Saturday 20 April 2013

How Enoch Powell Got Vergil Wrong



Abusing the Aeneid  led to this

45 Years ago today, classical literature was put to its most shameful use in the history of British oratory, when Enoch Powell  MP quoted  lines from the Aeneid to incite racial hatred. At a Conservative Party meeting in Birmingham, he emotively described the alleged plight of the white working-class in the face of immigration, and said that it was bound to end in violence: ‘like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’

'So do you want a work permit or an Italian passport?'
If Powell had written this in an essay for me, I would have failed it and pointed out that it was no ‘Roman’ who said this, but the Greek Delphic Apollo, via his priestess at the equally Greek colony of Cumae, near Naples. She told Aeneas (no Roman, either), who was applying for an Italian work permit, ‘I see wars, horrid wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood’ (bella, horrida bella / et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno’ (6.86-7).

Powell’s speech roused the more ignorant amongst the white British working class to anger against the proposed 1968 Race Relations Bill, which at last made it illegal to refuse housing or work to anyone on the ground of their ethnicity. He was heard by racists as legitimising their abuse of citizens with Indian or African ancestry, especially the Sikhs whom Powell’s speech singled out for criticism. There was an instant rise in race-hate crimes. He helped the Conservatives win the 1970 election.

'I think I will stare at my cornucopia rather than foam with blood today'
Powell was himself from an upwardly mobile family of petit-bourgeois aspirations only two generations out of the Welsh coal fields. He never got over the fact that he was frightfully good at Latin and Ancient Greek. After grammar school in Birmingham and a glittering student career, he had been appointed Professor of Greek in Sydney at the age of only 25. But he did not exactly help Classical scholars look like desirable members of the community.

And he got the Aeneid so wrong. Of course Aeneas was going to have a few spats with the prejudiced and xenophobic indigenous Italians, but he brought Trojan style and enterprise, accepted that his people needed to learn the indigenous language if they were to stay, and helped found the alliance of peoples which constituted the Roman Republic. If the sophisticated Trojans hadn’t come to Italy, it would have remained the narrow-minded provincial backwater they discovered there. Instead, they (along with the locals and immigrants from Greece who had already got there) helped create the economic miracle that was ancient Rome.

Powell’s lauded high IQ did not help him understand economics any better than he understood Vergil. He was not bright enough to understand the benefits that immigration has always brought to Britain. In a series of important research projects conducted at UCL’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, it has been proved that an immigrant is 60 per cent less likely to claim benefits than a British national, and 58 per cent less likely to live in social housing. Immigrants are mostly young, strong, healthy, enterprising, and at work. They have children in British hospitals and the children go to school. But immigrants work and demonstrably pay in more to the economy than they take out. 

'WHY CAN'T I BE VICEROY?!!!'
Powell himself made the British Tiber foam with some blood. His influence can be still be felt every time a black person is mugged. The image of Classics is still suffering from the ill-treatment of one of the world’s greatest poets by this deluded scholar-demagogue. He had never recovered his sanity after Indian Independence in 1947 forced him to realise that he couldn’t achieve his lunatic dream of becoming Viceroy of India. I still don’t know why anyone could ever have taken him seriously. But I am planning a trip to Birmingham today and a table near the hotel where Powell spoke, in an excellent restaurant specialising in Punjabi cuisine. I foresee a Tiber foaming with much lager.

33 comments:

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKPze0dRgW8

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    1. I beg to disagree with your thesis, sir. He was not writing an essay for you, and would have been able to demystify your myopic vision and 'knowledge' with ease.

      The Hon. Powell knew his Virgil better than most, and was inspired by it, not the ideological way but as inspiration to his vision of reality to come, without the coloring of this or that cult/ideology.
      Studying Virgil in the original, Mr Powell knew what he wanted to say and was saying, as many educated Brits and non-Brits could of any color, race and creed.

      You have the privilege to disagree and dislike him for umpteen reasons, but not that to believe you knew what was in his heart and mind. He was too large a figure to match in his time, let alone in these dismal era.

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    2. Well said, This man had hindsight,I was at this meeting in Birmingham.
      He referred to this speach as the "Birmingham speach" not the rivers of blood thats the media interpretation.

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  2. Thanks Mr Rose! This just confirms my hunch that he was off his trolley--look at the crazed glitter in his eyes when goes on about lighting matches under piles of gunpowder.

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    1. You're spouting the liberal view, nothing of your own in it. Rivers of blood they call it, except he never said that. Whether he was a racist any more than anyone else isn't proved by this speech, which, rather than designed to stir hatred and cause violence as you suggest, but as a warning that if uncontrolled immigration was allowed to continue unabated the white working class would be disadvantaged and there would be violence. Just as now anyone who says anything about immigration needing to be controlled is howled down by the liberal virtue signallers chorus and twitter mob libero-fascists wanting to shut down free speech. You appear to be one of them, and allow your bigotry to dictate your academic knowledge. You may state facts you know, you can opine as long as it's clearly your opinion, but you can't pretend your opinion is academic truth. OK?

