, determined like the character of Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s novels, to offer his services to King and country.

Powell was more successful in this than the fictional Crouchback, joining the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a private in October of 1939, being promoted to lance corporal while still in basic training, and then selected to be trained as an officer.  This training began in January 1940 and lasted four months, after which he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the General List, to be shortly thereafter transferred into the Intelligence Corps.  This pattern of promotion continued throughout the war until he attained the rank of brigadier.   Stationed in Cairo, Algiers, and Delhi, he developed an ambition to become Viceroy of India and a lifelong dislike of the Americans, whom he correctly believed were trying to bring down the British Empire as well as the Axis Powers.

When the war ended, Powell had the pathways of two careers in which he had already achieved success open before him.  He could have retained his commission and continued to climb the ranks of the military.   He could have gone to Durham University, where he had been elected Professor of Greek and Classical Literature to resume an illustrious career in classical scholarship.   Instead, he resigned both commission and professorship to go into politics, initially with the idea of achieving his goal of becoming Indian Viceroy.

Powell was, by instinct and conviction, a Conservative, or, to use the term he preferred himself, a Tory.  His excellent definition of a Tory was “a person who believes that authority is vested in institutions.” (4)   In defending the authority of institutions which he had instinctively revered from his earliest days, he grounded it in the concept of prescription, i.e., legitimacy derived from tradition and tested and established through long usage.   It was because the Conservative Party traditionally embodied these concepts and not because he was particularly impressed with the way the Party handled the reins of government when in office that he sought to become a Conservative candidate for office.   He was added to the candidates list and, while he lost his first bid for office in Normanton in 1947, he was given a job in the meantime in the Parliamentary Secretariat and later the Conservative Research Department where he met Pamela Wilson, at first his secretary, later his wife and the mother of his two daughters.  His next candidacy, was in Wolverhampton.  One Sunday evening, on his way home to his Wolverhampton apartment, he heard the bells of  St. Peter’s Collegiate Church.  Although Powell had lost his faith as a youth,  become an atheist, and then an admirer of the notoriously antiChristian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he responded to the summons and entered the church to hear Evensong.  He found himself drawn to participate in the worship, and after that regularly attended the church each Sunday.  He soon abandoned his atheism to become a devout if idiosyncratic High Anglican. (5)   In 1950 was sent to the House of Commons by the electorate of Wolverhampton South West to begin his new career as a statesman.

As mentioned previously, Powell served as a minister in Macmillan’s government.  What most distinguishes his Parliamentary career, however, is his erudite and articulate speeches.   Although he is remembered today chiefly in connection with one issue in particular, he was hardly a single-issue controversialist.     When the Macmillan Conservatives introduced the Life Peerages Act he spoke out against it.   The Conservative leaders behind the Act, regarded it as a means of preserving the House of Lords through modernization.  The Labour Party rejected the Act on the same grounds, because they wished for more radical modernization.  Powell, however, regarded it as the first step towards the democratization of the House of Lords.  This would be an unacceptable redundancy, Powell argued, in which the two Houses would both be representatives of the same electorate, creating a constitutional crisis over which of the two is rightly representative.   He championed traditional, hereditary, peerages, soundly arguing that it was prescription that legitimized the authority of the Lords, just as prescription was the basis of the authority of the Crown and even of the elected assembly.

At the time the leaders of the Conservative Party had agreed to support the Keynesian and socialist economic policies brought in by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge after the war. Powell, however, broke with the Post-War Consensus, to insist that Keynesianism generated inflation, to call for monetarist reforms to combat such inflation, and to preach the virtues of private enterprise and the free market.

At the end of the war Powell was still an imperialist.  After India achieved independence in 1947, however, he was convinced the Empire could no longer be maintained and adopted a nationalist approach to foreign policy similar to that of  the Taft Republicans in the United States.  In the Cold War he opposed both the Communism of the Soviet Union and the hubris of the Americans.  His British nationalism led him to oppose the UK’s entry into the EEC in the 1970s and to take up the cause of Unionism in Northern Ireland.   It was also intimately related to the position he took in his most famous speech.

