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I have just reread Powell's speech to make sure I don't put words in his mouth, and I'm sorry but I still think it's petty, get-off-my-lawn prejudice disguised as argument, and only looks prescient by accident.
Above all else, I remain baffled that of all the sob stories he could have quoted to make his point - and I do not doubt that legitimately sympathetic stories existed - he chooses one about an old lady who courts destitution by stubbornly refusing to rent rooms to non-white customers, and then has the nerve to complain that she is denounced as a "racialist" because of it. That he expected his audience to parse her as a sympathetic rather than pathetically self-destructive figure speaks volumes.
And in much the same way what sticks in my craw about the main, demographics-based thrust of the speech is that he isn't "voicing uncomfortable truths". In fact, he's leaving key parts of the argument unspoken, either because even he couldn't bring himself to say them out loud, or because he somehow considered them literally self-evident. To wit, he leaves the statistics about immigrant demographics to speak for themselves; he writes as if the mere prospect of there being more brown than white people in England is self-evidently repulsive. He is not making an argument that if this process is allowed to happen then nice Polish young men are going to be stabbed in the street by crazy Sikhs and the police will turn a blind eye. Either he is assuming that everyone already understands browns to be violent savages by definition but doesn't want to say it out loud, or else, as near as I can tell, the whole of his argument must come down to "there are soon going to be more brown than white people in England, and then the browns will be in a position to outlaw racial discrimination on the part of white business owners, which would be illiberal; it is the God-given right of racist old ladies to refuse service to Negroes if they want".
From a 21st century vantage point, this is just… such a deeply parochial argument. It's so quaint. It somehow manages to simultaneously be almost unthinkably bigoted in its basic assumptions, and comically optimistic about the kind of problems that runaway immigration would actually cause. Religious extremism is not a twinkle in this man's eye. Rape gangs do not follow from anything in this speech. Spurious, witch-hunty accusations of racism are not even what he's talking about, and God help us, he's not even discernibly talking about HBD. He literally just thinks that if there's too many brown people the brown people will "oppress" your basest, most vulgar, I-don't-like-looking-at-blacks garden-variety racist by outlawing that kind of racism, and that this would be a great blow against freedom in England.
It's honestly kind of embarrassing (though it's a testament to his sheer skill as a writer that the flow of his prose almost disguises the underlying vapid stupidity of the argument).
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.
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.
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.)
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