“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”
By Jake Bowyer
06/21/2018
Earlier by Jake Bowyer:The Real Predators on Campus Come From The Third World
Raheem Kassam is not your typical Muslim immigrant. The son of Gujaratis who relocated to London from Tanzania, Kassam was reared in a typically pious environment surrounded by other Muslim families. But he rejected Islam and the far-Left politics that are de rigeur for nonwhites in the West.
Kassam, instead, is a conservative, an outspoken supporter and official for UKIP, and, until earlier this month, the editor for Breitbart London. [Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam Is Out, by Rosie Gray, The Atlantic, May 23, 2018] (Kassam apparently left the populist website because of his allegiance to Steve Bannon, the firebrand pushed out at Breitbart after he said some unflattering things about President Trump and his family to the slimy journalist Michael Wolff. [I’m the reason’ Bannon Is Out, ‘Fire and Fury’ Author Michael Wolff Says, by William Cummings, USA Today, Jan. 10, 2018])
These days, Mr. Kassam is a close confidant of Nigel “Mr. Brexit” Farage, whom he introduced at the 2017 CPAC. He is also one of the more vocal supporters of the gulaged Tommy Robinson, who was recently sentenced to 13 months in jail because he bravely exposed the timidity of the British authorities when it comes to Muslim rape gangs. [UK Far-Right Figure Tommy Robinson Jailed For Contempt, Associated Press, May 29, 2018]
This unusual immigrant-turned-conservative is not only a political activist but also a social critic and author. Last year, he published No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You, an in-depth look at Europe’s creeping Islamization. Now, in 2018, Kassam has analyzed the most famous speech of modern Britain’s most infamous politician, Enoch Powell, in Enoch Was Right.
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”
These are the best-remembered words from Powell’s speech on April 20, 1968 in Birmingham. At the time, Powell was the Shadow Defense Secretary for the Conservatives, then led by the liberal-minded Edward “Ted” Heath. By invoking the words of the Cumaean Sibyl from John Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid, Powell spoke his own epitaph insofar as his “respectable” political career was concerned. (VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow disagrees). Heath sacked him the next day.
Today’s United Kingdom has become Powell’s figurative River Of Blood, a multicult mess thanks to massive, unchecked immigration. London’s murder rate exceeds New York’s, while rape, armed robbery, and a wave of knife crime in mostly nonwhite areas are daily routine [London’s Murder Rate Now Tops New York City’s, by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA Today, April 3, 2018].
Feckless leaders like Labour Party politician David Lammy and London Mayor Sadiq Khan blame the easy, safe culprits — lack of money, not enough police, and, of course, white Eastern European immigrants. [‘McMafia gangs’ Behind London Crime Wave — David Lammy, BBC, April 3, 2018]
None seem willing to observe that black- and Muslim-dominated areas of Britain are rife with violent crime. Nor will they admit how badly the Main Stream Media and the authorities botched the rape-grooming scandals of Rochdale, Rotherham, and now Telford because the culprits were mostly Pakistani Muslims who victimized white girls.
Powell saw it all coming, and, according to Kassam, saw it with great clarity. Powell knew the British elites would fail the British people. Enoch Was Right takes Powell’s speech piece-by-piece to show just how right the British patriot was.
Excerpts of the speech open all seven chapters, as well as the prologue and conclusion. Kassam writes streamlined prose with great effect, especially when excoriating Britain’s Leftist political class and its MSM enablers. He shows with great detail how Powell’s predicted dystopia is even worse than even Powell anticipated.
“In 2016 there were advertisements for the British Broadcasting Company for positions in journalism that were explicitly closed to white people,” Kassam writes. “Despite the uproar that followed this blatant instance of discrimination, the BBC continues to this day to run the scheme, as does the second largest broadcaster in the country, ITV, which in 2017 advertised positions that were ‘only open to UK nationals from a black, Asian or non-white ethnic minority.’”
Does this not sound like the prognostication of the constituent in Wolverhampton Powell cited, who feared “that in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
That “whip hand” has come to pass, Kassam writes, thanks to NGOs, organizations that are hardly “non-governmental” but are driving the immigration discussion in Britain to radical extremes. In Powell’s day, the official Conservative position on immigrants was repatriation. Today, the ostensible Right in the UK would vilify such a platform as akin to a second Final Solution.
In modern Britain, never forget, men who create funny YouTube videos are put in handcuffs, while thousands of hardcore Islamists enjoy life on the dole as they plot the next Manchester. [The Prosecution of Count Dankula, by Douglas Murray, National Review, April 23, 2018]
Even worse, thanks to Hate Speech laws and a political Left that believes in no borders and sharply limited rights for native-born whites, dissent is likely to take on an increasingly bloody character. Here, Powell’s reprising Virgil’s epic, Kassam writes, is particularly poignant given that Aeneas is a Trojan who migrates to and conquers Rome. Invoking “rivers of blood” metaphorically suggested that massive immigration was bad for the natives and the immigrants, and might even end in street-level violence against the latter.
Kassam and Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader interviewed in this book, concede that Powell might have unintentionally sabotaged himself with such verbal flourishes as rivers of blood, or matches and tinderboxes. Along with Powell’s anecdote about an old pensioner who, because she was the last white left in her neighborhood, suffered the indignity of human waste being shoved through her mail slot, such rhetoric almost invited the gatekeepers of the mainstream to characterize Powell as a fire-breathing racist. [Widow in Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech really did exist, By Fiona Barton, Daily Mail, February 2, 2007] Thus, even today the Left and center-right in Great Britain view Powell as a devilish caricature and muse to the National Front and other far-right parties. “Enoch Was Right,” by the way, appeared on NF-sponsored buttons in the early 1970s.
But Powell did not associate with the NF or other such parties, Kassam notes. Powell believed that nonwhite immigrants could assimilate so long as their number remained small. No matter. The British National Party named Powell a golden member to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his speech [VIDEO — Enoch Powell Awarded Honorary BNP Gold Membership, by Henry Watts, BNP.Org.UK, April 19, 2018].
Enoch Was Right is a fine addition to any Dissident Rightist’s library. Kassam knows his subject well, from Powell’s deep-seated love for India to his scholarly disposition. Powell was accomplished poet with four published volumes to his name, as well as a translator of Herodotus. Kassam also makes the case that Powell was not an ethnonationalist who believed in “blood and soil.” Rather, he was what we would call an “identitarian” who understood that nations are based on shared heritage and culture and cannot be defined in purely civic terms.
For Powell, the immigration question came down to numbers — the greater number of immigrants, the greater chance for ghettoization. Second- and third-generation immigrants belong neither to the culture of their parents nor that of the majority. Into this void comes radicalization, criminality, and other social cancers.
The one major blemish in Enoch Was Right is its amateurish quality. This independently published book is marred by several typographic and grammatical errors. [VDARE.com says: We sympathize!] Those aside, it spotlights the most prescient British politician of the 20th century. It was Powell, the trained classicist and a full-throated imperialist, who paved the way for the Thatcherite revolution and Brexit rebellion of 2016.
Powell knew that mass immigration could inspire a more working-class type of Tory, a vision, perhaps, of the Brexit vote and the rise of Trumpism. In both instances, older, blue-collar, mostly white workers rebelled against multiculturalism, mass immigration and corporate globalism in the face of withering scorn from their supposed betters. This great mass of voters, never consulted about immigration because their elected leaders knew what they would say, have turned, in frustration and desperation, to alternatives.
Enoch Was Right looks at the man, again, who saw what was coming.
Jake Bowyer is the pseudonym of an American college student.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.