Storm clouds gather

FIFTY years ago, British politician Enoch Powell gave a virulent speech that has haunted our society from the shadows ever since.

Locked in the dark recesses of our communities for decades, in recent years the menacing sentiment of Powell’s words has emerged emboldened.

Powell delivered his Rivers of Blood speech to fellow Conservatives in a Birmingham hotel on April 20, 1968.

Half a century later, almost to the day, and it still raises the hackles of many who survived World War II and most who familiarise themselves with the hell of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Powell began his infamous address in a philosophical tone before telling of a conversation he shared with “a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries”.

The man, Powell said, wanted to leave England because “in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.

It was an incendiary comment at any time but made just weeks after the assassination of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King and with race riots flaring across the US, it was dynamite.

Powell, who had just returned from the US, was aware of the potency of his words.

Careful to avoid being reined in by circumspect Tories, he reneged on the custom to provide his party a copy of his speech before he presented it.

“I can already hear the chorus of execration,” he said. “How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?”

Powell contended that what the man had said to him “thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking”.

“We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population,” Powell said.

“It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

As a result of immigration, Powell said, wives were “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”.

A sense of being a persecuted minority was growing among ordinary English people, he said.

Powell’s speech sounds disturbingly familiar to comments on immigration in newspaper letters pages and on talkback radio in Australia today, and pales against what is said by racists online.

When Powell spoke, it was only three decades since the Nazi horror and the spite of white supremacy still affronted English society.

Powell was dismissed from the shadow cabinet by Conservative leader Edward Heath and roundly condemned. He had supporters but his words were too close to the bone for most.

THE hatred and chaos spawned by fascism had changed the world in the WWII’s wake.

Like the #MeToo of today, a #NeverAgain movement had erupted.

The academic study of eugenics and social sciences based on Darwinian notions of selection were reviewed for ethical content and recast.

The United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were formed to strengthen the rule of law.

When Powell talked of one colour holding the “whip hand” over another it grated excruciatingly with a people whose war wounds were raw.

But with the savagery of Nazism now buried under more than 70 years’ history, most adults who survived it have passed on and their children, with memories of airraid sirens, blackout blinds and tinned food worn like scars, are rarely heard in contemporary debate.

The horror is a grainy memory, trapped in blackand-white photos and footage of goose-stepping Nazis.

But many, including Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan, are warning of the rise of totalitarianism.

“There are no saviours of democracy on the horizon,” Flanagan said in an address to the National Press Club this week.

“Rather, around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is always anti-democratic in practice, populist in appeal, nationalist in sentiment, fascist in sympathy, criminal in disposition, tending to spew a poisonous rhetoric aimed against refugees, Muslims, and increasingly Jews, and hostile to truth and those who speak it, most particularly journalists to the point, sometimes, of murder.”

US secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, Madeleine Albright recently published Fascism: A Warning.

“In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the honour roll of elected governments swelled not only in Central Europe, but also Latin America, Africa and Asia,” she wrote last year in The New York Times. “Almost everywhere, it seemed, dictators were out and democrats were in. Freedom was ascendant.”

But Albright contends the democratic spring has turned to winter in recent years.

“We may be encouraged that most people in most countries still want to live freely and in peace, but there is no ignoring the storm clouds that have gathered,” she wrote.

“In fact, fascism and the tendencies that lead toward fascism pose a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II.”