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  3. He also tried his hand at poetry, the Collected Poems was published in 1990.

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  4. Edith,
    I am re-interpreting Greek drama for a youth company. So far I have written the first scenes of the Orestia. I intend to a scene from Sophocles and Euripides It's brief, 8 pages in total. Would like to have a quick butchers?

    Yours, in slight trepidation,

    Richard Brown

    PS I am reading a book on the Dead Sea Scroll. What tripe. Loads of Jesus impersonators. Imagine if a horde of lost tragedies were found?

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  6. The following quotation appeared as a comment on Rogue Classicism. It is by David Ganz: 'The quotation, as Professor Hall should reveal, was the subject of two articles in Vergilius by Professor Herbert Huxley (1998) and Professor Robert Todd (1999). Powell was a very complicated figure, which is not in any way to defend his speech. He condemned British treatment of Kenyans confined in the Hola Camp, attacked the monopoly of drug firms supplying the NHS, opposed hanging and supported homosexual law reform. He was the first MP to argue for a minimum income for the old and unemployed, and supported free education for all university students. Professor Hall might also have considered the quality of his edition of Thucydides.'

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  7. I was Herodotus, not Thucydides.
    I had a go at saying why Powell was wrong on Virgil a few years ago: http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2006/10/veils_turbans_a.html

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    1. The Oxford Classical Text of Thucydides (which was one of the set texts when I did Greats at Oxford) was edited by Enoch Powell.

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    1. Thanks for correcting Professor Ganz's claim that Enoch Powell's edition was of Thucydides. I had not mentioned it because it was not relevant. And thanks also for reminding us about your fascinating blog on the topic.

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  10. The last time I checked, Vergil wrote those lines, and Vergil was a Roman, and quite obviously 'the Roman' to whom he was referring (and in which he was factually correct, unless you literally believe in the existence of Apollo - it wouldn't surprise me). The intellectual dishonesty by which you attempt to discredit Mr Powell sets the standard for the rest of this smear piece as much as your use of the expression 'petit-bourgeois' gives away your ideological motivation for it. After Woolwich and the rise of the Islamic State, I wonder if you will still make the assertion that the speech was 'shameful'.

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    1. As a bog standard Grammar School boy, I know no Classics (or is it Humanities?) but can usually detect rationality. Thanks, I was almost sucked in.

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    2. Mr. Powell is now regarded as a visionary. Britain is no longer the property of the British people - it belongs to the international bankers and anyone who wants to emigrate there, provided they do not look or speak in any manner resembling the original people. I feel sick to my backbone lately every time I hear pompous virtue signalers decrying others as racists, bigots, xenophobes - and for what? Is it truly a crime to wish that your nation remain the same one you were raised in? Is it really wrong that Britain, and other countries of Europe, remain predominantly white? Is it wrong for Africa to remain black? Is it wrong for Arabia to remain Arabian? Or for China to remain Chinese? Pakistani people to live in Pakistan? Is it? I'm sick of people, especially white people, desperate to extend a hand to anyone and everyone except their own countrymen and women. A nation is defined only by it's language, it's culture, and yes, it's borders.

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    3. A nation is defined by its language and culture and borders, you say. Ok. The language you write is Celtic and Pict daubed with thick coats of Saxon and Nordic, smashed with a hammer and glued together with the idiosyncratic French of transplanted Vikings. It is a Creole. In fact it's a meta-Creole--it's a Creole *of* Creoles. Your culture is a mishmash, a gumbo. And, my god, you certainly didn't have a problem with going through national borders when you were building an empire. Exactly which historical version of Britain do you want to live in?

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  11. PoĆØte Maudit... Thanks for your comment, which expressed (far more eloquently than I would have done) everything I thought about this shameful piece. I found the blog intellectually dishonest and nauseatingly snobbish.

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  12. This blog post is trash. As somebody points out above, Powell was clearly referring to Virgil himself. Although the language used was ill-judged, much of the content of the speech was legitimate, it is a shame that the issues have rarely been discussed seriously.

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  13. Edith, please read Simon Heffer's biography of Powell to understand what Enoch was trying to say. He was in India during the troubles associated with independence and never forgot the influence of tribalism on peoples behaviour in extreme circumstances. This is the point of his Vergil quote, as Aeneas and his trojans refugees battle with resident tribes in Italy. As to the benefits of immigration financially, perhaps you have learnt the pice of everything, but the value of nothing. Immigrant groups were encouraged to bring their culture with them and liberal humanists told us the utter nonsense that all cultures are relative. So we have problems of female genital mutilation, honour killings, forced marriages, dowry fraud and grooming and sexual abuse of young girls by immigrants, or first generation men of immigrant families. Then there are the problems with all our social services, health and schools due to large scale immigration. You have, as so many, conveniently forgotten these issues which are all far worse than the problems of immigration of which Enoch warned us. Like so many of the technocrats currently running Europe, who may have liberalised the community with the best of intentions, you have neglected to allow for human nature, in particular, the worst of human nature, again, something Powell had at the forefront of his arguments.