The Speech

The subject of the talk, that would earn Powell the love of the masses, the ire of the fashionable, progressive, chattering classes , and his place in history was immigration and racial strife.   His enemies accused him of trying to incite racial strife by stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment.   The reality is quite different.  In fact, he as actually trying to prevent racial conflicts and violence by warning that such would be inevitable if large scale immigration continued.   The progressive-minded, without listening to or reading the text of his speech in its entirety, responded to the selected excerpts highlighted by the media and accused him of racial prejudice and of promoting discrimination against new immigrants and their descendants.   In reality, Powell declared in the speech what he consistently maintained throughout his political career, that British subjects and citizens were entitled to the same rights and protections under British law, regardless of whether they had arrived on British soil yesterday or whether they lived where their ancestors had lived since the days of Alfred the Great.   It was the Labour government of Harold Wilson, Powell insisted, that was trying to create special privileges for new immigrants at the expense of born and bred, white British people, through their proposed Race Relations Bill.  The second reading of this bill was scheduled for the Tuesday after the speech.

The speech itself was masterfully constructed.   He began by declaring that “the supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”  (6)  The statesman, however, encounters difficulties in performing this function, because preventable evils lie in the future and are not perceived as being as pressing as present evils, leading to the “besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.”   The statesman must rest this temptation, for if he does not he will “deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after”. 

Having thus prepared his listening audience for predictions that they might find unpalatable he launched into his subject by recounting a conversation which had taken place a week or two previously between himself and one of his constituents.  His interlocutor was “a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries” who had expressed dissatisfaction with the direction in which Great Britain was going and a desire to emigrate and to see his children and their families settled overseas.   The genesis of this seemingly rather unpatriotic despair, Powell quoted in the man’s own words, as the feeling that  “in this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

Later in the speech, he quoted at length from a letter he had received describing the plight of another of his constituents.  The lady who wrote to him, told him about an elderly woman, who had begun renting rooms in her house to make ends meet after losing her husband and sons in the war, but who was now the only white on her street, the other, including her tenants, having moved away as the neighborhood filled up with immigrants.  Without the rent income, and unable to get her rates reduced because of an unsympathetic government, she was now subjected to threats, abuse, vandalisim, and the taunts of “Racialist” from immigrant children who followed her whenever she went to the store.  

 

Nothing in Powell’s address seems to have infuriated his critics, whether from Labour or among the “wet” leadership of his own Party, more than these anecdotes.  Ostensibly, the reason for this is that the most inflammatory rhetoric, the kind most vulnerable to the charge of racism, in the whole speech is contained within them.   Yet the glaring fact that in neither case was the rhetoric Powell’s own but rather that which had quoted from ordinary people who had spoken or written to him does not seem to have mollified his enemies’ rage in the slightest.  If anything it increased it.   One can only speculate as to why this would be so.  The Labour Party has always tried to present itself as being the voice of the ordinary, common, working, Briton, and presumably did not appreciate this lesson in how out of touch their thinking actually was with that of the very people they claimed to represent.(7) Those Conservative leaders who were enraged by the speech appear to have made the same mistake in reverse.   Powell’s  views on immigration were, as he himself pointed out in the speech, the official position of the Conservative Party, and men like Edward Heath, Quintin Hogg, and Edward Boyle appear to have seen Powell’s statement of that position as an embarrassment.  They misjudged the tremendous amount of popular support that actually existed for their own party’s position and jumped on the rhetoric Powell had quoted as an excuse for not acting on that plank of their platform, claiming, quite unreasonably, that Powell’s speech had made the subject of immigration untouchable.

Whatever his opponents may have thought, by including these quotations in his speech, Powell demonstrated his willingness to take seriously the concerns of ordinary British people, in his own constituency and elsewhere, that through forces beyond their control, including the inertia or even malice of their own government, they were becoming strangers in their own country. This was a refreshing change from the attitude of the typical modern intellectual who believes that such fears should be treated as irrational, dismissed and ignored, or changed through an aggressive campaign of social engineering on the part of government, church, media, and institutions of education.

In fact, the bulk of Powell’s speech demonstrated that such fears are far from being irrational in the sense of being contrary to fact and reason.  Noting that in some areas mass immigration was producing a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history”, he cited the Registrar General’s calculations that within fifteen to twenty years, there would be three and a half million immigrants and their descendants in the UK.  From these figures, he extrapolated that by the year 2000 the number would be between five and seven million, and pointed out that these would not be distributed evenly throughout the country, but would rather be concentrated in certain areas.

