Quotes About Revenge

London Riots 2011: The Revenge of Enoch Powell? - Quotes About ...

In April 1968, as the immigration issue reached the top of Britain’s social and political agenda, Powell delivered an epic speech in a Birmingham hotel in which he warned of the long-term consequences of large-scale immigration.

It is widely referred to as the ”Rivers of Blood” speech and it instantly made Powell a hero to many (and a pariah to others). The speech also destroyed any hopes Powell harbored of ever becoming Prime Minister.

A Classical scholar, Powell used allusions to ancient Roman literature when we warned that the streets of Britain will be awash with blood as a result of racial (and presumably class) conflict.

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood,’” he gravely stated.

Powell exploited the fears and anxieties of white Englishmen (particularly the working class) over immigration that was imposing wholesale changes upon British society in just one generation – of which Powell commented “there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.”

In the speech, he quoted an unnamed constituent who allegedly told him: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country… In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

Powell also warned that by the year 2000, one-tenth of the British population would be nonwhite immigrants and their descendants. He actually underestimated that — according to statistics, in 2009, about 12 percent of the population was black, Asian or mixed-race.

“Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population,” Powell declared in that long-ago speech.

Once again, he was proven right. There are entire neighborhoods in parts of itself is believed to be about 30 percent nonwhite now.

Powell’s warnings centered on the fact that Britain would lose its cohesive national character because the importation of peoples of vastly different cultures (particularly Indians and Pakistanis) would make them unassimilable – and therefore, contribute to social breakdown and chaos.

But Powell was very wrong in parts of his analysis.

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