May 28, 2013
Enoch Powell
Has anybody apologized to Enoch Powell yet?
The British establishment declared the Conservative MP a nonperson back in 1968 after he warned that unchecked Third World immigration would engender catastrophic domestic unrest.
His address was dubbed the “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell, a classical scholar, had alluded to the Tiber and to Virgil’s Aeneid, but opponents and supporters alike omit that detail. Powell, they all came to believe, had predicted “rivers of blood”—that of battling blacks, browns, and whites—flowing through London’s streets.
Which brings us to last Wednesday’s beheading in Woolwich.
We’ve all seen the footage of killer Michael Adebolajo, 28, born a Christian in England but now a Muslim “revert” radical with an “innit” Ali G. accent.
“From the Crusades to Afghanistan, the West has been obliged to respond to Muslim aggression.”
Caught on tape literally red-handed, Adebolajo averred that he was simply avenging Western invasions of Muslim lands. That ever-popular alibi for Islamic violence is, paradoxically, both theologically sound and historically illiterate.
To tackle the latter: From the Crusades to Afghanistan, the West has been obliged to respond to Muslim aggression. Recently, we even fought on their side—thanklessly, it turns out. (Ditto our compulsive embrace of Muslim “refugees.”)
Islam declared war on America shortly after the nation’s birth, back when America’s leaders still officially disapproved of “foreign entanglements.”
Next time Muslims threaten to kill over a cartoon or a teddy bear or the “swirl” on Burger King ice-cream packaging, recall that one Muslim Brotherhood founder swore eternal enmity toward the United States in 1949 after he witnessed men and women shamelessly dancing cheek-to-cheek at a dry church social to the tune “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
(To those who still wonder why liberals are so forgiving of every Islamic idiocy, that single song may offer one accidental answer.)
When I think about colonialist invaders massacring innocents by the millions, somehow neither Indonesia nor Sweden spring to mind. What are they, then? The “Microscopic” and “Subatomic” Satans, respectively?
The British-born killer’s fixation on “his” “lands” is particularly pathetic. Canadian Muslim (and tireless anti-neocon) Tarek Fatah points out tartly that due to the color of his skin, Adebolajo “wouldn’t get a job as a janitor” in a “Muslim land” such as Iraq.
You see, Muslims mostly kill other Muslims, something Adebolajo neglected to mention.
Many were astonished that bystanders did little to help Adebolajo’s victim (except pray for him after he died) and that it reportedly took Woolwich cops almost twenty minutes to show up.
Hell, forget the notoriously ridiculous British constabulary (three of whom, on or about the time of the beheading, were cautioning an 86-year-old woman against manufacturing a comically large wheel of cheese). Think about it: This soldier was murdered outside an armory, a place which, one might be forgiven for assuming, is stocked with arms and perhaps even a few fellows trained in their use.
Frankly, I found the British (non-)reaction to last week’s shameless ritual slaughter sadly predictable.
Blasphemy warning: Londoners’ highly touted “courage” during the Blitz always struck me as mostly an extreme expression of the average Briton’s temperamental tilt toward weary resignation and inertia.
Consider an alt-history mockumentary made by two British teenagers in 1965. Entitled It Happened Here—even that commie Sinclair Lewis was still American enough to feel call his book It Can’t Happen Here—the movie posits a successful Nazi conquest of England. The citizenry are mostly portrayed as simply content to enjoy a “quiet life” again, whoever happens to be in charge.
Around the same time, the filmmakers’ near contemporaries in Beyond the Fringe were polishing their bitchy “Aftermyth of the War” sketch, skewering their parents’ WWII self-mythologizing. The skit’s running punch line, uttered in response to serial atrocities, is an indifferent, “You put on the kettle. We’ll have a nice cup of tea.”
Today, even the “right” side is crippled by clichés. As a mass email from the British National Party informed me, “The whole nation is shocked by the barbarity of Muslim fanatics on the streets of Woolwich.”
Patently false. On social media at least, far more outrage was directed at the English Defence League types who hastened to the murder scene in protest.
I briefly engaged two of the “outraged” on Twitter: a “mod revivalist” and a “pagan goth” who keeps a pet rat. Both were white, young, and male, and both blew their wad of leftist talking points quickly enough. I didn’t bother with the “anti-fascist” concern troll with the rainbow/unicorn avatar or the widely re-Tweeted (black) guy who opined that anyone wearing a “Help for Heroes” shirt—as the victim had—deserved to die anyhow.
If these young Tweeters—as well as the Woolwich bystanders, the police, the prime minister, and the media—are representative, then England is doomed for real this time.
Orwell, normally a canny observer of his countrymen, declared that goose-stepping would never catch on in Britain because “the people in the street would laugh.” Yet his nation almost outlawed laughing at a different shade of fascism nearly ten years ago.
But who needs laws if you have a well-trained populace? After the BBC’s Nick Robinson reported that the Woolwich killers were “of Muslim appearance,” dozens complained, more put off by that description of the murderers than by the murder itself.
When German tourists visit Fawlty Towers, John Cleese’s innkeeper frantically commands his staff: “Whatever you do, don’t mention the war!”
Naturally, he’s the one who can’t hold his tongue. After imitating Hitler then shouting, “you invaded Poland!” Basil Fawlty suffers a breakdown.
“Don’t mention the war” remains a popular catchphrase decades later, but the episode’s last line always seemed more acute, mostly because the script gives a German the last word:
“How ever did they win?”
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