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“One Eye Is Taken for an Eye”: A Bad Moon Is On the Rise Over Blood River

It was 50 years ago today.

[Delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.]

“It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week – and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. 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. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancee whom they have never seen.
[snip]
“There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.
[snip]
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

“That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

“Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.” Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech

I see a bad moon a-rising
I see trouble on the way
I see earthquakes and lightnin’
I see bad times today

Don’t go ’round tonight
It’s bound to take your life
There’s a bad moon on the rise

I hear hurricanes a-blowing
I know the end is coming soon
I fear rivers over flowing
I hear the voice of rage and ruin

Don’t go ’round tonight
It’s bound to take your life
There’s a bad moon on the rise

I hope you got your things together
I hope you are quit prepared to die
Look’s like we’re in for nasty weather
One eye is taken for an eye

Oh don’t go ’round tonight
It’s bound to take your life
There’s a bad moon on the rise
There’s a bad moon on the rise

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • SLM April 20, 2018, 2:54 PM

    Were Enoch Powell around today to give a follow up to his speech it would probably be quite brief: “What did you expect?”

  • kinch April 20, 2018, 4:12 PM

    “Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”

    As if Cicero were speaking God’s Own Language.

    Rhetoric FTW. Perhaps that’s so few of us can write such simple and concise utterances today: barbarised educational systems which have thrown out Latin and Greek and the Trivium.

    Having read about Powell at second- and third-hand during my so-called ‘education’… and in mentions in the usual suspects (I’m looking at you, The Economist ‘Newspaper’), the impression one always received was ‘this was a bigoted yokel’. In fact Powell was one of the pre-eminent Classicists of his generation, and had an excellent military record. A deeply civilised and humane man. And oh, so right.

    It is a terrible thing when the natural order decays and our Betters (today Burnham’s so-called ‘Managerial Elite’) become our Dregs.

  • ghostsniper April 20, 2018, 4:32 PM

    They call me a “we” but I shoot heads one at a time, individuals they are.
    Each gets to make his own bed.
    There is no we, except in delusion.

  • John The River April 20, 2018, 6:05 PM

    “Anonymous”
    That’s a shock.

  • ghostsniper April 20, 2018, 6:40 PM

    The guilty make themselves obvious when convinced the finger points at them.

  • Howard Nelson April 20, 2018, 8:51 PM

    Some learn from the past and learn to make their present better.
    Some imagine the future and try to make the present better.
    Some don’t believe in ‘good enough’ and love to ruin what’s doing good enough.
    Some others enjoy reinventing the unlubed wheel, loving it’s squeal. I’m one of those and I wish I were two (double the enjoyment).
    If this makes sense to you, I apologize.
    If this makes no sense to you, why did you waste your time reading this far?

  • Vanderleun April 20, 2018, 10:03 PM

    “Anonymous”? Who was that? Keystokes now dust in the spam.

  • MMinLamesa April 21, 2018, 6:05 AM

    Mr Powell’s quaint notion of the problem would, were he breathing today, have him projectile vomiting his brains out of his nose and ears.