And the English people wouldn't listen to Enoch [Powell].
Ned Ma
George Young “Some 74 percent of Britons in the aftermath of Powell’s rhetoric agreed with him – that black immigration was likely to cause violence on our streets in the not too distant future, or as he put it – “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
A few days later, a group of white youths descended on the christening party of a Caribbean family, slashing the face of the baby’s grandfather. They chanted “Powell” and “Why don’t you go back to your own country!
Fifty years later, the UK finds itself amid another immigration scandal in which the children of Caribbean labourers invited to help rebuild the British economy after World War II are threatened with deportation. Has Britain really changed in this half a century? MI5 later investigated a march of 500 dockers supporting Powell through London and discovered that it too had been orchestrated by fascists. The staunch socialist leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, called him an “outstanding personality” and described his sacking as “tragic.” Powell was no prophet. There were no rivers of blood, despite immigration to Britain continuing. There was, however, Brexit, secured partly thanks to a rigorous anti-immigration campaign. There have been no 'rivers of blood'. Half a century has passed since Britain heard Powell’s words – and one question remains: He wasn’t right, so why did both the Conservatives and Labour seem to agree with him? —Alistair Sloan, 2018
Ned Ma
[Eddie deleted his comment in which he asked me to leave the country. He mentioned the violent attacks in London, Manchester, etc. as 'rivers of blood'.]
Eddie Huntington you're or you are, not your leaving. You should leave first to get some English language courses. No, they were not rivers of blood. They were attacks in a particular context: the boomerang of British state violence abroad, hypocrisy, etc.
Ned Ma
Here is more: Geoffrey Cronjé, theorist of South African apartheid, “was plagued by the idea of a ‘mishmash’ or ‘mengelmoes’ of races, an unintelligible pulpy mass: the whites would become black, and society would turn to shit.
“This dread, as the South African writer J. M. Coetzee observed in his essay on Cronjé, resembles Freud’s conception of obsessional neurosis. The obsessive, terrified of uncleanliness, contamination and death, develops elaborate rituals and prohibitions to remain clean. Yet the image of death he has in mind is in fact the image of his own unacknowledged desire. His prohibitions pulse with longing for the forbidden. His rituals, Coetzee suggests, are a ‘counterattack upon desire’.
“This obsession with cleanliness and fear of contamination appears constantly in racist ideology. Why should this colonial complex, originating from the segregation imposed by South Africa’s British rulers at the end of the nineteenth century, appear in the mental life of twenty-first century Britain? It is as if ‘the ghost of the former colonial subject’, as Octave Mannoni put it, still haunts ‘whites who have never left Europe’. It is as if colonialism had an afterlife.” —R. S., London, 2024
Colin Muir
Ned Ma He was a embarrassment to the Tories so they gave him a position in Northern Ireland. I read/watchedc documentaries in the late sixties, and he was essentially saying what I've always believed - something that Douglas Murray recently put another way..... 'If you import the world's peoples then you import the world's problems'. No rivers of blood? Read about the murder of P.C. Blakelock many years ago.
Ned Ma
Colin Muir You have excluded the social-economic context and what triggered the riot. That is typical. Cynthia Jarrett, an Afro-Caribbean woman died the previous day due to heart failure during a police search at her home. It was one of the main triggers of the riot, in a context where tensions between local black youth and the largely white Metropolitan Police were already high, due to a combination of local issues and the aftermath of the 1985 Brixton riot which had occurred the previous week, following the shooting of a black woman, Cherry Groce, during another police search. Thus state violence as usual is the main cause. State violence takes different forms: political, social, economic, cultural, etc. The killing of a policeman later makes it a 'river of blood'. You really are some one who knows how to analyse events, riots, tensions, injustice, etc
Colin Muir
Ned Ma you missed the point l wanted to make. Young black citizens were treated as second class citizens. They set out to behead a policeman! Did you see the uniform laid out and photographed. And a large knife was plunged through his neck. I was concentrating on black violence with knives. Now it's knives and machetes. You can criticise my simplistic view as much as you like, but society is getting worse, in case you haven't noticed. Cause and effect? You might be good at analysing but you dont seem able to see the effects. Are you a politician or lecturer by any chance?
Ned Ma
Colin Muir but you are racialising crime without explaining why. I mentioned the causes. They are the ones serious studies and research centres and universities highlight and analyse. Your approach is based on prejudice against a certain type of people. See, for example, the London School of Economics's long report on the 2011 riots. Crime when it is committed on a big scale is ignored: plunder, mafia money laundered in ten city, British troops war crimes, complicity in genocide, harbouring of oligarchic , support of repressive regimes that kill in mass… You even don't include the killing of MP Jo Cox by a neo-Nazi in your take on crime – you like to racialise it. I don't identify myself with any 'race' (a social construct), nation or political party. I am interested in history, approach and facts.
Ned Ma what's happening now are major crimes by all - white, black, brown. It appears that more crimes are being committed by individuals with mental health problems. We've been on a path, in the UK, to social suicide and economic suicide for more than 25 years! I could go back further. Politicians who knew we were failing economically but appeared to 'put it off'.
At 81, l despair that my sons and grandchildren dont understand what lies ahead. Am l racist for wanting to stop illegal immigrants! No. I just wished that our politicians had acknowledged when minor changes should have made - instead of allowing the current state of affairs to exist. I'll keep reading and listening to Douglas Murray Not because he's 'well known' but because l found his views were similar to mine. In the meantime, wars will continue. Mankind cannot live in peace with each other.
Paula Dean
Ned Ma what do we call all the murders, stabbings raped of women if they don’t cause rivers of blood.
Ned Ma
Paula Dean they were not rivers of blood. They were attacks in a particular context: the boomerang of British state violence abroad, hypocrisy, etc. They happened in particular countries, not only Britain. They did not happen in Portugal, Brazil or Japan, for example. Tomorrow when/if some people carry out attacks in the UK becasue of what has been happening to the Palestinians, you would still deny context and British state involvement. Actually, I wonder why such attacks have not taken place yet. Rape of women is not a river of blood. Sexual offences/crimes are not rivers of blood. You really don't have any sociological or basic distinction between a civil war, broad social conflict that involves large number of killing, genocide, etc. (rivers of blood) and crime.
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