Enoch Powell Rivers Of Blood Quotes

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

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.

We must be mad, literally mad as a nation… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre… As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood. Enoch Powell, 1968

In John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid, the Sybil speaks of a “field of blood” and a “purple flood”. That there can be various translations should have made it evident to the political classes that Powell was not being literalist, though I have now stressed that enough. Instead, to read the entire segment it is clear the Sybil is warning of great hardship for Aeneas, the immigrant, but tells him in that in the end he shall get what he wishes: a  town of his own in the land to which he “migrated”. Powell will have been aware of this. That rather than integration, what Britain would end up with is foreign areas in Britain.