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That's the racism that prevents cops from taking the brown people's side when they attack you.
'First they came for the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist...'
The funeral pyre is burning for Nowak, 'you' and you's family are next.
Okay, but the thing is, I dislike the I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racists. I dislike them intensely. They disgust and appall me in much the same way that blacks disgust and appall them. I and people of similar political and moral principles to mine would be liable to "come for them", in the sense of wanting to outlaw racially discriminatory refusal-of-service on their part, even if the racial minority they discriminated against made up an irrelevant 0.01% of the population and had no electoral weight of their own. The "first they came for the XYZ, but I did not speak out" rhyme breaks down when the XYZ are not merely a group to which I don't belong, but a group that I already considered enemies regardless.
Of course, you can have a maximally libertarian setup, where the old lady is allowed to refuse to rent to Negroes because she thinks they're icky, and I'm allowed to call her names for being a bigot because I think bigots are icky. But Powell seems to think we should be shedding tears for the old lady because children follow her around calling her a "racialist" (which I stress again, she objectively proudly is), so permit to doubt his principled commitment to freedom.
Again, I do not think there is any sensible reading of the speech which suggests that Powell is concerned about browns enacting genocidal violence on whites. His "funeral pyre" is a purely demographic/cultural one, his doomsaying prophecy is that one day there'll be so many brown people about that white racists will be ostracized. He puts forth no evidence - no argument - that the new brown majority will treat the white minority unkindly, except specifically in the form of cracking down on white bigots.
Mark: I am not saying that no such argument can be made - Nowak's murder alone is an argument written in blood - I am saying Powell does not make any such argument. He is not talking about the same thing you are. The thing he's talking about is rather more stupid, and infinitely less serious.
Uhh... no it doesn't? This is the entire principle behind defending scoundrels. Just because X is currently oppressing group Y (a group you consider your enemies), doesn't mean they won't eventually turn on your in-group too.
The author of the "first they came" poem was an anti-communist priest who hated Jews, and yet two groups listed in the poem are communists and Jews. Your claim that the logic breaks down when the group is a group you consider your enemy is literally the exact reverse of the intended meaning of the poem.
Thank you, however, for giving me a presumably unintended insight into your worldview. The message you took from that poem was not "you must defend the civil rights even of people you consider your outgroup, because if you don't, there'll be no one left to defend your civil rights". The message you took from it was "you must defend the civil rights of groups you feel no animosity towards, because if you don't, there'll be no one left to defend your civil rights. However, if someone wants to trample on your outgroup's civil rights, that's 100% A-OK and not at all a cause for concern." By your logic, the priest who wrote this poem was right to look the other way when the SS were rounding up Jews and communists.
Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud.
sigh Again, it depends on what you mean by "came for". I do not think that my outgroup should be oppressed or have their civil rights ignored. But this does not mean "you can't anything at all against your outgroup, ever". The poem was not intended as anarchist apologia that says you can never outlaw, or even oppose, any evil behavior whatsoever because "coming for" anybody in any way, ever, is too much of a slippery slope.
To put it another way, if you think "first they came" applies to "first they came for the people who refuse to rent rooms to Negroes, but I did not speak out, because I was against refusing to rent rooms to Negroes" then I do not see how you cannot extend it all the way to "first they came for the people who lynched Negroes in the streets, but I did not speak out, because I was against lynching Negroes in the streets", or "first they came for murderous paedophiles, but I did not speak out, because I was not a murderous paedophile", at which point it loses all meaning. I think clearly the poem only works if by "came for" you mean "sent to a gas chamber en masse"; if you mean enabling the government to do unconscionably awful things to your outgroup, things it should never be allowed to do to anybody for any reason. But no one was suggesting sending the racist old lady to a gas chamber in a cattle wagon.
Well, the reason I think Powell's speech was so prophetic was that he understood perfectly the kind of slippery slope the UK had begun toboganning down. You are entirely correct that, at the time of writing, no one was calling for the execution (or even imprisonment) of white Britons who don't want to rent out rooms to black people. But in modern Britain, plenty of people have been arrested, convicted and even imprisoned for vastly less severe "infractions" than this, "infractions" which amount to thoughtcrime against the prevailing regime.
