Return of a prophet

by Ralph Berry

The lot of a prophet is commonly hard.  They encounter heavy resistance in their often curtailed lives, which may continue after death.  They may however find that their once violent rejection has softened, for good reasons.

Enoch Powell for one is now seen by many in the centre not as the racist of legend but as a nationalist, who warned against the dangers of uncontrolled immigration. For that he was vilified beyond measure in his life.  He was sacked from the Cabinet by Edward Heath, now held to be against stiff competition the worst Prime Minister since the war.  But recent developments have transformed the scene, and with it the archaic values that dominated the ruling class (and to an extent still do).  The people are coming to recognize that the greatest problem of our time is the invasion of the first world by the third.

Europe sees it ever more clearly, and the British public, which endures the daily humiliation of illegal cross-channel migrants, registers strong and consistent dismay.  Government is powerless to act, and its latest stunt, large floating block houses are criticized by the newly-arrived illegals, whose ideas of acceptable living standards have risen sharply since arrival in England.  The Government plan is being foiled by the ever-inventive lawyers–and by locals, who do not want the Stockholm Bibby to be parked off Dorset.  No solution is in sight.

The alarm was raised in 1973 by Jean Raspail in LE CAMP DES SAINTS.

This is a fiction based on Revelation 20: 7-9, with its prophecy that ‘when a hundred years have passed Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.’  In Raspail’s fable a flotilla of of refugees makes its way to the South of France where they land and go on to advance.  The French Government does not have the nerve to repel the invaders, and eventually the West falls to the mass emigration known as ‘the grand replacement’.

‘Le Camp des Saints’ ran into predictable criticism on the Left for its alleged ‘racism’ and was taken up by the Right.  For William Buckley, ‘Raspail was ahead of his time.’  That was unarguably true, and the message was enhanced by Houellebecq’s best-seller SOUMISSION (2016).  The migrant wave had become specifically Muslim, with the same outcome as Raspail’s: the collapse of the order based on the civilization of France and Europe.

England has had no fictional equivalent to Raspail and Houellement, but it has a brilliant and fiercely argued prose work:  Douglas Murray’s THE STRANGE DEATH OF EUROPE: IMMIGRATION, IDENTITY, ISLAM (2017) opened with this thesis:

‘Europe is committing suicide.  Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide.  Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally another matter.’

Murray argues this, trenchantly and convincingly with a wide range of fact in recent history.  It was at once seen as a masterwork and was instantly successful.  For 19 consecutive weeks it topped the Sunday Times best seller list, and a second enlarged edition came out in the following year.  ‘The Guardian‘ banned the book, which is nowhere to be seen there.

Murray’s treatment of Enoch Powell is most instructive.  The portions of Powell’s most famous speech for which he was lambasted now seem almost understated.

‘However, if anyone had suggested to Powell in 1968 that he should use his Birmingham speech to predict that within the lifespan of most people listening those who identified as “white British” would be in a minority in their capital city, he would have dismissed such an advisor as a maniac.  As was the case in each of the other European countries, even the most famous prophet of immigration doom in fact underestimated and understated the case.’  (p. 17).

That is the position, which will be further clarified though not eased in the next London and national elections.  Enoch Powell is the future.