He made it clear that the problem is not immigration qua immigration but is rather a matter of scale. “[N]umbers are of the essence” he stated for:

the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

He was also careful to distinguish between an immigrant, someone who entered the country with the purpose of settling there, and someone who entered the country to visit or to study, with the intention of going back home.   The problem, then, was not that alien people were entering the country, or even that alien people were entering the country to stay, but rather that the latter were coming in so fast and in so large numbers that it was transforming the country, or at least the parts of it where the immigrants were concentrating.   Later in the speech, after quoting from the letter about the widow who had lost her tenants and was experiencing harassment, he made another point that is logically connected to the idea that the scale of immigration was the problem.  This was with regards to the integration of immigrants.  Integration, he said, means that the immigrants “become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.”   Physical differences such as colour make integration “difficult though, over a period, not impossible”, and of the new coloured immigrants there were “many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.”  Nevertheless, it was, he said “a ludicrous misconception” to think that was true of the majority of them.  The large scale of immigration and the concentration of immigrants in particular areas, was, of course, a deterrent to integration, which Powell noted, although he brought it up in the context of discussing the Race Relations Bill, an even greater deterrent to integration.

Since the increase in the immigrant population would make it harder and harder to deal with this as time went on and it was happening at such a rapid rate that it was a matter of urgency that it be dealt with immediately.  The government could deal with it in a simple way, he declared, first by “stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow” and second by “promoting the maximum outflow”, noting that these suggestions are “part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.”    By “promoting the maximum outflow” he did not mean kicking people out of the country, but rather encouraging the re-emigration of those who wished to go, and providing them with “generous assistance” to do so.   He did not know how successful such a program would be because “no such policy has yet been attempted” but he noted that immigrants in his constituency had approached him, on occasion, asking for such assistance to return to their country of origins.

After discussing the possibilities of a re-emigration policy, he turned to “a third element of the Conservative Party’s policy” by way of introducing the subject of the Race Relations Bill.   That third element was that the law and the government ought to treat all citizens the same and not practice discrimination.   This, he said:

does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

That, of course, was exactly what the Wilson government was setting out to do with its Race Relations Bill.   The supporters of this bill – among whom, Powell singled out the press and the ecclesiastical authorities for specific mention – were completely mistaken.  The bill was not a two-way street and was not intended to be.   It was being enacted to protect the new immigrants from discrimination on the part of the white British.  This kind of legislation was not only unnecessary, it completely mistook the situation and who needed protection from what.  The new immigrants were not in the same situation as American blacks.  The latter had been brought to their country as slaves before the country even existed, and who had gradually been emancipated, enfranchised, and given full citizenship rights.   The new immigrants, however, had entered the UK with full citizenship rights.  Their entrance was “admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought” and it was the existing populace that was feeling the adverse effects as:

For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

Now the Race Relations Bill was set to make things even worse, being:

a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

Powell’s analysis of the problems inherent in mass immigration and anti-discrimination legislation and his proposed solutions were quite reasonable.  This is not what attracted the attention of the media and the British nation.  It was rather, in addition to the anecdotes referred to above, the apocalyptic tone in which he set his predictions of future evils.  The admission of immigrants at such a high scale was an act of national suicide:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, 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.

The Race Relations Bill would give the immigrant communities a loaded weapon to use against their unarmed citizens.   Powell expressed his reaction to this in the most famous line in the entire speech, the one which caused it to be dubbed “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”. (8)

The Parallel Voice

In that line, Powell compared his premonition of unnecessary racial strife due to mass immigration and the Race Relations Bill to the ominous prophecy of the Sybil in Virgil’s Aeneid.   From the perspective of hindsight, a more apt comparison might have been to Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, or to Laocoon the Trojan priest.  Having been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but having spurned his erotic advances, Cassandra had been cursed by the jilted god, who made it that her warnings would not be believed.   She warned against accepting the wooden horse from the Greeks, as did Laocoon.  The warnings went unheeded.  Likewise, Powell’s warnings were disregarded by those with the authority to put his recommendations into action.

He was not the only one to fill the role of Cassandra with regards to immigration.  In 1973, a novel entitled Le Camp des Saints was published, written by French author Jean Raspail.  An English translation by Norman Shapiro was published a couple of years later.   The novel, set in a “near future”, told of an armada of one hundred ships, that had set out from Calcutta laden with thousands of the poorest of the poor and destined to arrive at the French Rivera on Eastern Sunday.   As the ships slowly make their way, the French debate what to do about it.   Leftist elites, in the government, the church, and the media, declare that the immigrants must be welcomed.  They declare the ships to be carrying “The Last Chance for Mankind” and utter banalities like “we are all from the Ganges now” but are basically given free reign to spread their views because the one right-wing publisher left in France, refuses to print anything about the matter except a map of the progress of the ships, and a countdown to the “moment of truth”, i.e., their arrival.  

