Stay away from this [censored]

[fpb]

I don't think I have been so furious in years. Gerald Augustinus' Closed Cafeteria, a blog I USED TO read regularly - they can forget about me from now on - has published in full the infamous racist speech that ended the career of loathsome British politician Enoch Powell in 1968. The blog claimed that this piece of filthy black-bashing, aimed entirely at people with dark skins, had anything to do with the current episodes of terrorism in Britain. This is total, complete, unmitigated rubbish, and shows a revolting inability to distinguish between opposition to militant Islam and brute racism with which I do not want to be involved. If anyone else here has ever had the bad idea of reading Closed Cafeteria, I urge you to stop and let him know why.

Comments

[mbs-bookworm.livejournal.com]

He edited the post in question now...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

He should never have touched it in the first place. That a man washes his hands after touching pitch does not alter my view of touching pitch. Considering that the speech in question caused Powell to be expelled from the Tory Party at a time when Tories were Tories, and that nobody in Britain has a good word to say for it - not even Powell's friends - he should at least have looked at it with some attention. And how he can possibly have missed the several allusions to physical difference as determinant of alienation and violence is simply beyond me. I might add that, as I pointed out in a book, the speech, in spite of Powell's supposed Classical education, actually misquotes Virgil: the "river Tiber foaming with much blood" is caused, if you actually take the trouble to read the damn poem (I have, and it is one of the greatests pieces of poetry ever written in any language), by the native Latins actually refusing, under the influence of a demonic spirit, to allow the immigrant Greeks among them. And the moral of the fable is: if you brutally attack strangers who have trusted themselves to your law and your mercy, the Gods will inflict terrible punishment on you.

[mbs-bookworm.livejournal.com]

Having never seen the post in its original form (and not being familiar with the speech in question), I guess I'm at a disadvantage in knowing what it is that is so objectionable.