Maybe you think that a woman who doesn't want to rent out rooms in her boarding house to black men is just a racist and if she doesn't like it, tough. But you don't have to sympathise with her in particular to recognise Powell's broader point: if you think it's going to stop there, you are staggeringly naïve. And he was absolutely right – it did not stop there.
As I mentioned in the above links, a man was jailed for eight weeks for the "crime" of sharing a meme depicting Pakistani men armed with knives arriving to the UK in boats, with the caption "coming to a town near you". In my view, he should have not been sent to prison, and the fact that he was is a grotesque, unconscionable violation of his civil rights. Maybe you think forcing women to rent out rooms to black people doesn't inevitably lead to white Britons being arrested and imprisoned for any and all criticisms of diversity, immigration etc. Maybe it doesn't lead "inevitably" to police officers handcuffing a white stabbing victim while his Indian murderer gloats about how he done a racism. But at this point, whether the one "inevitably" leads to the other is sort of academic. Powell predicted that, at least in this case, one would lead to the other. He was right and it did. That's why it's called the "rivers of blood" speech, because Powell felt a great foreboding: not that the anecdotes he described are bad in and of themselves (they are, as you put it, almost quaint), but that they bode extremely ill for the direction the UK would take in the coming decades.
Right, it's not the slippery slope fallacy if you're pointing out that the slope is in fact a waterslide.
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That does seem pretty analogous to the communists. "First they came for the omnicidal would-be-tyrants".
This is why I think "came for… and I did not speak out" has to mean something like "they got sent to Auschwitz, which no one ever should be for any reason, and I let it happen", rather than "I myself did something, anything, to oppose them". With the benefit of hindsight, the writer does not think he should have allowed the Nazis to do whatever they wanted to the communists; but I don't think it follows that he regrets ever criticizing communists in any way, and I don't think it even follows that he thinks no amount of police action against communist terrorists was ever justified.
Therefore I do not think "first they made laws preventing bigoted old ladies from renting rooms to Negroes…" is a valid application of the poem, because I am not a hyper-libertarian and I do not think that 'the power to forbid people to rent rooms to minorities based on personal prejudice' is an inherently immoral weapon for the government to wield. I am not turning a blind eye to unconscionable evil being done to my enemies. I can conscion outlawing discriminatory business practices, I can conscion it just fine. It's what I would have been campaigning for already, no ominous "they" required.
Real fucking talk if Hitler had shoved fags gypsies and commies into Auswitch first with Jews as a coincidental afterthought of being commie he'd have some eager consolidation willing to fight for him on the cheap and who would die for his project. The whole "I did not speak out" fantasizing heroism puts oneself in the place of the victim but the reason people did not speak was because they were happy to be the oppressor too. And thats the reality of all the browns Enoch was assessing, they themselves all were ready victimizers of their own kin when barely in power so when in power they would wield the whip happily and freely.
You’ve done a lot of venting in the past couple days. More in the past couple years. You keep showing up to bitch about the minority du jour and you demonstrate zero interest in the intended purpose of this community. We should have banned you the last few times.
Goodbye and good riddance.
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What exactly is the problem with these people?
Is it the 'black' part? What do you think of racists who call the police to get their dying victim arrested? Ironically, present-day Britain likely has more brown 'I-don't-like-looking-at-them-garden-variety racists' than white ones at this point.
'already'? When we are at iteration 1000th of the rhyme? We're all way down the list, not at the start. The anti-racist rhyme is the water and you are the fish.
Oh the 'rivers of blood' are purely metaphorical then? Same as this part, I suppose?
What is a whip used for again?
Either that, or he has smuggled in the implication that browns are inherently liable to be physically violent to whites without actually justifying it in any way whatsoever, which again makes his entire rhetoric founded on silently assuming the most crucial conclusion. Pick your poison, but he doesn't come out looking good in either case, intellectually speaking.
