From Rivers of Blood to The Camp of the Saints

This week is the anniversary of one of the most resonant speeches made since the end of World War II. It still echoes down the decades, ringingly relevant to Western civilization, perhaps more today than ever.

At a meeting of Conservatives in Birmingham, England, on April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell warned of the peril of allowing mass immigration from alien and incompatible cultures. A scholar of classics, he wound up his peroration saying, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

For this “Rivers of Blood” speech, as news media dubbed it, Conservative leader Edward Heath sacked Powell from his shadow Cabinet. The Times of London echoed Heath in excoriating Powell’s words as “evil,” “disgraceful,” and “racialist.” The Thunderer, as it used to be known, accused him of a “calculated” effort to “inflame hatred between the races.”