Throughout the book various people who believe in France and French civilization, oppose the leftist consensus.  One of these is a man who had immigrated from India years previously but who had integrated into French society.   These gather in the home of one of their number, a retired professor whose house overlooks the beach where the ships have landed, and make a last stand for France and Western civilization, as it crumbles all around them, brought down by the burden of a liberal guilt that had rendered the West incapable of fighting to ensure its own survival against hordes armed with their own pitiable condition.

The Retrospect

How do Powell’s predictions appear in hindsight, forty-five years later?

If anything, he appears to have erred on the conservative side in the sense that the things he predicted have come true on a much larger scale.

The Race Relations Bill passed and, like similar anti-discrimination legislation in the United States and Canada, it has been used in exactly the way Powell predicted, as a weapon against white people.   It is more than just the anti-discrimination legislation, however.  A complete double-minded attitude towards race, racial prejudice, and even racial hatred has developed in the UK, North America, and other Western societies.  What is forbidden of white people is tolerated and in some cases even praised when directed against white people.

Powell’s described the United Kingdom’s admission of immigrants on a large scale as the act of a nation “engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”, i.e., committing national suicide.   Immigration rates have continued to be high and an additional factor has joined high immigration to contribute to the national suicide of Great Britain, i.e., a decline in British fertility rates.   Declining fertility and high immigration are a deadly combination.   For a nation, which is a living, collective, entity, to survive, its present generation must continue to be primarily descended from its past generations.   People from other nations can enter a nation and become integrated into the nation without threatening the nation’s survival, but if the nation takes to bringing in immigrants on a large scale to offset its own failure to reproduce, it will die.  

To maintain that mass immigration and multiculturalism have been good for the United Kingdom or any of the other countries that have adopted them is to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore reality.   The traditions and institutions of these countries have been undermined and in some cases changed beyond all recognition.  There has been a loss of a sense of continuity, and with that, of a sense of community.   With this erosion of social capital and increase in alienation have come the unnecessary ethnic strife that Powell strove to prevent.

 

It is not fashionable to say it, but it is nonetheless true, that Enoch was right!

(1) My main source for the biographical details about Enoch Powell contained in this essay is Simon Heffer’s Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Phoenix Giant, 1998, 1999). This is a comprehensive biography, which, while not an “official” biography, was written with the cooperation of its subject, who made his archives available to its author, with the stipulation that his most private papers would be accessed only after his death. I have also consulted Patrick Cosgroves’s The Lives of Enoch Powell (London: The Bodley Head, 1989).

(2) Margaret Thatcher, The Path To Power (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995) p. 146.

(3) By the end of his life, he could fluently speak English, French, German, Greek (modern and classical), Italian, Latin and Urdu, read Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Welsh, and was learning Hebrew.

(4) This is in response to the question “Can you tell me what it is to be a Tory?” in the interview he granted to Naim Attallah in 1992. http://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/ Variations of this same basic definition can be found throughout his various speeches and interviews

(5) The idiosyncrasy is most noticeable in his Biblical scholarship, which he took up as his primary pastime after his career as a statesman.

(6) The text of the Birmingham speech is available to read on The Telegraph’s website: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

(7) To give the devil his due, while the Labour Party as a whole was vehement in its denunciation of Powell and his speech, there were exceptions. Michael Foot, later to become leader of the Labour Party, whose friendship with Powell crossed the vast divide between their different views and parties and survived the speech, said that Powell had been tragically misunderstood. Another Labour MP, Christopher Mayhew, cancelled a speech he had been invited to give at Birmingham University after the school reneged on an invitation to Powell. Mayhew told the school bluntly “People who believe in free speech and practice it should stick together whatever their other differences. If Birmingham University won’t have Enoch Powell they can’t have me.” (quoted in Heffer, op. cit., p. 472, italics added)

(8) According to Simon Heffer, in the actual address Powell quoted the line “Et Thybrim multo spumentem sanguine” from Virgil’s Aeneid, in its original Latin first, and then translated it, but provided only the translation in the press release. Heffer, p. 454.