I think the argument is that you're bringing in invaders who are going to radically alter your society. Anybody that stands in the way of that is going to get cut down. I suppose that this is something that needs to be explicitly spelled out to people like you explains why the globalists have been so successful in their reshaping of the West.
You are, again, skipping crucial steps. It's not inevitable that a demographic change will lead to physical violence against the old majority. If, say, Belgians or Koreans moved to my town en masse I would not expect them to start stabbing the locals, whatever the scale of the migration. To believe otherwise would be sheer, paranoid xenophobia. It may very well be the case that if you replace my Belgians and Koreans with Pakistanis or Sikhs, the murder rate will in fact go up, but this is a specific claim about the cultural (or, if you must, genetic) dispositions of Pakistanis and Sikhs, which requires evidence to back it up; it's not the null hypothesis about any generic group of foreigners.
Why would you need to make the argument that an influx of brown people would not correspond to some kind of downfall in civilization and descent into savagery?
At the time the UK was coming off the high of a 100-years run of civilizing the entire planet, from vast continents to tiny islands, leaving behind cargo cults.
Two world wars in recent memory demonstrate that even properly educated European neighbors could behave in quite savage ways, and that perhaps the well-mannered British people were even more of an exception than expected.
There was no evidence that the brown people would be able to behave, except for the few British people that had travelled and were lucky to stumble into some positive experiences, and avoid bad ones.
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Since experience seems to be solidly backing him up - as I never tire of reminding people, blacks in London are 8x as likely to commit murder as whites according to statistics quoted by the former chief of London police - this is less an assumption and more of an observation.
But again, FttG originally praised him as "a conservative voicing uncomfortable truths about immigration". Even if I we grant that he had those kinds of statistics in mind, he just comes across as a mealy-mouthed coward for not having the guts to explicitly discuss his most important claim or the evidence for that claim. He would be leaving the most important "uncomfortable truth" unspoken.
I find it profoundly petty that, when someone makes a prediction which, decades hence, is soundly vindicated, you rap them on the knuckles for not showing their workings.
Well again I'm not actually convinced that he made that prediction. I still find it a more natural and coherent reading of the text that the strife he perceives in Britain's future is the political oppression of white racists by an electoral majority of brown anti-racists. I don't actually think there's any textual evidence that he was envisioning a plague of acts of personal brown-on-white violence like Digwa's. If that had been his point, I contend that his rhetoric would have been burying the lede to such outrageous degrees as to make the overall speech laughable, but I don't think it was his point.
(I think you actually have a much better case in the other sub-thread when linking his doomsaying, not to modern crime statistics, but to the rise of anti-free-speech legislation, which can legitimately be seen as a slippery slope from the concerns he voices. This doesn't wholly rehabilitate the speech in my eyes, because I still think that in fact a just society should not allow racial discrimination, and allowing it in the name of preventing a free-speech-destroying slippery slope is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; and also because he's still complaining about private responses to racist behavior i.e. the children chanting "racialist", not just institutional overreach, so his principled-libertarian cred is less than stellar; but it's a fair defense.)
I can't find any point in the speech where Powell claims that white Britons will ever be outnumbered by brown migrants or their descendants. He specifically predicts that, by the year 2000, one-tenth of the UK will be Commonwealth immigrants or their descendants. (The 2001 census found that 8.6% of the UK was Asian*, black or mixed.)
In the speech, he describes the experiences of a lady living in Wolverhampton which has recently become much more ethnically diverse:
The clear implication of this anecdote is that Wolverhampton is becoming vastly more dangerous and unpleasant to live in (to the point that an old woman who has lived there her whole life now feels afraid to leave the house) as a direct consequence of its recent influx of immigrants, and that Britons across the country can reasonably expect the same to happen to their communities should contemporary trends in immigration continue. I don't think you can remotely accuse him of being a "mealy-mouthed coward" when he includes the anecdote above to illustrate his point.
And he explicitly voiced this specific concern in the speech itself:
Need it hardly be said that her concern was well-founded? White Britons have been sent to prison for "racist" offenses far less serious than refusing to rent out rooms in their house to immigrants.
*Which, in the British context, primarily refers to people from the Indian subcontinent.
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