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    1. Rivers of Blood....https://hoodsite.com/graphic-20-year-old-man-fatally-stabbed-in-the-chest-in-smethwick-united-kingdom/

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  14. "And he got the Aeneid so wrong. Of course Aeneas was going to have a few spats with the prejudiced and xenophobic indigenous Italians, but he brought Trojan style and enterprise, accepted that his people needed to learn the indigenous language if they were to stay, and helped found the alliance of peoples which constituted the Roman Republic. If the sophisticated Trojans hadn’t come to Italy, it would have remained the narrow-minded provincial backwater they discovered there. Instead, they (along with the locals and immigrants from Greece who had already got there) helped create the economic miracle that was ancient Rome."

    Makes Rome sound like Singapore, similarly a city founded from nothing by a mix of peoples local and not, arriving under different circumstances, and the whole thing put together by a band of rather more alien colonists from afar. Malays=Italics, Chinese=Greeks, Trojans=British. That maps inaccurately, but rather better than most such attempts to link ancient and modern examples of anything.

    Of course, more importantly, the Trojans were not "immigrants" as such, and neither had the Greeks been, but rather were colonists. Whether the Etruscans also were is above my pay grade. The Trojans in the tale didn't show up and ask for citizenship as a band of individuals or refugees and offer their skills to existing polities. They came to win a place among them, with arms. At least in the Aeneid account.

    The argument for the Trojans is the argument for the British going abroad to make an empire, for the settlers carving out territory in America or Australia, for the East India Company, just as it was the argument for the Greek and Punic colonies all over the Mediterranean in those earlier times.

    Aeneas is Francis Drake, Robert Clive, or for, per my earlier example albeit less warlike, Raffles.

    If Aeneas and his followers are the model to which modern immigrants are to be compared, then Britain of the 20th century is cast in the part of the unfortunate Etruscans or later the Sabines.

    I recognize that I'm eliding how and whether centuries passed between any historical arrival of Anatolian easterners and the actual [if any] founding event of Rome the city/town, but just working with Vergil here.

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  15. Edith Hall - I've just happened upon your hideously sententious blog page, and wish I hadn't. Your studiedly inaccurate reading of Powell's thoughts and motives suggest that you simply haven't done proper research. Read Heffer, whose unsentimental text might offer you greater insights into the real Powell, and clues on how to write in a way that readers can take seriously.

    Out!

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  16. "š˜¦š˜·š˜¦š˜³š˜ŗ š˜µš˜Ŗš˜®š˜¦ š˜¢ š˜½š™‡š˜¼š˜¾š™† š˜±š˜¦š˜³š˜“š˜°š˜Æ š˜Ŗš˜“ š˜®š˜¶š˜Øš˜Øš˜¦š˜„."

    Errr... you wot, m8?!

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  17. If we're discussing error, "Aeneas was going to have a few spats with the prejudiced and xenophobic indigenous Italians" We must look at this quotation, as we know, that which is now Italy was only created in the 19th century, almost two millennia after the Aenid was wriien. therefore at the time of this "publication" Italy didn't exist as a state, Rome was the stat, empire and local governance People in glass houses etc..
    Powell foresaw the coming problems who loved his country and served in WW2rising to the rank of Brigadier

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  18. He didn't get Vergil wrong--he whored Vergil out. When he speaks the Sibyl's words and pretends that they are words that warn with divine authority against invasion, rather than words that celebrate and encourage the invaders, the colonizers, the empire-builders, he's not ignorant of the context, he knows the Aeniad quite well, thank you very much, it's just that he's deliberately misrepresenting the work—this work that he claims as part and parcel of what makes him, and by extension the ruling class of Britain, superior to the immigrants, the refugees, the unwashed masses who lack the benefit of a classical education or a native land with distinct seasons or two centuries of stolen colonial wealth or the right DNA. He is whoring out his conscience—his scholarship, his orator's art, the entire hallowed Western Tradition; the whole two gross of broken statues and the few thousand battered books, to quote another high-cultured racist—in order to keep the brown people out.

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  19. Aye, I'm sure you're right Sam, pity he didn't have you around as censor. Is he misrepresenting the work in the same way that leftists misrepresent the British Empire? You know, all the stolen wealth that magically hadn't been tapped, and the terrible business of opening up societies with ideas of individual rights and responsibilities, a parliamentary system, commerce and education, industrialisation, construction, oh and attempting to annihilate slavery? You must be so disappointed with the world we've built Sam. Never fear, they'll get round to terraforming Mars soon enough. I hear that's a red planet.

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  20. Pretty sure that Powell would have been ale to spell VIRGIL correctly, unlike the heading of this thread.
    An example of Mupphy's Law?

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    1. Both spellings are acceptable. His name originally was Vergilius; it was only after his death that the Virgil/Virgilius appellation became common.

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