Thursday, September 28, 2023

"A prophet is not without honor except in his own country"

 

I'm cynically amused to find that, at long last, a British politician and Cabinet Minister is acknowledging the harm done to that country by unrestricted immigration and asylum policies.


Things took a shocking turn in the United Kingdom on Tuesday when Home Secretary Suella Braverman pronounced that "multiculturalism" has failed. For context, the UK Home Office is essentially responsible for security in the country.

In a speech that hit on many of the issues plaguing Europe related to illegal immigration, Braverman explained how a lack of assimilation has led to ruin on the continent. 

BRAVERMAN: Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades. I'm not the first to point this out. In 2010, Angela Merkel gave a speech in which she acknowledged that multiculturalism had utterly failed, and then, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British PM David Cameron echoed similar sentiments shortly thereafter.

Multiculturism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society, and in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of our society. 

Further, the UK will now be seeking big changes to asylum regulations that have previously represented an open door.


There's more at the link.

The Bible cites Jesus as warning us:  "A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house."  One suspects that somewhere up there, the late Enoch Powell is nodding his head in grim agreement.  In his (in)famous "Rivers Of Blood" speech on April 20, 1968, he prophetically warned of precisely such a danger in/to the United Kingdom.



Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

. . .

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.

. . .

For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, [the existing British population] found themselves made strangers in their own country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

. . .

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members ... But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

We are on the verge here of a change ... we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population.

. . .

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood".

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.


The full text of Mr. Powell's speech may be found here.

Powell was accused of racism, vilified, and condemned by almost all professional politicians.  However, the ordinary people of Britain strongly supported him, and he won re-election with a greatly increased majority in his constituency.  History, of course, has proven him to be correct - but few contemporary politicians will admit that.  It's not politically correct to do so.  Facts no longer matter in this Brave New World - only the ruling, approved narrative.

I'm an immigrant myself.  Obviously, I have no problem with legal - I stress, legal - immigration.  However, that should be accompanied by a responsibility, on the part of the immigrant(s), to assimilate into the culture and society of their new country.  I've done so, and am very proud to be an American citizen.  I stand for the values propagated by our Founding Fathers, and I support 100% the perspective of the late President Theodore Roosevelt on what it means to be an American.


There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts ‘native’ before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.


Amen!

One can only look at the current invasion of aliens across our southern border and ask whether any of them have that understanding of why they're coming here, or any intention of conforming to it.  I suspect you know the answer to that as well as I do . . . but who among our politicians will come out and say it?

Where is our Enoch Powell?  Where is our Theodore Roosevelt?

Peter


10 comments:

  1. It is worth noting that the current home sec who made that speech is Indian (family arrived in the UK having lived first in East Africa for some time AIUI) and that the Tory party government has a number of other descendants of relatively recent immigants from Africa and India serving as ministers including the PM Rishi Sunak. Most people in the UK are happy with such immigrants and their descendants as they have assimilated more or less completely. I know various others of that sort and really if you were unable to see them you would assume they were completely pasty white and others (who are Eastern European) where the only clue is that the surname name is Somethingavic and not Smith.

    The problem is the ones that haven't assimilated - mostly but not exclusively the Pakistani immigrants - and in particular the mass entry in the last decade or so due to abuse of "refugee", "asylum" and family member rules. To a large degree you can put the blame for this on a combination of the Blairite labour governments of the 200s and the EU though the fact that the Tories have failed to reverse any of it in the last 13 years, and particularly in the last 5 or so post Brexit speaks poorly of them. Mind you they've been sandbagged by the civil service and prior EU related treaties such as the ones to do with the ECHR but they have utterly failed to grasp the nettle, fire the civil servants and tell the ECHR to take a hike

    PS I actually met Enoch Powell once or twice once he was out of politics. He and my father collaborated on something that involved classical Greek and/or theology and may have been to do with the c1000AD Byzantine church. At least I suspect it was because that's what got my father his PhD about that time and later also got him his BD. He was very much an academic sort and I never understood how he could have raised such hate. Perhaps it was because he clearly wasn't a blowhard populist and therefore was harder to dismiss as a rabble rouser

    ReplyDelete
  2. Money quote:

    "that should be accompanied by a responsibility, on the part of the immigrant(s), to assimilate into the culture and society of their new country. "

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you, Peter, for the Teddy Roosevelt speech reference! I just shared it (with a Hat/Tip)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Successive generations aren't patriotic through osmosis; they have to be taught.

    ReplyDelete
  5. As always, this ends in blood.
    Rivers of blood, mountains of skulls, and oceans of tears.

    Ethnic cleansing started with Cro-magnon vs. Neanderthal. And/or Noah's Flood. I don't care which one you pick.

    All we've done in half a million years is perfect the efficacy and reach of the means of accomplishing that.

    On your marks, get set,...

    ReplyDelete
  6. @ Francis Turner:

    Plenty of Native UK people have more than had enough but know that it's too dangerous to speak out.

    The real story here is that some Brown Bird can say that the Emperor has no clothes where a White Person (and triply so a White Male) CANNOT say this without being destroyed professionally and personally.

    Until this and far more is rectified, the beatings will continue.

    ReplyDelete
  7. They had an episode of Call The Midwife this past season that featured Enoch Powell's speech. They tried to make the English dock workers in 1968 out as being as fierce racists as Southern Klansmen. The poor Jamaican nurse was so terrified she left her husband and went home.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Peter, I frequently hear people say that Christians are obligated to allow large amount of immigration, referencing passages in the Bible about welcoming the stranger.

    I would like to hear your perspective on that particular argument. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  9. @Anonymous at 12:33PM: I think there are several aspects to a Christian approach. Here's how I see it.

    1. If refugees are genuinely in danger, they should be admitted to safety on a temporary basis. Once the danger is over, they should return to their homes. If that is genuinely impossible due to circumstances, then the question becomes whether they should be allowed to stay. I don't know that there's a universal answer to that question. If they are willing to assimilate into their new society, and if there's accommodation and jobs available, and if the host country can afford it, then possibly yes: but all those conditions have to be fulfilled up front. It can't be an unthinking gesture.

    2. If refugees can be helped outside a host country's borders, I think that's preferable. Yes, we're called to compassion; but there are many ways of extending it. We can (and routinely do) subsidize food, accommodation, security, etc. for victims of disasters and/or refugees even thousands of miles away, and send troops and personnel (for example, US Navy ships) if necessary. That makes more sense to me than allowing every refugee to enter our borders - and still fulfills the Christian call to compassion.

    3. The cost to our own country has to be considered. If admitting large numbers of refugees might cause difficulties - economic, cultural, societal, whatever - then one has to be very, very careful about doing so. It might be more practical to help to stabilize their own country (for example, by removing a tyrannical government that caused them to flee) instead of destabilizing our own.

    4. I don't believe we have any obligation to admit refugees who've already transited other countries to reach our borders. Once they're out of danger, that's where they should receive aid - and I have no problem sending aid to them there. (The United Nations does that all the time, establishing refugee camps and running them.). If they've already crossed several borders, they're not so much seeking security as they're economic migrants looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I don't believe they have any right to demand admission and/or residence in our country under those circumstances.

    There are other considerations, but that's how I see it.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph went home when Herod died.

    ReplyDelete

ALL COMMENTS ARE MODERATED. THEY WILL APPEAR AFTER OWNER APPROVAL, WHICH MAY BE DELAYED.